K N Pandita
2024 election results belied the tall claims of BJP leadership’s “ab ki bar char sow par” boastful slogan. This reflected their overconfidence bordering on disregard of the element of unpredictability in democratic elections in a multi-faceted country like India.
I will not go into the nitty-gritty of the alleged profligacy of BJP’s second-rung leadership nor shall I react on abuse of some fundamental democratic ethics we have noticed in BJP’s election dynamics.
I would like to concentrate on one important aspect that is now under discussion in many political circles and is likely to impact future policy management. I mean the person and politics of Congress leader, Rahul Gandhi who has been nominated by the INDI-Alliance to be the Leader of Opposition in the Lok Sabha.
Rahul Gandhi is the scion of the Gandhi-Nehru house, a leader of the Congress party, and one who got deeply involved in power politics during the tenure of the rubber-stamp Prime Minister while actual power remained in the hands of his mother, the super governing authority created by blatant misapplication of the Constitution of India.
When NDA replaced the Congress government’s six decades-long rule in 2014, it was obvious that the Nehru-Gandhi house would be loath to let India run by an entity in which it would have no say whatsoever. Things became very embarrassing for this house when the NDA returned to power in 2019. The Nehru-Gandhi (N-G) house decided to take the challenge seriously.
It took two important decisions. One was to bring together all regional or national level parties that had met with defeat in the 2019 election. The second decision was to align with such foreign elements as had openly declared their mission of ousting Modi and his government for the ambition of lifting India as an economic and military power. The foreign democracies and autocracies both became accomplices in the nefarious mission. They have partly succeeded.
After the election results were declared, RG became politically important being selected as the leader of the opposition by his INDI Alliance. The fact is that the BJP-led NDA government has been obsessed with RAGA phobia all through the last ten years of its tenure. It is the BJP that gave enormous media hype to RG (or RAGA as the BJP street mobs liked to call him). It’s the BJP that projected him larger than his size. There is hardly any pro-NDA media outlet — both press and electronic — which does not allow a good deal of prime time to project RG. No doubt, the projection is negative but the very fact that millions see him on the screen day and night has had its impact which has been amply reflected in the outcome of the election.
It is strange that even senior leaders of the BJP, including top brass like PM Modi, Amit Shah and others, made it a point to respond either in the public or media to each and everything that RG spoke or did. Why they want to project RG is a moot question.
Once the BJP leadership found that RG was bent upon defaming and humiliating them or disrupting the session of the Lok Sabha, they should have decided to ignore him a hundred per cent. Dispassionate TV viewers, again and again, asked what need there for a government with an absolute majority in the Parliament to give explanations and interpretations of all the sense or nonsense which RG spoke. By playing a quarrelsome school urchin’s game of point-counterpoint, these leaders reduced their stature and the serenity of a parliamentary debate. At the same time, they inadvertently served the purpose of RG’s antics. They called him Papu trying to tell the people that he was a wayward urchin, which, unfortunately for them, he never was. He is shrewd. And the BJP leadership was agog with calling him Pappu.
Had they ignored him outright and made no mention of him in the game of politics, the entire nation would have appreciated the BJP leadership that it had mastered real statesmen caring for the country and non-responsive to their critics. In all democracies, the opposition tries the leg-pulling of the ruling party and its leadership. But sensible leaders who run a government in the interests of the people do not give a damn to such actions of the opposition as they look at the nation from a different trajectory.
The political leadership of a democratic state is required to maintain a level of decorum. They refuse to be provoked; they do not respond to criticism that they think has no substance. Therefore, they respond only to such queries as are pertinent to the welfare of the state.
It is nearly four years that the National Herald issue has been hanging fire. Now and then BJP leaders speak of “thousands of crores of misplacement in the said news outlet. The case is also before the court. But no decision is taken or no action is taken by the court on the case. The general impression thus created is that perhaps the prosecutors have no solid evidence to prove that this is a case of financial impropriety. If it is not, then why is not the prosecution completed by now and the alleged culprit either exonerated or convicted?
RG defamed the government in his public statements in foreign countries. Why was it not declared a treasonable act and punished according to the law of the land? Rahul Gandhi was once detained at an airport in the US for carrying foreign exchange far beyond what is allowed by US law. Atal Bihari Vajpayee was the Prime Minister and he is reported to have intervened with the US leadership in the matter and got RG released from the custody of the immigration police. Why did Vajpayee do that? Why did he break the law of the land? This forces us to believe that RG’s grouse against the NDA government has some basis.
In the final analysis, the NDA government should stop carving one reason or the other for their debacle in the election. It must make some introspection and set its home in order. PM Modi would do well to have a mechanism of informal consultations on very sensitive issues with the intellectual giants of the civil society known for their nationalist credentials. The bureaucrats do not always have the entire quota of wisdom allotted to them.
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