Rahul Gandhi’s hyperbolic speech, however, stands on the three ‘pillars’ of cynicism, gaslighting and blatant falsehood
Rahul Gandhi’s speech, delivered in English in Lok Sabha on Wednesday, may not revive Congress’s sinking fortunes, but it has captured the news cycle and triggered a media debate. It stretches credulity to imagine that a leader who has been a proven failure, has witnessed and led Congress’s near-obliteration has magically resurrected himself through a speech, but we live in strange times. The deracinated Indian elite and the ecosystem that still wields considerable media clout live in perpetual optimism that the ‘youth leader’ — who is nine years shy of becoming a senior citizen — will one day come of age. Some are saying Wednesday’s “historical speech” proves he finally has.
As a performative art, Rahul’s body language during the debate on the Motion of Thanks on the President’s address, ticks a few boxes. He appeared impassioned, even enraged, and burning in righteous indignation. His ‘saviour complex’ was good TV.
Rahul’s hyperbolic speech, however, stands on the three ‘pillars’ of cynicism, gaslighting and blatant falsehood. It wasn’t the speech of a political leader who has a unifying vision for India and seeks to integrate and unite the vast nation. For all its grand rhetoric, it was the speech of a misanthrope who has become bitter after repeated defeats and now wants to apply fuel and matchstick to the faultlines of Indian polity and watch it all burn, if only to gain the satisfaction that the usurper from Gujarat can no longer enjoy the power that has been denied to him — the rightful male heir of his dynastic fiefdom.
Repeated references to his family tragedies may derive empathy, even sympathy, but a demographically young, aspiring nation owes nothing to Rahul because of his past or the losses that he has suffered at a personal level. They would rather take him for what he represents — an entitled dynast incapable of grasping the reality that India is no longer a feudal society beholden to one ‘enlightened family’.
Flailing arms, dramatic assertions, and flammable rhetoric do not make a statement factual but it may still create some impact among the targeted audience. So, to what extent were Rahul’s proclamations (and there were many of them) true, and how may these be received?
Speaking on foreign policy issues, Gandhi held the present government responsible for bringing the two neighbouring countries to work against India. He said, “The single biggest strategic goal of India has been to keep China and Pakistan apart. But what you have done is brought them together. You have committed the single biggest crime you can commit…” Rahul also claimed that “India was weakening and is completely isolated” and questioned “why no foreign dignitary was present as chief guest during the Republic Day celebrations.”
It is possible that in between fleeting in and out of the country due to his busy international schedule, Rahul may have missed that Covid situation forced the cancellation of in-person attendance but the heads of five Central Asian states connected virtually with the prime minister for the first India-Central Asia summit.
The China-Pakistan argument is more bizarre. While the two nations indeed share commonality of interests and pose a joint threat to India, and that eventuality is against India’s strategic interests, Rahul’s comment is a na?ve political jibe — ignorant of history, the geopolitical power equation in Asia, China’s role as Pakistan’s economic benefactor and military partner and the centrality of Pakistan in China’s geostrategic ambitions (as GMF fellow Andrew Small points out in his book The China-Pakistan Axis) or Yun Sun of Stimson Center points out in her War on the Rocks essay.
Rahul also fails to take into account or is ignorant of, China’s role behind Pakistan’s nuclear bomb or Pakistan military’s anti-India security strategy in which Beijing plays a central role.
To argue that New Delhi has brought the two adversaries together is to imply that China and Pakistan lack agency of their own and Narendra Modi is so powerful that he alone can shape the policy prerogatives of India’s adversaries. Even the prime minister would admit that this is possibly the biggest compliment anyone has paid him so far. For his part, external affairs minister S Jaishankar gave Rahul some “history lessons” by pointing out that Pakistan illegally handed over the Shaksgam valley to China in 1963 when Jawaharlal Nehru was still the prime minister, a barter India has never accepted. The minister, in a series of tweets, also pointed out China built the Karakoram highway through PoK in the 1970s — a decade from which the two nations also enjoyed close nuclear collaboration. In 2013, during UPA 2, Beijing started the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor as part of the Belt and Road Initiative.
Perhaps more embarrassingly for Rahul, veteran Congress leader K Natwar Singh, who held the foreign ministry portfolio in the Manmohan Singh government during UPA 1, fact-checked the Gandhi dynast.
Singh said Rahul’s comments were “not completely accurate. China and Pakistan have been close allies since the 1960s. It started in his great grandfather’s (Nehru’s) time, who took the Kashmir issue to the United Nations.” Singh also refuted Rahul’s charge that India is “isolated”. News agency ANI quoted the former foreign minister, as saying: “Now, we are not isolated. We have good relations with our neighbours and the foreign policy is not a failure. We have a foreign minister who spent all his life dealing with foreign policy issues.”
It will be difficult to find a more damning indictment of Rahul’s chicanery.
China’s aggression has also pushed India closer to the United States as a balancing partner. Interesting to note that US senator Jim Risch, a Republican and a ranking member of the US Senate foreign relations committee, has slammed China for making a PLA officer involved in the Galwan clash a torchbearer in the ongoing Beijing Winter Olympics. In a tweet, the American lawmaker said: “It’s shameful that #Beijing chose a torchbearer for the #Olympics2022 who’s part of the military command that attacked #India in 2020 and is implementing #genocide against the #Uyghurs. The US will cont. to support #Uyghur freedoms & the sovereignty of India.” This is possibly not a mark of India’s “isolation”. It may also interest Rahul to know that China began the transfer of nuclear weapons technology to Pakistan in 1982 under then premier Deng Xiaoping, and West was fully aware of it. Perhaps the Gandhi scion needs to change his foreign policy advisor.
During his speech, Rahul also asserted that “If you read the Constitution, you’ll find that India is described as a Union of States. India is not described as a nation but a Union of states…
“One cannot rule over the people of a state in India. Different languages and cultures cannot be suppressed. It’s a partnership, it’s not a kingdom. You will never, ever in your entire life, rule over the people of Tamil Nadu. It can’t be done. No matter what you’ll never rule over the states of India. You can look at Ashoka the great. It has always been ruled by conversation and negotiation.”
Even Ashoka the Great might be shocked to know that he had “always ruled by conversation and negotiation.”
But beyond fake history, Rahul also said, “Congress smashed the idea of a king in 1947, but now that has come back. There is a vision that India can be ruled by a stick from the Centre. Every time that has happened, the stick has been broken.”
He also went on to say, “There are two competing visions of India. One, of a Union of States, where decisions are taken through conversation and negotiation – a partnership of equals. Another, of rule by a Shahenshah’s diktat. This hasn’t worked in 3,000 years. BJP’s flawed vision has weakened our nation.”
It did not strike Rahul as ironic that a fifth-generation dynast was telling a self-made man from the grassroots, a prime minister who has twice received overwhelming popular mandates, that “India is not a kingdom”. Nevertheless, Rahul’s comments merit attention.
To begin, Rahul claims to have read the Constitution, but he may have missed the Preamble to the Constitution which clearly states that India is a “Sovereign Socialist Secular Democratic “Republic” that will secure for its citizens Justice (social, economic and political), Liberty of thought, expression, belief, faith and worship; Equality of status and of opportunity; and to promote among them all Fraternity assuring the dignity of the individual and the “unity and integrity of the Nation.”
So yes, the Constitution does refer to India as a “nation” and promises to secure its unity and integrity. Inherent in Rahul’s dismissal of India as a civilizational unity and his repeated stress on sub-national and regional identities is a suggestion that the identities of being an Indian is hierarchical and in that ranking, the regional and sub-national identities are prioritized over the national identity.
For instance, Rahul at one point said, “You have no idea of history, you have no idea what you are dealing with, because the people of Tamil Nadu have inside their heart the idea of Tamil Nadu, the idea of the Tamil language, and then also the idea of India.”
As Aunindyo Chakravarty writes in NDTV, “there was a pregnant pause before, and a stress on, the word ‘then’, almost as if, Rahul Gandhi was giving us the order of the importance of collective identities, where being Tamil precedes the idea of being Indian.”
This pause and the implied order of hierarchy are worth noting because Rahul, through the laying down of this marker, is in effect suggesting that the relationship between the Union and the states is one of negotiation, and the emergence of India as a nation-state is incumbent on that negotiated power contract. Rahul unwillingly contradicts himself where he refers to the “country’s tradition and “3,000-year history”. A nation cannot simultaneously exist for 3000 years and then come into being as part of a conciliated process between the Union and provinces post-Independence, which is what Rahul implies at various stages.
But beyond the muddled thinking, Rahul central argument is clear. That India is essentially a Union of states that emerged after the departure of the British when provinces and princely states decided to come together as a union of equals through negotiation, and if this negotiated identity is weakened then the nation will fall apart. This subscribes to the notion that the only thing that binds the nation is a cooperative and conciliatory partnership between the Centre and the states. Rahul mentions the word ‘negotiation’ twice to also hint at an inherent tension in this power arrangement.
The repeated stress on Tamil, Keralite or Rajasthani identity carry Rahul’s insinuation that the ‘idea of India’ is in danger due to the Centre’s hegemonic behaviour, and the Congress party stands for cooperative federalism and is ideologically opposed to “ruling by a stick”.
Rahul is guilty of both intellectual dishonesty and pseudo history. Perhaps he is banking on the fickleness of public memory, or taking his chance with a young electorate who, he reckons, is innocent of history. In its long record of ruling over India, the Congress party is guilty of every charge of hegemonic and monarchical behaviour that Rahul levels at BJP.
Even a cursory glance at history would show that Nehru imposed president’s rule, dismissing a state government, 8 times. His daughter Indira, in her twin stints of 14 years as prime minister, invoked Article 356 of the Constitution a whopping 50 times. Rahul’s father Rajiv, Indira’s son, imposed President’s rule 6 times, the Congress government led by PV Narasimha Rao imposed President’s Rule 11 times while the UPA under Manmohan Singh invoked Article 356 12 times.
According to a recent RTI response from India’s Ministry of Home Affairs, Congress was in power at the Centre when President’s Rule was imposed 84 times, which is more than 73% of all the occasions.
The hegemonic control over Indian states that Indira Gandhi, for instance, wielded can only be compared to a feudal lord presiding over her fiefdom, and it may have led to the rise of regional powers and altered India’s power structure. Chakravarty, in his piece for NDTV, quotes a paragraph written by Partha Chatterjee in 1991 where the political scientist argues that “successive tragedies that have befallen the Nehru-Gandhi family are not unrelated to the fact that the Congress system since the era of India Gandhi has consistently emulated the form of monarchical rule… It is a corollary of the monarchical form of power that the violence of the Indian state…”
But Rahul’s intellectual dishonesty runs deeper. For all his grandstanding on BR Ambedkar and the Indian Constitution, the Gandhi scion remains unaware or deliberately ignores what Ambedkar and the drafting committee of the Indian Constitution gave as reasons behind choosing to call India a ‘Union of States’ and not a “federation of states” unlike the American Constitution and how the drafters saw the relationship between Centre and the states.
Ambedkar, as the chairman of the drafting committee, unequivocally asserted that the “Drafting Committee wanted to make it clear that though India was to be a federation, the Federation was not the result of an agreement by the States to join in a Federation and that the Federation not being the result of an agreement no State has the right to secede from it. The Federation is a Union because it is indestructible.
“Though the country and the people may be divided into different States for convenience of administration the country is one integral whole, its people a single people living under a single imperium derived from a single source. The Americans had to wage a civil war to establish that the States have no right of secession and that their Federation was indestructible. The Drafting Committee thought that it was better to make it clear at the outset rather than to leave it to speculation or to dispute.”
Note Ambedkar’s words where he says: “the Federation was not the result of an agreement by the States…” and “Though the country and the people may be divided into different States for convenience of administration the country is one integral whole.” This punctures Rahul’s central assertion that the idea of India is a negotiation of power between Union and its provinces, not driven by a sense of nationalism and unified national identity that leads entire India to cheer for a girl from Assam winning an Olympic medal, or makes commoners in Tamil Nadu line up the streets and pay their last respects to the mortal remains of India’s Chief of Defence Staff.
Rahul should have read Ambedkar closely before making his intemperate remarks in the Parliament. CD Singh in The Indian Journal of Political Science (April-June 2011 edition) quotes from Ambedkar’s writing on India’s caste system. “It is the unity of culture that is the basis of homogeneity. Taking this for granted, I venture to say that there is no country that can rival the Indian Peninsula with respect to the unity of its culture. It has not only a geographic unity, but it has over and above all a deeper and a much more fundamental unity — the indubitable cultural unity that covers the land from end to end.”
It is this indubitable and indestructible “cultural unity” that binds this diverse geographical construct called India into a nation and gives it a “fundamental unity” that Rahul missed while seeking to drive a wedge between the identities of being an Indian. Rahul also fails to understand that diversity does not militate against this fundamental unity — rather it reinforces the union. This cultural notion of being an Indian — part of an ancient civilization since millennia — signifies an Indian exceptionalism that cannot be described in terms of Westphalian nation-state, nor can it be captured in hierarchy of identities where sub-national or intra-regional identities are graded higher than the national identity.
It is important also to understand that Rahul is no philosopher king grappling with the battle of ideas. Behind his grandstanding rhetoric, gaslighting and illusions of grandeur lie a sinister cynic who wants to lob a Molotov cocktail inside a packed theatre hall and watch the destruction from afar. In repeatedly harping on Tamil identity and implying that people of the state are Tamils first and then Indian — a state that has witnessed separatist movements over Tamil identity the Gandhi scion is very much aware of what he is doing.
In failing to politically meet up to the challenge posed by Narendra Modi and BJP, and presiding over a moribund Congress riven with factionalism and power-broking, Rahul is hoping to delegitimize the Indian state by pitting regionalism against nationalism and seeking relevance from the shift in power structure that may ensue.
This is a man desperate for power, and is not unwilling to even quibble on soft-secessionist statements to promote unrest and disquiet. It is a rather sad fall for a party that once held centrestage and led the nationalist movement as it journeys into irrelevance.
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