Congress party leader and Leader of Opposition Rahul Gandhi’s one-point agenda of solely focusing on issues related to Adani is gradually turning into an albatross around the neck of the entire INDIA bloc, leading to discomfort within the alliance.
On Tuesday, one of the main constituents of the bloc, the Mamata Banerjee-led All India Trinamool Congress, skipped the meeting of INDIA bloc leaders at Congress chief Mallikarjun Kharge’s chamber. The reason behind that was that while the TMC wanted to raise multiple issues in Parliament, including inflation, slowing GDP, unemployment, fund crunch, the situation in Bangladesh, and the Manipur unrest, the Congress stated that it would like to corner the government only on the issue of the indictment served by the United States government against Adani in an alleged bribery case.
The Congress has been demanding that all business should be suspended for a discussion on the U.S. Department of Justice indictment against directors of Adani Green. Today too, Congress MP Manickam Tagore gave an Adjournment Motion notice in the Lok Sabha to discuss the Adani issue.
There is a sense among the INDIA bloc members that Rahul’s ‘obsession’ with Adani will lead to a washout of the Winter session of Parliament, giving the BJP-led NDA an easy route of not being held accountable in Parliament over issues that impact the masses.
According to these leaders, the Adani issue, contrary to what Rahul feels, has no resonance with the public and, in fact, is creating significant negative sentiment for the INDIA bloc among business houses and the middle salaried class, who see the ‘political’ targeting of Adani by Rahul as being due to the perceived closeness between Gautam Adani and Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
As the Sunday Guardian had written earlier, this longstanding anti-Adani sentiment of Rahul had also impacted the Congress’s results in Maharashtra, where it was virtually decimated.
Interestingly, while Rahul is quoting the U.S. DoJ’s ‘sacrosanctity’ and supposed integrity to build a strong narrative against the Adani group, on 1 December, outgoing American President Joe Biden pardoned his son Hunter, sparing him a possible jail term for federal felony gun and tax convictions on the grounds that this very system was misused for political reasons.
In his statement, Biden said that his son was singled out and prosecuted “only because he is my son.”
“In trying to break Hunter, they’ve tried to break me – and there’s no reason to believe it will stop here. Enough is enough. Here’s the truth: I believe in the justice system, but as I have wrestled with this, I also believe raw politics has infected this process and it led to a miscarriage of justice – and once I made this decision this weekend, there was no sense in delaying it further,” Biden stated in a clear indictment of how the justice system in the U.S. can be influenced for political and other reasons.
In the case of Adani, as the Sunday Guardian has stated earlier, reports and inputs suggest that the group was being targeted for business and political reasons by a system that can be easily manipulated, as the statement from the U.S. president shows.
In the coming days, it is expected that unless Rahul and Congress do a course correction and start focusing on real issues, more INDIA bloc members will announce their breaking away from this path of political attack.