Hardly anything matches the frustration of a petulant, spoiled child who is denied the object of his immediate fancy.
After four decades of getting his way as scion of India’s most powerful family, Rahul Gandhi started hearing ‘no’ about nine years ago from the Indian electorate and a rapidly changing polity. He had kept the biggest lollipop for the last. With a tacit promise of the nation’s biggest post for merely bearing a surname, he wanted to savour the PM’s job when he had full control of the party.
He got full party control after Sonia Gandhi walked into an uncertain sunset, repeatedly messed up his job, and now the lollipop is all but gone. It was getting increasingly evident that the Congress will not even come close to power anytime soon with its growing irrelevance and PM Narendra Modi’s growing popularity even after two terms. But the disqualification from Parliament after conviction in a Surat court for insulting the Modi community and OBCs in general (he had to apologise to courts twice before for casual slander of PM Modi and the RSS) threatens to legally take that lollipop away for another 11 years.
It is not an easy heartbreak to deal with and Rahul Gandhi’s frustration is showing. He lashed out at two journalists at a recent press conference, asking them to carry a BJP badge for merely asking him questions on the disqualification.
For all his posturing to the contrary, RaGa does not take well to uncomfortable questions. A few years ago, he mocked a local man and asked him to join the BJP. The man’s fault? He asked about the terrible condition of roads. Rahul was incidentally drubbed by Smriti Irani from Amethi in the 2019 general elections.
Then in 2020, the Congress party served an inexplicable legal notice to this columnist and Firstpost over merely a critical piece.
The Congress spokesperson did not even assign a specific reason for the notice. Party MP Vivek Tankha wrote on Twitter that the piece was among “defamatory, incendiary & provocative news articles”. He warned: “Media must know its limits…”
The self-proclaimed champion of free speech never came out in support of Nupur Sharma getting murderous fatwas and “sarr tann se juda” calls for quoting from the Hadiths. Half a dozen people were, some on camera, but it did not move RaGa to issue unequivocal condemnation of the Islamist mobs.
In late 2022, he again humiliated an NDTV woman journalist for asking about the party presidentship during the Bharat Jodo Yatra. He mocked her outlet for having “a new owner”, Adani.
From the first amendment to free speech by Jawaharlal Nehru to Emergency to banning numerous books and movies, the Congress has been the architect of the darkest episodes of censorship in independent India. Rahul Gandhi’s projection of ‘politics of love’ sought to smudge that track record. But the actions of the insolent ‘prince’ only rekindles those memories of intolerance.
Abhijit Majumder is a senior journalist. Views expressed are personal.
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