Rahul Gandhi: The Hazards Of Perpetual Slander

The Lok Sabha was treated to a pleasant change on 2 February. While a cold dusk settled upon the national capital, Rahul Gandhi of the Congress Party bucked history and habit, for once, to deliver a stirring speech in parliament.

He doesn’t attend the house too often, is not a born orator, speaks but infrequently, and when he does make a speech, it is usually more a cause for mirth, rather than merit, because of a tendency to derail his cause through rashness, meandrous argumentation, comical gimmickry, or petulance.

Those recurrent failings were, however, surprisingly absent in his latest effort. This time, he spoke stridently, with agency, and hammered the Modi government on a number of issues for almost an hour.

Gandhi covered unemployment, agriculture, income inequality, crony capitalism, and foreign policy, to highlight the Narendra Modi government’s failings. Nothing was going right, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) had gotten it all wrong, the country was headed for disaster, and our society was being ripped apart from within. Political dialogue, or ‘Instruments of conversation’ as he termed it, was becoming extinct in India thanks to them.

According to him, India faced a grave threat from China; one of existential proportions, and wholly of the BJP government’s own making. And, if the rapidity of his exasperated breathing was a military metric, then the conch of war was set to be blown by Beijing.

To boot, he painted the Prime Minister as a monarchical despot, hell bent on imposing his dangerous ideals and worthless plans upon hapless subjects, without ever paying the slightest heed to their aspirations or wishes.

Now, whether one agrees with Gandhi’s political assessment or not, this sort of criticism is actually par for the course. At lease he didn’t flub his lines, fumble his delivery, or hug an MP. Some generous souls might even have called it his best speech till date, but for the fact that it came apart in tatters well before Gandhi concluded.

And by the end, it felt like he ought to have chosen reticence over rhetoric, because the damage he caused to his political image, his party, and their prospects in five ongoing assembly election campaigns, was fairly substantial.

This momentous unraveling took place in two parts – once in the middle, and once at the close.

Gandhi was in full flow, essentially excoriating an imperious BJP for excluding farmers, Tamilians, and Dalits, amongst others, from an institutional framework being built on communal Hindu, and casteist Brahminical, lines. As attacks go, this was a fairly boring one, but it is always the opposition’s bromide of choice when elections are around. That way, you can make a community feel excluded, tar the BJP as exclusionary and divisive in one go, and pitch for the identity vote, all at the same time.

But that is also when Gandhi referred to Kamlesh Paswan, the BJP’s MP for Bansgaon constituency of Uttar Pradesh, as ‘my Dalit colleague’. ‘I am proud of him’, the Congress MP said, rather patronizingly, ‘but he is in the wrong party’. All hell broke loose instantly.

An incensed hubbub rose in the treasury benches, and a furious Paswan asked the Speaker for permission to reply. As per procedure, all Gandhi needed to do was yield, but instead, he grandly announced to the Speaker, in the magnanimous tones of a benevolent sovereign: ‘Look…I will allow him [Paswan] to speak’.

This offer, though, only earned a withering look from a harried Chair (the Speaker of the Lok Sabha has the toughest job in the country), and a stinging reprimand; following which, the MP for Wayanad sheepishly learnt to his visible discomfort, that permission for members to speak in the house was the sole preserve of the Speaker.

But embarrassments aside, Gandhi’s reference to Paswan as a Dalit was curiously revelatory, of what identity politics reduces people to. In addition, Gandhi’s words carry significant inferences within, of how the secular mind operates.

First, the presence of a Dalit MP in BJP ranks is indigestible to them, because it is as much a mark of their decline, as it is the failure of an unconscionable social engineering, which parties like the Congress had hitherto practiced successfully for generations.

Second, it shows up identity politics as a fruitless, divisive experiment without moral basis, which the very targets of such experiments (except a majority of Indian Muslims) are now consistently and comprehensively rejecting.

Third, such caste-based descriptors negate the opposition’s perennial accusations, of the BJP being communal and casteist. Note how Gandhi called Paswan a Dalit, and told him he was in the wrong party, in the same breath? They simply cannot afford to let the Dalit vote move any further to the BJP than it already has; if it does, the opposition will be swamped nationally.

(Now, this is election season, so invoking caste identity is only to be expected from the usual suspects. Similarly, everyone knows how crucial the Dalit vote is to the Congress in Uttarakhand and The Punjab (they lost the Dalit vote in Uttar Pradesh many decades ago). So, did Gandhi know what he was triggering, when he referred to Paswan as a Dalit? If yes, then it was an egregious move; and if not, then he’s revealed his mind more than he should have).

Fourth, such attitudes only reinforce an old truth, that vote bankers view communities primarily as electoral commodities. It is a venal practice which has no place in a decent society.

Fifth, the consistent electoral success of the BJP, in most of the parliamentary seats reserved for scheduled castes and tribes, represents a supra-caste consolidation which is gradually sweeping across India like a juggernaut. This poses an existential threat to secular parties like the Congress, which they need to thwart with the only gambit they know – by playing the identity card. It is probably what gets the opposition’s goat the most, forces Gandhi to speak in such fashion, and reduces their MP’s to tweeting gau-mutra barbs.

And, sixth, speaking about a person’s caste in such a blasé manner does the Congress cause little good. Instead, and all opposition parties should understand this, the more they treat the identity of a voter as a fungible item, to be encashed at the ballot box, the more popular the RSS’s core concept of ‘Integral Humanism’ will become. Do they really want that?

Now, one would have thought that calling an MP a Dalit in the wrong party was enough for one day, but the Congress leader was in irrepressible form. Listing out the Modi government’s foreign policy failures, as he saw it, Gandhi concluded with a warning: the nation was at risk because the BJP’s blunderings had brought China and Pakistan together against us.

That factually incorrect comment generated tumultuous commentary, including from our Foreign Minister, because the truth is that both neighbors have been working in concert to enfeeble India, for nearly as long as we have been independent. Thus, the actual mistake is not that the BJP forced China and Pakistan to act in tandem, as alleged, but that a senior leader of the Congress party actually believes that the two countries had not been colluding actively until 2014, when the BJP took office.

This is, in fact, an astounding statement by Gandhi, especially if he means what he said, because it is delusional beyond belief. Yet here, again, we were offered an insight into the man’s mind.

What are we to make of it then, in closing?

A common thread running through Gandhi’s Dalit remark, the one about the BJP forcing our two principal adversaries to collude, and indeed, through his entire speech, is a view that the BJP and the Prime Minister can do nothing right. Or to put it another way, whatever they do is wrong.

This is an absolutist position which leaves Rahul Gandhi with zero elbow room. Fine, it is a choice, but the problem is that by corollary, it makes everything the BJP’s fault (and Modi’s, because, don’t forget, much of Gandhi’s attacks have traditionally been directed at the Prime Minister personally).

Such thinking is severely flawed, because blaming Modi and the BJP for everything is both illogical and impossible. Unfortunately, Gandhi has now extended this argument to breaking point, and there is no turning back. By this, and as incredulous as it sounds, a Dalit winning on a BJP ticket is the BJP’s fault (ergo, his you’re-in-the-wrong-party barb).

What’s he going to say next? That a Dalit voting for the BJP is the BJP’s fault? Well, believe it or not, the harsh reality is that the likes of Gandhi are already saying precisely this. Direct quote from the speech: ‘He [Paswan] knows who has oppressed the Dalits for 3,000 years’.

We just don’t recognise the message at times, because it is cleverly couched in the language of fear mongering (ergo, their stock Brahmin-bashing, and the constant alarmism created over ‘Brahminical domination’ of the ‘under-classes’).

What’s more, by blaming Modi and the BJP on foreign policy to this extent, he has taken China off the hook. Won’t Beijing be pleased?

These are the hazards of perpetual cavil. The irony is that this sort of constant, carping criticism actually prevents the government from adopting the very ‘conversation’ Gandhi repeatedly wished for in his speech. How can there ever be any meaningful political engagement, some slight common ground, or even a semblance of compromise, if all official efforts run into the same absolutist wall of obdurate disapproval? No system may function effectively under such extreme conditions.

Therefore, Rahul Gandhi must understand at some point soon, that if he continues on this reckless course for much longer, he will either do further needless damage to an already-dented framework of political discourse, or, he will condemn the political cause he represents to an oblivion of his own making.