What we witnessed was alarmist. One man’s desperation, frustration and ignorance being imprinted on the nation to paint a picture of gloom and doom.
Rahul Gandhi’s 45-minute scathing invective against the government during the debate in the Lok Sabha on the Motion of Thanks on the President’s address was a theatric exposition loaded with buzzwords and nuanced references; a diatribe that his supporters said was an intellectual discourse with an overarching perspective and an altruistic mission of salvaging a failing India.
Rahul Gandhi made sweeping generalizations about the incompetence of the current government, speculated on its malevolence and came to the frightening conclusion that India today is in a near state of collapse, isolated from the outside, crumbling from the inside and with no hope for the future.
But do his arguments validate his conclusion or is this vituperation merely rhetoric to obfuscate the public and shore up the sagging fortunes of his party and himself?
First, he reiterated the usual cliché about two Indias—one rich and the other poor, but provided no proof to substantiate his claim. He expediently overlooked the poor centric projects of the current government listed by the President in his address, namely the PM Awas Yojana, which has constructed 2 crore pucca houses for the poor or the “Har Ghar Jal initiative”, which has brought tapped water to 6 crore additional households since 2019; neither does he mention the digitalization that provided prompt monetary relief to crores of needy Indians during the pandemic.
The credibility of his words hit a new low when he elaborated on the unemployment rate in the country without factoring in the gargantuan impact of the pandemic.
Next, he hectored the government on national administration, invoking the concept of “Union of States” defined in our Constitution. He surmised, “India is described in the Constitution as a union of states and not as a nation. One cannot rule over the people of a state in India. Different languages and cultures cannot be suppressed. It is a partnership, not a kingdom…Congress smashed the idea of a king in 1947, but now that has come back. There is a vision that India can be ruled by a stick from the Centre. Every time that has happened, the stick has been broken…”
India is a mosaic; an exemplary manifestation of varied languages, manifold ethnic groups and multiple religions. Autocracy does not work here: a fact that the Congress learnt the hard way, when the Congress under PM Indira Gandhi imposed a draconian Emergency in 1975. Basic rights were suspended, scores of prominent Indian leaders were incarcerated and newspapers were censored. The country was in the grip of unprecedented fear and intimidation. The people of India did not take this affront to their dignity and freedom lightly. In a landmark election they dumped the entire Congress Party handing even Mrs Gandhi (Rahul Gandhi’s grandmother) and Sanjay Gandhi (his uncle) a humiliating personal defeat.
True. Indian cannot be ruled by the stick. Had this BJP government been ruling with an iron hand, it would have been relegated to the dustbin of history after its first 5-year term. This did not happen. In fact, the people returned the BJP to power under Modi with an even greater majority. In 2019, the BJP won 303 seats, 21 more than it won in 2014. And its vote share also increased by 6.4%, taking it to 37.4%—the highest vote share by a single party in 30 years. This increase is a direct result of the will of the people and their endorsement; not a result that can be extracted by force or the stick but one that can only be attained by “conversation and negotiation” (to use Rahul Gandhi’s words).
Next Rahul Gandhi rambled about suppression of languages and cultures with repeated references to Tamil Nadu. He said: “You people are confused. The problem is, you think that you can suppress these languages, these cultures, these histories… You have no idea of history, you have no idea what you are dealing with, because the people of Tamil Nadu have inside their heart, the idea of Tamil Nadu, the idea of Tamil language and then the idea of India.”
What exactly he was trying to convey beats me. This government is the one that has proudly and proactively celebrated our indigenous cultures and encouraged vernacular languages to the fullest extent, much more than previous governments.
Also, Rahul Gandhi needs to know that it was the Congress government’s decision (under his great grandfather) to impose Hindi as the sole official language that provoked the deadly anti-Hindi riots that rocked Tamil Nadu in 1965. Fierce protests erupted across the state with angry students in the forefront. The Congress Chief Minister, Bhaktavatsalam responded with brute force. Paramilitary forces were inducted to quell the protest: hundreds of students were arrested. There were at least 70 casualties. This suppression did not go unanswered. The people of TN threw out the Congress Party and voted in the DMK for the first time in 1967.
When speaking of suppression, Mr Gandhi needs to examine the track record of his own party.
Shifting his attention to external affairs, Rahul sanctimoniously hypothesized: “The strategic goal of India should have been to keep China and Pakistan separate. But what you have done is to bring them together. Do not underestimate what we are facing. This is a serious threat to India.”
Rahul Gandhi is clearly unaware that the unholy alliance between China and Pakistan is as old as the hills. In 1963, Pakistan illegally handed over the Shaksgam valley to China and the Karakoram highway was built in the 1970s in Pakistan with China’s help. Nuclear cooperation between Pakistan and China began in the 1970s and 80s: Pakistan’s nuclear program is for all intents and purposes a Chinese proxy on India’s western front. With the construction of the Gwadar port (2002) and the implementation of the CPEC project (2013) Pakistan became a vassal state—even before Modi took power in 2014.
This unequivocal timeline nails what Rahul Gandhi terms as a “massive blunder”.
His unabashed sense of entitlement filters through when he tells us his great grandfather spent 15 years in jail, his grandmother was shot 32 times and his father was blown to bits. I respect the sacrifices made by his family and empathise with his loss, but there have been a lot more families and a lot more individuals who have sacrificed for the country without demanding or getting anything in return.
The speech makes for sensational story-telling and has garnered plaudits from the die-hard sycophants of his diminishing darbar, but when scrutinised objectively and intelligently, it proves to be pedestrian harangue. In fact, it is a jumbled mess of faulty logic, garbled historical facts and outright disinformation—all delivered with the reckless aplomb of a crown prince without a kingdom and without an awareness of his own intellectual deficiency.
Finally, he concludes with a grim premonition of a doomsday scenario: “The nation is now at risk… The nation is at risk from outside. The nation is at risk from inside and that is a very dangerous place for a nation to be. I do not like it. I am very uncomfortable with my nation, with my beloved country standing where it is standing, completely isolated on the outside, fighting on inside, institutions captured, states not able to speak to each other. This worries me. It frightens me for my country… But remember what I said, you are putting this nation, this wonderful nation and its people at huge risk.”
What we witnessed was alarmist. One man’s desperation, frustration and ignorance being imprinted on the nation to paint a picture of gloom and doom. More illusion than reality; more ignorance than knowledge and more scaremongering than confident pragmatism.
Our country was at risk in 1962, when the pacifist policies of the Congress Party almost resulted in China annexing the whole of the Northeast. The country was at risk from inside when the Congress Party conducted a pogrom against the most patriotic of Indians—the Sikhs in 1984. And the country was at risk in 2008 when a paralysed, dumbstruck Congress government under Manmohan Singh did nothing while terrorists attacked the financial capital of our country and held our nation hostage.
Our country is stronger, more confident and more secure of its place in the world than it was eight years ago. Please don’t tell us otherwise