Rahul Gandhi: The Emperor with No Clothes!

Puja Awasthi, the india republic, 26 February 2014: Somewhere after the slew of state elections in 2008 and the general elections of 2009, Rahul Gandhi threw a motley group of journalists a tea party in the prosaic precincts of the Munshiganj Guest House in Amethi. We were ferried in white Ambassadors—four journalists to a car and made to wait a couple of hours before he appeared—face charmingly creased from a day of campaigning and crumpled white kurta missing a button. He held a press conference of sorts but the more interesting bits came from the informal exchanges he had with us. To me the greatest insight into his character came from his admission that his dilly dallying on proposing to his girlfriend had prompted his mother and sister to threaten him that if he could not pop the question, they would do so on his behalf.

Years later when Rahul Gandhi sat down for what he described as his ‘first formal interview of this kind’ he seems to have carried to it his earlier inability and unwillingness to face and deal with facts. The rambling interaction was as though the interviewer and subject were riding two different tangents. His answers followed the format adopted by wannabe beauty queens who, no matter what they are asked, find a way to weave in the words ‘love’, ‘kindness’, and ‘world peace’ into their answers. Rahul Gandhi’s mantras were ‘RTI’, ‘women’s empowerment’, ‘empower the people’ and ‘open the system’. Ironically however expansive he had expected his ‘open the system’ verbosity to sound, juxtaposed against the constant third party references to himself (‘what Rahul Gandhi thinks’) made him sound more like a deluded one time Emperor in search of a kingdom and people to call his own.

Even the people his family have long claimed to themselves are not exactly enamoured by him. In April 2005, he inaugurated an eye hospital in Amethi for which his entire family, including his grandmother Paula Maino had descended. After the inauguration, he addressed the public to incessant chants of ‘Priyanka! Priyanka!’ For some time Priyanka Gandhi appeared unmoved, but when she did speak a single sentence that went something like “Kitna sundar hospital banvaya hai” (What a beautiful hospital he has got made), the applause that followed drowned the lukewarm response that had come her brother’s way.

His fawning party men too often despair at his ways- wondering how an election as complex as the Indian one can be addressed by his laptop toting inner circle that has little firsthand experience of the election trail. No wonder when last year’s Assembly election results were out, Congressmen in UP went about announcing that they had been lucky to better their 2007 result of 22 seats by a whooping six!

While Rahul Gandhi might be unable to come across as a thinker (except a woolly one who describes poverty as a state of mind best trumped by Physics), he has clearly established that he has a mind of his own and what that mind lacks in breadth and originality, it makes up in a persistence bordering on obduracy. From the ill received interview, sample his throwing of questions at the interviewer and then accusing him of not answering despite the fact that he himself waved off every single question by sticking to a pre rehearsed script which he was convinced was the ‘real issue’.

The interview also cemented the fact that he has been burdened by birth to be in the wrong party. That he would perhaps have been better off conducting a newer, more radical kind of political experiment unencumbered by legacy of scams and half truths. Take for instance his introduction of primaries to select candidates, an idea, despite not being new, comes across as revolutionary in a party that is sustained by nepotism. Yet a senior colleague rubbished the idea as an “auction”.

Despite an underlying and indestructible discordance between him and the party, Rahul Gandhi repeatedly falls back on his family name and the party’s history to woo the electorate. His election campaign in UP in 2012 when set against that of Akhilesh Yadav (another politician who appropriated a family mantle) seemed to suggest that while the former was offering more of the same, the latter was overhauling his party.

Yet, under the slightest pressure, that disconnect pushes through. Rewind to the interview when he was called to speak in his party’s defence. On the issue of 1984 riots, he went “There is a process. See there is a legal process. And that process is on. Okay” but when pressed for an opinion on Ashok Chavan, he ducked it with an unrelated reference—“What I will say is that there are six bills in parliament that are sitting there, bring them in. Pass them”.

The performance understandably so dismayed his party that the most handsome compliment that the UP congress could put out on Twitter was “There cannot be a 2nd thought to the fact that Rahul Gandhi comes with a clean intention & single agenda of ‘positive politics’!”

In all fairness though, Rahul Gandhi comes across as a man with his heart set on a few causes and a willingness to go on and on about them till such a time when even the naysayers are convinced of their rightness. However that is a quality more suited to advocacy than politics. Imagine Rahul Gandhi in an Arvind Kejriwal kind of mould.

His other remarkable quality perhaps is the willingness to be laughed at.

Till he had not perched on that chair before India’s most acerbic television anchor, Rahul Gandhi had enjoyed the alchemic benefits of the unsaid and the misinterpreted. He would have known that he would not come out shining, yet he chose to speak. He could have opted for a soft focus-Simi Grewal kind of interview (remember his father did so) that would have made him look like India’s brightest political star.

Instead he chose to be the emperor who has no clothes.

source & courtesy: http://www.theindianrepublic.com/tbp/rahul-gandhi-emperor-clothes-100027803.html#sthash.FeFUODc2.dpuf