Rahul Gandhi’s Return
The Congress with it’s pleasant face, over the decades,
always assured roti kapda and makan. They were like the nation’s lead
actors…all of them had the glib assurance of a dynasty, of what in timid
Sociological language, is called guile, cunning and tacit inheritances of
political environment. This includes language skills, ability to wear turbans
of different sorts, and to engage with the masses. For the Congress, the masses
remained what they were, the rural proletariat. Within this they would
occasionally target Muslims, women, third gender, industrial workers, farmers
and Dalits. It did not make a difference to them. During Rajiv Gandhi’s term
the Congress were assaulted by public outcry, when the assassination of Mrs
Indira Gandhi was followed by a huge pogrom of Sikhs, many of them who fled to
Punjab. In turn, they were followed by a mass migration of Hindu Pubjabis, who
now felt that they would give Delhi the colour it lacked. As a result, they
were the harbingers of right wing politics and a commercial revolution which
brought in fast cars and shops and a spurious designer culture, which grew in
time, to put Delhi on the map with other great haute couture cities of the
world. To think that it took 33 or 34 years to change Dlhi from an iconic
bureaucratic and university city to an untidy constellation of consumer townships all jammed together. Rahul
and Priyanka are amused by changes, they are not affronted by change. Rahul
would quite happily sell the farmers with small landholdings to the industrial
oligarchy of landowner and capitalist farmers. Rahul uses his bucolic charm to
assure the poor that he is one of them, and now his sartorial attire mimics the
University students of the 1970s who could come every day to college in blue
jeans and ironed khadi kurtas. He is not offering anything new, or different,
but he is saying that he enjoys politics and is here to stay. What skills he
learns as he moves on, is hard to say.
When his father said “When a great tree falls, the earth shakes”
he was met with aghast observations from the upper middle class, which
certainly did not go along with Rajiv’s
banana boat republic of Mayo school and Doon school expatriates. While one
remembers them with some alarm, one knows that as advisors to Rahul they could
not have done any good. His current mentors are Kapil Sibal, Sheila Dixit and
Mani Shankar Aiyar. None of them are known for democratic styles of
functioning. So why would the proletariat want to vote Rahul back? The only
reason would be, of course, because he has learned a new humility, and with it
comes charm and humour. The Indian people, farmers turned clerks, peons and
factory workers, are always ready to forgive. Finally, what they are really
looking for, in caste biased India, is to be left alone so that they can
worship their known Gods, (who might not be the Sanskritic high Gods and Goddesses,) and to eat the food
that they are used to, and have freedom of speech and action. The latter allows
them to move across the country, and to find work, as citizens of India. They
learn local languages, and while never trying to fit in, as the rules of
commensality and marriage are as rigid as ever, they do try to accept the
customs and conventions of the places they find work. This minimum requirement
of freedom and mobility is something
that the secular Congress does promise. While homogenization, and theological
colonization, (where the lesser Gods were extinguished in praise of the cult of
the Warrior Ram,) were accepted by the working class, let us remember that they
presumed that education and right to work, would go with it. The casteist
Hindutva bandwagon does not provide this basic human right of education and
standards set by the Man Mohan Singh Government, though the latter were a cartel
of free loaders who neglected the poor economically and promoted industrialised
agriculture. The present government has always claimed that it continued with
many of the policies of the previous government, to the chagrin of the Congress
workers. However, when it came to the Educational aspects, they preferred to
pump up war machineries. Rahul belongs to a
nuclear family line of dynasts who have
simple oratory skills or learns them…Rajiv used to preface every speech
with “Hum ko Dekhna Hai..” which even his speech writers could not dissuade him
from. Sonia’s faltering speeches were polished over two decades. And now, the
middle aged Rahul, says for TV and audiences, “ Gabbar Singh Tax!” for GST. The
totemic cow has already been displaced from the Hindutva brigade’s list, and
Rahul will play the Dalit card by offering Ishta Deva as his trump card.
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