Rahul Gandhi needed to appear 'Prime Ministerial' and thus attract votes to his dynastic party. Alternatively, he could have nominated some one else and ensured that person appeared 'Prime Ministerial' and thus could attract vote to the party he had inherited. Rahul chose neither alternative. Why? One reason may be that he wanted the pleasure of being able to unseat or humiliate a Congress PM. But in order to gain that pleasure, Congress would have to win the general elections. Is Rahul really too stupid to see that? Yes. At least, that is the conclusion readers of the NYT will come to after reading an article by Samanth Subramaniyam titled-
Time Is Running Out for Rahul Gandhi’s Vision for India
What is that vision? Modi shouldn't be PM. Nobody should be PM- definitely not Rahul because Daddy was PM and got blown up. Granny was PM and got shot. Great-grand pappy wasn't killed but the Chinese took down his pajamas and made fun of his puny genitals. This shows that being PM is bad. Look at Mummy. She wasn't PM and she is still alive.
As the election neared, the quelling of dissent grew more visible still.
This year, in an unprecedented move, Modi’s administration arrested two chief ministers of states run by small opposition parties.
Just as Biden foisted fraudulent court cases on Trump after stealing the election- right? The truth is, corrupt politicians get arrested. It may be that central agencies are reluctant to arrest corrupt politicians connected to the ruling party- but that is a different matter.
(One stepped down hours before his arrest.) In both instances, the government claimed corruption,
no. The prosecutors claimed corruption. All political parties accuse each other of corruption. But without evidence, Judges dismiss such cases.
but many critics noted that the arrests were uncannily timed to pull two popular politicians out of campaign season in states where the B.J.P. has struggled.
Alternatively, both politicians are hoping to get mileage out of their being arrested. Were this not the case they could have found ways to postpone the hearings or else would have arranged for a scapegoat to be offered up.
Income-tax authorities froze Congress’s bank accounts, supposedly over a late filing.
Their treasurer was so useless he didn't bother to file the returns
“It has been orchestrated to cripple us in the elections,” Gandhi told reporters.
Gandhi crippled Congress by being useless.
If so, it feels like overkill, because it is common wisdom that Congress can’t win.
Which is why it is safe to go after Congress for unpaid taxes, corruption etc.
Those who want nothing to do with the B.J.P. watch Gandhi with conflicted anguish. He is, by all accounts, sincere, empathetic and committed to a pluralistic India.
He won't let his cousin back into their ancestral party. His pluralism doesn't extend very far.
This is a man who forgave his father’s killers,
politically, he is in bed with their biggest patrons
and who said on the sidelines of a private New York event last year, according to one of those present: “I don’t hate Modi. The day I hate, I will leave politics.”
That's a day Modi does not look forward to. Rahul is the gift which keeps giving- to other parties.
But he’s also the latest in a lineage under whom Congress grew undemocratic and sometimes wildly corrupt. The great liberal hope is that Gandhi can achieve contradictory things: use his dynastic privilege to resuscitate his party, and dissolve the dynasty at the same time.
This is easily done. Nominate a charismatic technocrat who can give Modi a run for his money. A family owned company can bring in a CEO from outside.
That’s a steep demand, but Gandhi’s priorities are altogether more Himalayan. “He doesn’t say it,” Sitaram Yechury, the general secretary of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) who knows Gandhi well, told me, “but he’s modeling himself after Mahatma Gandhi. He doesn’t want to take any position of power.”
Mahatma Gandhi nominated Nehru though, truth be told, Nehru could have crossed over to the Socialists and prevailed over the elderly nutters who supported the Mahatma. What Yechury didn't say was that Jyoti Basu could have been PM but the CPM politburo would not allow it. This was a factor in the decline of the Communist parties.
In January, Gandhi told his colleagues that he has “one foot in and one foot out of the party,” and that he plans to be “a bridge to activists outside.”
But activists want a bridge which takes them to power and influence. Still, if Kanhaiya Kumar (who contested the last election on a Communist ticket) gets elected in Delhi, 'activists' might see some point in accepting Rahul's patronage. The trouble is that Kanhaiya is unpopular with the Congress rank and file in Delhi. Also, as a Bhumihar, his appeal to bahishkrit Biharis in the NCR might be limited.
As he explained it then, the B.J.P., with its undiluted majoritarianism, “is a political-ideological machine.
His granny and his daddy had no problem defeating it. In 1984, the BJP got only two seats in the Lok Sabha.
It can’t be defeated by a political machine alone.” His role, as he sees it, is to be the counter ideology — to go out into the country, rouse Indians to the dangers of the B.J.P. and offer them his dream of a fairer, more tolerant India instead.
But who will be PM in that dream?
Rahul Gandhi conceived of his yatra much as Chandra Shekhar did:
No. He was imitating Murli Manohar's 'Ekta Yatra' which started in the deep South and ended in Kashmir. It is said that Modi first got national exposure through this yatra. Ten years later he became CM of Gujarat even though he had never contested an election before that.
as a way to counter the ideology of a seemingly immovable leader.
Because there is no alternative Prime Ministerial candidate. The hope was that Gehlot, CM of Rajasthan, would be roped in while the mooncalf went walkabout but Gehlot refused to budge.
...Rahul Gandhi once called Uttar Pradesh his karmabhoomi, a Sanskrit word for the land of one’s momentous actions.
At one point Rahul thought he could revitalize his party at the grassroots level in his ancestral state. He failed. Akhilesh and Yogi are his age but smarter and more experienced.
But Uttar Pradesh also became the land where Congress was fated to fail. Today it’s the roiling heart of the B.J.P.’s Hindu nationalism. Varanasi, Hinduism’s most sacred city, lies near the state’s eastern border, and Modi chose to represent it in Parliament — a crafty choice for a man wishing to be hailed as a defender of his faith.
Voters in Varanasi knew Modi had done a lot to improve amenities in Ahmedabad, Gujarat. They were happy to advertise their desire to welcome Hindu pilgrims from elsewhere. Modi mentions to Tamil audiences the fact that the second most spoken language in Varanasi is Tamil because of the very large number of pilgrims from that State.
Around 40 million Muslims live in the state, and under its B.J.P. chief minister, they’re increasingly being erased from public life.
When Nehru became PM, they were physically killed or chased away by the Custodian of Evacuee property.
One law jeopardizes their right to marry whom they wish.
America prevents you marrying your eight year old niece
Other regulations have constricted the meat trade, in which many Muslims work.
American States has plenty of such regulations.
Islamic schools are in danger of being banned outright.
No. They may be deprived of government funding.
By painting Muslims as trespassers, the B.J.P. licenses violence against them, sometimes even explicitly.
Nehru and Indira presided over vast pogroms against Muslims and Sikhs.
(In 2015, a man was beaten to death by his Hindu neighbors in his village in western Uttar Pradesh, on the rumor that he had slaughtered a cow. The men accused of his murder have since been freed on bail and the case is still unresolved.)
Plenty of non-Muslims have been slaughtered for cartoons about the Prophet. No religion has a monopoly on crazy.
More than any other part of India, Uttar Pradesh shows what the B.J.P. has wrought and how successful it has been. In 2019, during the last national election, the B.J.P. swept 62 of the state’s 80 seats. Congress won just one.
Sonia won that seat. Now she has gone to the upper house, will Congress retain it? What if Priyanka contests?
A few years ago, Gandhi decided that his party needed a way to mobilize people against the B.J.P., settling on a yatra as a means to that end. He embarked on his first, walking up the spine of India, in late 2022. Even the plainness of his attire — sneakers, loosefitting trousers, white polo shirt — was a rebuke to the Olympian vanity of Modi, who once had his own name stitched, in tiny letters, to form the pinstripes of a suit.
Samanth is lying. Modi received the suit, which cost 16,000 dollars as a gift. It was auctioned off for about 700,000 dollars with the money going to charity.
We thought Rahul's walkabout was a farewell tour which is why it did not matter that he didn't look Prime Ministerial.
The yatras felt like campaigns, yet Gandhi’s team insists that they were not about projecting him as prime minister but rather a form of ideological resistance, almost above politics. (His staff politely refused my repeated requests for an interview.)
To be fair, if Gehlot had taken over Congress, Rahul could have been seen as mobilizing grass-roots support for the party's Prime Ministerial candidate.
The Congress Party found itself divided over Gandhi’s approach. Salman Khurshid, a Congress veteran, worried that the party has strayed from bread-and-butter political strategy. We were in his office in Delhi, and he kept looking dolorously at his phone, which never stopped ringing. It was the feverish middle of the election season, and Congress was picking its candidates and negotiating alliances with other parties. Gandhi had to weigh in, Khurshid said: “We’d like him to be within shouting distance. He’s a thousand kilometers away.” Khurshid wished for a more customary system, the sort that promised, say, a 20-minute appointment at 10 a.m. to talk about three things. “That’s how ordinary political parties work,” he said. “He wants an extraordinary political party.”
In which case, he should find someone extraordinary to run it.
Sometimes, Gandhi’s team told Khurshid and others to come on the yatra and talk to Gandhi on the bus. But it wasn’t sufficient, Khurshid told me. “There’s never enough time.” The yatra involved a lot of stopping and starting and stopping again, as I discovered. Two or three times a day, Gandhi’s Jeep — and its caravan of police cars, S.U.V.s and a vehicle bearing a device labeled “Jammer” — inched through a town, halting at a crossroads for a speech. Then the convoy would hasten to its next engagement, trying to cover vast Uttar Pradesh distances through dense Uttar Pradesh traffic, and always behind schedule. The day ended in a cordoned-off campsite, where everyone slept in shipping containers fitted with bunks. Here, in his own enclosure, Gandhi hobnobbed with local Congress functionaries or practiced jiu-jitsu with his instructor.
I must admit, I was under the impression that Kharge had taken charge of Congress and that things were improving. It appears that the chaos had actually gotten worse.
In Prayagraj, where we headed after Varanasi, it’s possible to traverse the distance between the party’s zenith and its rock bottom in a single evening. First, Gandhi made a speech outside Anand Bhavan, an ancestral family home, an eggshell-white mansion on an emerald lawn. Anand Bhavan is now a museum, but its chief relic is intangible: the promise of Nehruvian secularism, circa 1947.
Nehru presided over the worse violence against Muslims the sub-continent has ever seen. After he became PM in Delhi, the Muslim percentage went from 33 percent to just 5 per cent.
Then, while leaving Prayagraj, we passed the high court that invalidated Indira Gandhi’s election in 1975 on the grounds of electoral malpractice. The verdict provoked her to impose a state of emergency — a suspension of civic rights — for nearly two years, tarnishing Congress and strengthening its competitors. By this time too, the party had wrapped itself feudally around the dynasty.
Indira ruthlessly got rid of all rivals. Her son was less capable. Sonia, too, could not prevent regional satraps from setting up their own dynastic Congress parties.
Any emergent leaders with their own base were subdued or cast off because they threatened the Gandhis. By the late 1980s, other politicians had clawed voters away from Congress by
quitting Congress accusing Rajiv of corruption
courting specific groups — members of a caste,
Indira did that. Indeed, all parties did.
say, or as with the B.J.P. and Hindus, of a religion.
Indira and Rajiv got votes for 'defending' Hindus. But so did Nehru.
As Congress faltered, its workers joined rival parties, including the B.J.P. In India, party workers don’t just canvass voters — they step in for an insufficient state. If a farmer needing a loan is turned away by the bank manager, or if a woman can’t pay the cost of treatment for her sick daughter, party workers use their contacts to help. These services are performed in the hope that the favors will be returned every five years, come the election. “The average party worker needs, say, 10,000 rupees a month to run his home,” an old Congress hand in Varanasi, who asked not to be named for fear of professional reprisal, told me. “If their party can’t get to power, how will they get paid? They’ll go work for whoever is most likely to win.”
This is the crux of the matter. If the party spends money on vanity projects- like Rahul's yatras- they can't pay to get elected which in turn means they have less money- except for Rahu's ego-trips.
At the time, (2004 when he entered politics) Gandhi often showed little patience with the orthodox figures of politics.
Sanjay and Rajiv were said to have that quality- not necessarily a bad thing.
Pratap Bhanu Mehta, a political scientist at Princeton, who met Gandhi back then, recalled that he made minimal eye contact and seemed distracted — unable even to feign interest as politicians usually do so well.
Mehta is boring and stupid. No sensible person would make eye contact with him.
A journalist who met Gandhi privately told me that he was, as the saying goes, eager to tell you what you thought: “It was: ‘You don’t know how the Congress works. Let me tell you.’ Or, ‘I’ll tell you about India and Pakistan.’”
Nothing wrong in that. Journalists are supposed to listen to important people and Rahul was very important indeed- at that time.
In his memoir “A Promised Land,” Barack Obama compared Gandhi, whom he met in 2010, to “a student who’d done the coursework and was eager to impress the teacher but deep down lacked either the aptitude or the passion to master the subject.”
Sonia kept foisting her idiot son on unsuspecting foreign dignitaries.
One of Gandhi’s colleagues admits he used to be “very anxious and pushy” back in the day.
Because, as he said 'I could have become PM at the age of 25.' It took a lot of sustained effort to make himself, and thus his party, unelectable.
“He has calmed down over a period of time.”
Because there is no longer a risk that his party might win.
He had to. Congress isn’t a party you can change in a hurry.
Nehru changed it completely. By 1955 it had embraced Socialism. Indira changed it even more completely. She made it dynastic. Rajiv changed it by bringing in spreadsheets and computers. Sonia changed it by backing Manmohan. Rahul changed it by making it unelectable.
Its ways are too ossified, and it is honeycombed with fiefs. When Gandhi wanted Congress to field new faces in elections, he pushed for candidates to be selected through an internal voting system, rather like a primary.
Rich people would create a lot of 'benami' memberships and vote for themselves.
According to one former party consultant, senior politicians, worried about losing their tickets, complained to his mother, Sonia, the Congress president.
What is more they tricked her into believing they were her own cute little babies.
Khurshid, one of the old guard, told me: “Everything that destroys democracy got in there — money, muscle, power.” It resulted in “the dedicated warriors of the Congress at the youth level” being sidelined.
There were no such warriors. Thugs- yes. Warriors- fuck off!
The primaries never took off. In 2018, Gandhi wanted young chief ministers in three states where Congress had won state elections. He didn’t get his way.
Why? Gehlot in Rajasthan and Kamal Nath in MP were highly experienced. Rahul was a petulant child.
But at least Gandhi tried something, a consultant to Congress told me. “If you leave it to these other guys,” he said, “they will not even change the curtains in the party office.”
Curtains don't matter. Winning does matter. Gehlot and Kamal Nath are determined to leave their sons a good legacy. Rahul can't even get married and sire an heir.
These exasperations may have amplified a hesitancy about power and responsibility that Gandhi seemed always to harbor.
He is work-shy. To be fair, Indian politics is as boring as fuck.
In 2009, he declined the offer to be a cabinet minister. Perhaps even then he saw his role as that of a moral authority outside the government, Yechury said.
A guy too lazy to do a job handed to him on a plate can't be a moral authority on how that job should be done.
On becoming the party’s vice president, Gandhi gave not a stirring speech but a somber one, recalling the assassinations in his family and counseling his party that “power is poison.”
It was a poison which came his way because his Daddy was the son of a lady whose father had been PM.
In a party often pilloried for being dynastic, Gandhi has been unable to stamp his will on Congress.
because he is shit. The Dynast may be a drooling imbecile.
One friend of the family described Gandhi as “timid.” When his 2022 yatra went through the state of Kerala, Yechury, the Communist leader, considered walking with him, but members of Congress’s Kerala unit protested: The Communists were their chief rivals in the state, and this show of solidarity — even against the B.J.P., a common antagonist — wouldn’t do at all. Yechury couldn’t understand it.
He is a lightweight. Kerala CPM knows that it has to cannibalize Congress before the BJP supplants it. However, it is the CPI which is challenging Rahul in Wayanad.
Gandhi might not be the party’s president, but there’s no doubt he is its presiding force, Yechury said. Why didn’t he just hold fast?
Because Yechury is yesterday's news.
Two years ago, during a protest in Delhi, Gandhi and dozens of his Congress colleagues were detained by the police. One of those present, who asked not to be named because he was not authorized to speak publicly, told me that several senior leaders were held together, and Gandhi had “really frank and open conversations” with them. A couple of these leaders “got aggressive, saying, ‘You have to take charge,’ persuading him to take back the party presidency, accusing him of running away from responsibility.” It was high-octane drama: “What do you do when you’re detained, man? We were there for six hours. He couldn’t go anywhere.” The Congress worker remembers Gandhi saying then: “I know what I have to do. My job is to do mass outreach. You guys handle the party.”
The dynast's job is to either run things or appoint a guy who can run things. You can hire people to do outreach or reach-arounds or whatever. Rahul doesn't get this.
Congress didn’t send any representatives to the temple’s inauguration, and I had expected Gandhi to speak about Ayodhya, which lies, after all, in Uttar Pradesh. But he barely mentioned it, even in Varanasi, a city facing a potential reprise of Ayodhya. The morning after his speech there, I visited a quarter called Pilikothi, following a sequence of lanes, each framed by so many tall tenements that there was something canyonlike about them. It was a Sunday,
which is not a holiday for Muslims
but Pilikothi echoed with the tack-tack of sari looms. The sound drifted into the basement in which Abdul Batin Nomani, the mufti of Varanasi, sat at a low desk. Behind him were shelves of theological volumes. When he pulled a book out to illustrate a point, his hand didn’t hesitate for a second.
His hand did not tremble even though he was a Muslim and thus terrified of Hindus like the author.
The title of mufti, or jurist, has been in Nomani’s family since 1927, and he has filled the role for more than two decades. In that time, he said, the B.J.P. has spread so much hate that it has corroded even the possibility of amicable relations between Hindus and Muslims.
Whereas in Pakistan, where Nomani has relatives, relations are very amicable indeed.
You can be arrested for offering the namaz in public,
just like in Dubai
or for being a Muslim man marrying a Hindu woman,
just like in Saudi Arabia. On the other hand you could keep her as a concubine or just rape her a lot.
or for running your butcher shop during Hindu festivals.
in London, you aren't even allowed to butcher your own sheep in your backyard.
You could be lynched on a whisper that you’re carrying beef, or have your house bulldozed on suspicion of being a rioter, or be hunted by mobs goaded by B.J.P. politicians calling for murder.
Also, if you try to do jihad on kaffirs, those damned kaffirs beat you to death. The lot of the pious Muslim in India or the UK is not a happy one.
Nomani told me about the head of a Hindu monastery nearby, and how they would invite one another to their religious functions. “Then, slowly, his mind turned,” Nomani said. “He must have been convinced that to talk to people like me is wrong.”
It was useless.
Nomani heads the committee of the Gyanvapi Mosque, another centuries-old structure that the Hindu right aims to replace with a temple. Weeks before I met Nomani, a court allowed Hindus to worship in the mosque’s basement, similar to what happened in Ayodhya in 1986. Varanasi’s Muslims are fearful, Nomani said. Wouldn’t the same cascade of consequences ensue? Wouldn’t other mosques surely follow? When the yatra swung by, Nomani told a local Congress representative he would welcome a meeting with Gandhi. It never transpired.
So, Rahul isn't utterly stupid. But then, you should remember, the Mahatma was killed by a Hindu. It isn't enough just to appease minorities. You need to appease majorities too.
Nomani wondered why Gandhi didn’t even speak about the issue and directly confront the B.J.P.’s divisive politics. “Someone could have called and reassured us: ‘Don’t worry, we’re with you,’” Nomani said.
Why be with those who are against you?
He regards Gandhi with sympathy. “I believe he wants to do the right thing, and that he is against this culture of hate,” he said. “But he’s weak. His party is weak. He can’t do anything.”
Nomani is equally weak. Nobody wants to talk to him. Sad.
From Prayagraj, the yatra headed to Amethi, a town a couple of hours to the north. I had last visited in 2009, when it was still a stronghold of Congress’s first family, and I remembered the fields of winter mustard, yellow till the horizon, on the town’s outskirts and the wishbone layout of its three main roads. Gandhi won resoundingly that year. But in 2014, when his margin shrank, he must have seen the incoming tide of Hindu nationalism. Sanjay Singh, a local Congress worker, recalled that, on vote-counting day, Gandhi sounded dispirited as the results trickled in, telling his colleagues “the politics of this state is beyond my understanding.”
Even Rahul understood that if Congress lost the Center (it had already lost the State) then Amethi would stop getting lavish funding.
In 2019, the B.J.P. flipped Amethi. If Gandhi hadn’t simultaneously run from another seat, in Kerala, he wouldn’t be in Parliament at all.
People will vote for Rahul provided they don't understand what he is saying.
For the rally, the party had set up rows of chairs in a field, but the audience started dribbling out almost as soon as it began. By the time Gandhi was midway through his speech, only half the chairs were occupied. He talked about China, and riots in faraway Manipur, and the B.J.P.’s cronyism. Standing next to me, a policewoman told a videographer, “He isn’t talking about Amethi at all.” The only cheers came when he raised the plight of India’s poorer castes — the very people who made up most of his audience. As he had done throughout the yatra, he warned them they’d never get very far in the B.J.P.’s India. He may well be right, but I remembered something Mehta told me. Modi’s narrative of a resurgent Hinduism, however hollow, makes people feel good about themselves, Mehta said. “Rahul’s narrative does the opposite.”
Modi shows us that Indians can rise by their own merit and hardwork. Rahul reminds us that even if our parents were nice, we might turn out to be shit.
The next day, something interrupted the yatra’s staid choreography. We were in Raebareli, the one Uttar Pradesh constituency still with the Congress Party. Halfway through his address, Gandhi invited a young man onto his Jeep to quiz him about his prospects.
No. This was a young man from the Maurya community. He claims that he and and several other OBC and SC candidates had been recruited as teachers in UP but were denied appointment letters (bribes may be payable for this). He approached Rahul as he had approached other politicians. Since he had printed up posters and a T-shirt, he appeared professional and motivated rather than just a person who had suffered injustice.
In a later video he said that he had been mistreated even in his own 'Maurya Samaj' local community center by a legislator and his supporters. He believes this is because he is now associated with Rahul and is considered 'political'. It may be that the young man is mentally unbalanced. Still, it is plausible that he was recruited as a teacher but did not get an appointment letter. He says Rahul wrote a letter on his behalf. But he himself doesn't seem to set much store by it.
The man introduced himself as Amit Maurya, but he was barely audible, so Gandhi said, paternally but lightly, “First, learn how to handle a microphone.”
Gandhi had a bullying tone. This frightened the young fellow.
“I’m a little anxious, sir.”
“Don’t worry,” Gandhi replied. “You’re a lion.”
Rahul isn't tall but he was taller and much older than Amit. Being called a 'babbar sher' by a nutter was disconcerting. Should one laugh or cry? Amit cried.
Either it was the pressure of the moment or the unchecking of a dam of frustration, but Maurya burst into tears.
Because Rahul was bullying him. Maurya had prepared a statement explaining the nature of his grievance. There would have been no harm in helping the fellow make that statement since it would harm the BJP which rules UP.
In the week’s most genuine moment,
It was embarrassing. The young man clearly had a topical grievance- viz. bribes being demanded even from SC and OBC candidates for appointment letters. There may have been some further insult or injury whose nature I was not able to understand from the uploaded video. Perhaps the young man had been part of a protest at Lucknow's Ecogarden and had been manhandled or has a criminal case hanging over his head. Rahul should have let the young man have his say. The Mauryas are a very important caste.
Sadly Rahul didn't give a damn about the grievance of the young man who was clearly smart though, of course, his grievance may be imaginary. Still, he speaks in an educated manner. Why should he not get his appointment letter and start teaching? Rahul, selfishly, wanted to use the fellow as a prop and put words into his mouth. He was the ventriloquist and Amit was the dummy. His job was to say 'there are no SC or OBC billionaires' (actually there are) and 'there are no SC or OBC owned media houses' (also not true)'. But the plain fact is, Modi is OBC. The President is ST. There are wealthy SC dynastic politicians. Rahul himself has plenty of ill gotten gains.
Gandhi seemed nonplused, as if he didn’t know what to do with this political gift.
Nonsense! You can watch the video on You tube for yourself. Rahul had bullied the young man till he broke down and wept. Then he grabbed hold of him and put words into his mouth.
Instinctively, he folded Maurya into an embrace and kept his arm around the sobbing man.
he kept his arm around his throat.
Still, he just couldn’t abandon his routine — the statistics he’d memorized, the thesis presentation mode he was in.
But even if his speech didn’t change, he sounded more passionate — angry, even — about the inequities he had lined up to narrate to his crowd.
But that crowd knew that he was a Brahmin- a very wealthy one. Modi was one of their own. If he had given Amit a chance to make a speech- the crowd would have felt he was giving a leg up to a young man from a politically very important community. Instead, Rahul bullied and manhandled the young man.
Well after the yatra’s end, when summer hammers down and ballot machines appear in schools and colleges and municipal buildings, Gandhi may at least be able to count on Maurya’s vote.
Maurya is smart enough, though he may be mentally ill. Rahul could have given him 'face' by letting a minion adjust his mike. But Rahul was in a hurry. He bullied the boy till he broke down.
But who knows. Elections are subject to every manner of caprice, and the B.J.P. has shown itself to be peerless at swaying India’s voters.
They get elected if they have a better candidate. Otherwise they lose.
Out of hubris or audacity, Gandhi wants to persuade people to consider lofty things like morality and love, indispensable values that nonetheless make for nebulous campaign platforms.
Rahul doesn't want to be PM but doesn't want anyone else to be PM either. As with Amit Maurya, he wants somebody else to appear to be saying what he wants to hear but he abruptly loses patience and grabs the fellow and manipulates him like a ventriloquist's dummy. But the only dummy in Indian politics is Rahul himself.
He doesn’t mind if it takes years, and perhaps he doesn’t mind if he loses his party in the process. In that time, though, he risks seeing his idea of India extinguished altogether.
His idea of India is one where there is a PM he has appointed whom he can bully and manhandle and sack and replace with somebody yet more docile and pliable. But Modi extinguished that idea long ago.
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