Rahul Gandhi artlessly dodged the issue of the challenge posed by Narendra Modi to the Congress and to him personally, insisted mechanically that the Congress would win the 2014 general election, and laboriously avoided every pointed question thrown at him in a wide-ranging 90-minute interview on Times Now on Monday evening. Anchor Arnab Goswami throughout spared his guest the hectoring he is famous for, after all he was getting the first-ever formal interview since the Gandhi scion’s entry into politics in 2004, and tried gently to bring the debate back to the topic in hand.
Ultimately, he had to allow the Amethi MP to take the discussion where he wanted to – away from incisive questions on the Gujarat riots, the anti-Sikh pogrom, corruption, price rise, and the top-down perpetuation of the dynastic syndrome in the party. Any assessment of the interview will reflect where the listener stands on the current political spectrum, which means where he/she is likely to vote in 2014. But in fairness, Rahul Gandhi has come a long way from his first, retracted, interview to Tehelka, when he immodestly claimed that he could have become the Prime Minister at the age of 25 had he wanted to, though the party was then in no position to offer him the job. He seemed to suggest that his mother had given the post to Manmohan Singh, and would give it to him in due course. That sense of entitlement is now water under the bridge.
This is a far more sober Rahul Gandhi. He isn’t a formidable orator like Narendra Modi, or an eloquent speaker like Atal Bihari Vajpayee, or dogged like his mother Sonia Gandhi. He has probably realised that the 2014 election is not his to win and that it is better to wait for a more congenial moment. Given the turbulence in the polity and uncertainty regarding non-BJP parties supporting his candidature, this may be a wise decision. Of course, he has not thrown in the towel, but he has avoided the stigma that would follow if were the Congress’s official candidate.
Rahul Gandhi, despite persistent questioning, ducked the question whether he feared a direct face-off with Narendra Modi in the forthcoming election, and said that like Arjuna, his ambition is only to change the system and redress its unfairness. He rambled at length about the great energy of the people, and when the anchor steered him back to the fear of losing to Narendra Modi, he simply insisted, “we will defeat the BJP”.
The Gujarat and the anti-Sikh pogrom found the Congress vice president at his weakest, though he was spared all embarrassing questions. On Manmohan Singh’s diatribe that the Gujarat Chief Minister was a “mass murderer,” the Amethi MP replied, “the Prime Minister has said a fact”. People died in the violence, he said, and Narendra Modi as Chief Minister was responsible. He refused to acknowledge that the legal process had given Narendra Modi a clean chit, asserting tangentially that that the Congress and the BJP were poles apart ideologically, and that the BJP wanted to concentrate power in a few hands while the Congress, he in particular, wanted to empower the youth, women and the villages.
Asked if the logic of responsibility extended to Akhilesh Yadav in Uttar Pradesh and the Congress in 1984 (where the anchor politely did not say that Rajiv Gandhi was the sitting Prime Minister), Rahul Gandhi equivocated. He also dodged the query originally posed by Narendra Modi, to wit, did his party kill Sikhs in anger for the assassination of Indira Gandhi? Refusing to take the question about apology – he pointed out that he was not in power – he claimed that the Sikhs stood by his family when the Congress lost in 1977 and they moved to 12, Willingdon Crescent. Two people, he said, had killed his grandmother and he did not extend his anger (which is now gone) to the community. It was a professional failure of the anchor not to ask why those two people, who surrendered, were attacked in cold blood while in custody; one died and one survived and was hanged later.
The Congress vice president fumbled badly on the issue of justice to the victims of the 1984 pogrom (again, the anchor kindly refrained from mentioning the case filed by frustrated Sikhs against party president Sonia Gandhi in the US). He could not explain why the “legal process” he constantly invoked – which has seen people sentenced to jail in the Gujarat riots of 2002 – failed vis-à-vis the 1984 pogrom. Not one prominent person named by eye witnesses – HKL Bhagat, DD Shastri, Sajjan Kumar, Jagdish Tytler – has been punished. The Amethi MP, however, insisted that the Government of India had tried to stop the riots of 1984, but the Gujarat Government abetted the riots; he deflected further questions by saying the media had witnessed this.
Since he claimed the Right to Information Act as a major achievement in which he was personally involved, the anchor asked if he was amenable to political parties coming under its ambit as the Congress had the largest amount of funds – over 90 per cent – from unaccounted sources. This threw him off-balance, but he gamely said that he was willing though it would have to be a unanimous decision of all political parties in order to be passed in Parliament. He added that the balance of power in the system would be disturbed if only political parties came under the ambit of the RTI and not the press or the judiciary. The latter, he said, must come under the RTI.
Corruption and price rise found the Gandhi scion on the back-foot. Congress’s proposed alliance in Bihar, he insisted, was with political parties and not with individuals (read Lalu Prasad Yadav). But he completely failed to answer the Maharashtra Government’s decision to reject the enquiry commission report on the Adarsh housing society scam and to let former Chief Minister Ashok Chavan off the hook, while nabbing bureaucrats, and tried to deflect the issue to six pending Bills in Parliament! Charges against the Himachal Pradesh Chief Minister and former Delhi Chief Minister were also dodged under a generic statement of “legal process” against “anyone found guilty”.
Though he took credit for the Lokpal bill as the panacea for corruption, neither he nor the anchor mentioned the sterling role played by the Comptroller & Auditor General (CAG) in exposing corruption under the UPA. On the question of his silence on scams in the 2G Spectrum, coal mine allocation, Commonwealth Games, the Railway scam involving the family of Pawan Kumar Bansal, he merely replied, “I report to the Prime Minister, I made my views abundantly clear”.
Rahul Gandhi was uncomfortable at the idea of a debate with Narendra Modi or other political leaders. The real debate, he said, was taking place in the Congress and change was being implemented there. His big picture, he said, was to make India a major manufacturing hub as an alternative to China, as desired also by global capital, and for this the UPA had already built the north-south east-west corridors. He was silent when told that global capital is shying away from India because of the rampant corruption and climate of fear, but insisted that RTI, Lokpal, Panchayati Raj had changed the system and opened it up.
Dynasty is the Gandhi USP and the Amethi MP took questions gamely. Denying that he kept invoking his family name, Rahul Gandhi said that he had mentioned his family once or twice and that got reported. “I did not choose to be born here; it happened, and I can’t just walk away,” he said, thus unwittingly admitting that being in politics was a ‘family thing’ for him. Facing the charge, he said one “cannot not wish away the dynasty concept in a closed system,” which is why it prevails in all political parties including the BJP, the DMK, and even the Congress.
Challenged that the dynasty tradition was maintained from the top with the Scindia, Pilot, and Deora scions appointed to ministerial positions, he admitted that some families were “re-positioned” because the system was closed. Opening the system, he said, would take time, a new system, and processes. “This is a revolutionary work I am doing; I have done it in the Youth Congress and NSUI”. His experiment to select candidates for 15 parliamentary constituencies through a more participatory process, “is the biggest political step in the country”; but implementing it in all constituencies at one go would make the system explode.
Appreciating the manner in which the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) had involved the people, he dodged questions about the Rail Bhavan dharna or the alleged unhappiness in the Congress about continuing support to the AAP, and denied a game plan to use it to split the anti-Congress vote in the general election. To the charge of not being a vote catcher, Rahul Gandhi countered that when the party won in Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand and Karnataka, “then I am not involved,” but defeat was laid at his door alone. On the veracity of his educational degrees which have been challenged by Dr Subramanian Swamy, Rahul Gandhi said he had been to Trinity College, Cambridge, for a year. He dodged the question about his stint at Harvard, saying he had submitted an affidavit to the Election Commission regarding his qualifications, but had no time to reply to those who disbelieved him.
Claiming to be a serious politician, he said he was not in politics for power or money, but to take on the system; he wanted to “change the way we do politics”. Changes like the RTI Act, the Lokpal, selection of candidates for elections, policy making, involving women, jobs for the youth – all require concentrated effort. Elections are not the end of the world. Rahul Gandhi said he could not abide by unfairness, it made his blood boil and “that is the heart of my politics”. Possibly he was an anomaly in the current environment, but for him power was “not a desire, but an instrument to do something … to redress the pain people feel at the hands of the system which is predatory”. The deeper question, he insisted, is that power is concentrated in few hands. He missed the irony that he was railing against a system created by first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru and perpetuated by Indira Gandhi, Rajiv Gandhi and Sonia Gandhi!
Niticentral.com, 28 January 2014
http://www.niticentral.com/2014/01/28/rahul-gandhi-dodges-modi-bullet-much-else-183830.html
