Rahul Gandhi’s address in Parliament on Monday was a glimpse of the politician the 54-year-old can be. He critiqued in a dramatic but measured manner successive govts’ failure to tackle unemployment, the failure of “good idea” Make in India, failure to organise production, “handing it over to the Chinese” and so on. His address was what is desired of a Leader of Opposition. Yet, this was but one speech. What is more on display, in Parliament and outside, is a constant combativeness.
At the inauguration of the new Congress headquarters, ‘Indira Bhawan’, Rahul Gandhi laid out an insurgent message before party brass: “Do not think we are fighting a fair fight…we are now fighting BJP, RSS and the Indian state itself.” Ironically, the political legacy the Gandhi scion seemed to be channelling was not that of Indira Gandhi, but her bête noire Jayaprakash Narayan. An anti-institutional politics, draped in ‘revolutionary’ symbols, purporting to challenge a “corrupt” and “captured” prevailing order.
BJP, of course, had a field day trotting out its favourite themes of “urban naxal links” and “George Soros playbook” to cast the Congress politician as an agent of subversion bent on “breaking India and dividing our society”.
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Disclaimer
Views expressed above are the author’s own.
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