I was reading Azadi, the latest work by Arundhati Roy, at my home in Calicut, Kerala when I came to know about Rahul Gandhi and Priyanka Gandhi were stopped by the Uttar Pradesh police at 1.30 pm, Friday the Yamuna Expressway, 140 km away from Hathras. Interestingly, I was going through Arundhati’s opinion about the importance of freedom struggles in the streets across the nation and how the Narendra Modi administration at centre keeps trying to suppress the consents. I stopped reading and started listening to the dramatic videos continuously aired on different news channels.
Rahul Gandhi also fell down in the scuffle after police tried to stop him and his supporters from proceeding on the Yamuna Expressway near the Jewar toll plaza. Pictures of the incident were shared by the party. The Congress had said that the Gandhis were arrested by the police. Rahul Gandhi earlier questioned senior UP cops under which law was he being stopped as all he wanted was to walk alone towards Hathras to meet the rape victim’s family. “Can you tell me under which law can you stop me from marching towards Hathras,” he asked the police personnel.
“I want to go alone to Hathras and on what basis can you arrest me,” he added, to which the cops told him that he had violated Section 188 of the IPC of disobeying orders promulgated by the government during the pandemic. Rahul Gandhi also alleged that in India today only RSS people and Prime Minister Narendra Modi can move around.
Finally, Rahul Gandhi, Priyanka Gandhi Vadra and three other senior Congress leaders visited the family of the 20-year old alleged gang rape and assault victim in Hathras’ Boolgarhi village Saturday and promised to seek justice for them. In a 45-minute discussion with the victim’s mother, father, sister and three siblings, Rahul declared that Congress will not stop until the Dalit family gets justice. “Nobody can subjugate them, not even the BJP government that is in power here. There is no force on to stop them from getting justice,” Rahul Gandhi said and it was a word from a true political leader. Congress leaders Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury, K.C. Venugopal and P.L. Punia also accompanied the Gandhis. The Congress leaders were allowed to visit the family Saturday only after a major scuffle between the party members and the Uttar Pradesh Police at the Delhi-Noida flyway. High drama ensued as 35 Congress MPs and scores of party workers, besides the Gandhi brother-sister duo, jammed the flyway’s exit for hours, insisting that the UP government allow them into the state so that they could drive to the Dalit girl’s village.
On Friday, Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath had ordered the suspension of Hathras SP Vikrant Vir and three other police officers for mishandling the alleged gang-rape case. He also ordered a narco-polygraph test to be conducted on everyone involved in the case. On Saturday Yogi ordered for CBI probe into the case as an impact of Rahul’s visit at the victim’s family.
With this historic journey to the victim’s family, Rahul Gandhi literally has started his journey towards prime ministership. It was perhaps over 15 years ago. Rahul Gandhi dressed in a white kurta pyjama walked into the Dhaba at Claridges Hotel with a friend. Instantaneously the heads spun around and the buzz of attention was ricocheting across the dining space. The man at the centre of attraction, incidentally, at that time had not even formally entered into politics.
As Salman Khurshid put it, Rahul is an idealist, something some people consider a disqualification for a mass leader; he is a hardcore professional, something that some people believe sits uneasy with the malleability needed for the rough and tumble of politics; he has clear likes and dislikes for ideas and people, something that people used to politicians who are everything to everyone do not understand. The unrelenting attacks on Narendra Modi and the RSS made some leaders uneasy about taking on the popular mood. At one gathering of intellectuals suggesting more diplomatic alternatives he asked as only he can, “Why? Are you afraid of the RSS?” His steadfastness and political fortitude showed in his response to the Scindia and Pilot episodes. In the world of compromises, he is loath to depart from principle. Some of his uncompromising democratic positions, like the Youth Congress elections, made dyed in the wool old hands nervous. Once India tires of being told it is deprived by the ‘other’ and inevitably returns to collective destiny, it will discover the need for Rahul. The only question that remains is whether this happens naturally or will require strategic steering. The truth is that no party has figured this out as yet. Many are hoping that the fruit of change in public mood will fall in their lap like in the past, but politics has transformed considerably to assume that. The tree needs to be shaken and from the record Rahul is the only public figure to be attempting to do that.
Any honest person will admit that contemporary politics in India is surreal. There is public approval of vigilante justice and crowd lynchings, criminals use crime to secure political power and then use power to subvert justice, botched governance is being proclaimed as high accomplishment, and inexplicable military ambiguity is being brandished as unprecedented success. Audacity of the political class is the new norm, while dissent and public protests are being painted in dark shades. Enforcement agencies are unselfconsciously becoming dramatis personae of the drama of political vendetta, while disguised and open defiance of India’s composite culture has become entrenched in the landscape.
Rahul Gandhi is honest; as a political leader looking for the true values of democracy across the nation. His commitment to liberal democracy is second to none, but as we learnt in the economic competition with China, democracy has its own timeline for development and growth. It is the very time that Congress is taking to shake itself free of the shock of two consecutive defeats that will give it a sustainable thrust for the future. Many of us in the Congress continue to have faith in the proposition that the future will not only include Rahul, but will be substantially shaped by him. His detractors and ambivalent well-wishers will just have to understand that he will write his own script and pick his own timeline.
It is this mystique of the Nehru-Gandhis which disconcerts his detractors. He draws crowds from Pathankot to Pathanamthita cutting across religious, language, caste and economic divides. No matter how much divisiveness is injected into the body politic, there is always the enduring appeal of the discovery of India through the Nehruvian lens. The voices which are making demands that Rahul Gandhi stop running the Congress Party are engaged in a desperate and manipulative ruse for the Nehru-Gandhi family to disengage from governance. There are even respectable but hopelessly naïve voices like that of Ramachandra Guha unable to gauge the politics beyond the academia.
Dynasticism is another tag sought to be attached to Rahul Gandhi to question legitimacy. This is inaccurate labeling and an incorrect assessment of the trajectory of a political leader. Quite unlike many dynastic professions, from law to the movies, a dynast in politics has to win elections. Rahul Gandhi is a dynast who won his seat in the Lok Sabha and continues to be the focal and rallying point of the party.
Democracy involves the competition of ideas vying for legitimacy and acceptance in the political space. The relevance of Rahul Gandhi in India’s politics is illustrated from the two tweets which went unheeded and deliberately ignored. On 12 February 2020 he tweeted, “the corona virus is an extremely serious threat to our people and every economy. My sense is the government is not taking this threat seriously”. There was a chorus of contrived outrage in the ruling party’s concentric circles of its power structure. 7 months on, the pandemic is on a rampage with 4.37 million cases and 73000 deaths and is showing no signs of abating. On 17 March, Rahul Gandhi once again tweeted about the consequential economic consequences of the pandemic and warned, “tsunami is going to hit our economy in coming weeks, Govt needs to take measures”. This was ignored by the media and the policy makers. In 6 months, the statistics now reveal the 24% contraction of the GDP and the consequent large scale ravaging of the economy.
The enduring importance of Rahul Gandhi is clear from a study of his twitter account followed by 16 million users. His tweets are a relentless pursuit and engagement with the nuts and bolts of governance. The issues raised deal with the dangers posed by the rapidly advancing Covid, of the sliding GDP, unemployment, the students forced to take exams, the common man, the plight of the agricultural and rural population ravaged by demonetization and the unheeded pandemic, the industry, middle classes, affordable medical care, and so it goes. He is forever and steadfastly recalibrating and bringing into focus the real issues.
Rahul Gandhi is not affected by the contrived distractions of the loud and garrulous on television, wrestling on make believe and chimerical issues. His obsession with the economy and the bread and butter issues is but natural. For he is after all, an M.Phil in Development Economics from Trinity College, Cambridge. Despite the unfair disparagements, he chooses not to wear his academic qualification up his sleeve. Instead, he is comfortable in the sartorial simplicity of his white kurta and pyjama, as he continues his battle of ideas in the trenches and the fields of India.
At every political challenge, though it is inside party or as a politician, Rahul Gandhi consistently showed a true leadership quality. When the congress failed in general elections, he takes responsibility and move on. And he never quit mainstream politics even he faced continuous attacks from the Indian media, which have already been leaned to the right wing politics led by the RSS. He keeps talking for the people of India. And he is never afraid of criticizing the inhuman anti-people stands by the central government. Even he has got many opportunities to politicize social issues, he kept smart politics on and never chooses the way the BJP did. That makes him different from other political leaders as well. This journey has already become a history in Indian politics. In many recent political issues, Yogi Adityanath, Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister, did not waste his time attacking Mayawati and Yadav. He chose to focus on Rahul Gandhi and Priyanka Gandhi, Congress general secretary in charge of Uttar Pradesh. But the historic march by both of them along with other congressmen has already given hope to the Indian people who are fed up with the central government stands against the common people and promoting corporate fabric. A tremendous change in the Indian people’s hope has escalated true is the best result of Rahul Gandhi’s historic visit to Hathras.
Reference:
Salman Khurshid. India will soon discover its need for Rahul Gandhi; The Week, 2020 August 16.
