Rahul Gandhi, a Member of Parliament, has been on a tirade, against the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), and has also opined that many institutions including the press, judiciary, Parliament, and Election Commission are all under threat and are controlled in one way or the other. His conversation session at the Chatham House, a think tank in London, has stirred a hornet’s nest. He was at his wretched nadir when he remarked that the “collapse of Indian democracy” will “play out on a global scale.”
This unrestrained and unprecedented verbal onslaught, by a sitting MP, expressed in a foreign country, has outraged the feelings of patriotic sections of the population. His rancid fulminations have been interpreted as an outburst of acute frustration, desperation and utter helplessness. To groom him for prime ministership, he was saddled with important positions like the responsibility of the president of the Indian National Congress (INC), chairperson of the Indian Youth Congress and the National Students’ Union of India (NSUI), post of the General Secretary of the All India Congress Committee (AICC).
He has previously been a member of the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Home Affairs and Human Resource Development and also the Consultative Committee for the Ministry of Civil Aviation. He currently serves on the Parliamentary Standing Committee on External Affairs and is a trustee of the Rajiv Gandhi Charitable Trust and the Rajiv Gandhi Foundation. He has served as the MP of Amethi constituency and is currently the MP from Wayanad constituency in Kerala. His powerful family name, and his mother, have ensured many distinguished positions and responsibilities thrust on him continuously, but he has not been able to prove his mettle in any position. Yet, he harbours a grand delusion that he will be the Prime Minister of India one day.
Sycophants enhance this grand delusion and Rahul Gandhi is becoming like Dorian, the narcissistic character in the celebrated novel, ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’ by Oscar Wilde. While Dorian Gray personifies the aesthetic lifestyle in action, pursuing personal gratification with abandon, Rahul Gandhi is luxuriating in his dreams of prime ministership, and this elusive dream is making him lash out with unbridled contempt, often dangerously subversive. Consider his statement at Chatham House — “Democracy in India is a global, public good. It impacts way further than our boundaries. If Indian democracy collapses, in my view, democracy on the planet suffers a very serious, possibly fatal blow. So, it is important for you too. It is not just important for us. We will deal with our problem, but you must be aware that this problem is going to play out on a global scale. It is not just going to play out in India and what you do about it, is of course, up to you. You must be aware of what is happening in India — the idea of a democratic model is being attacked and threatened.”
Constant sycophancy of his followers has compelled him to agree with Ayn Rand’s belief in the novel ‘Atlas Shrugged’ that the world is best served when individuals act entirely in their own rational self-interest, or, to put it more bluntly, they act selfishly. Inevitably, his paranoid ambitious dreams are pushing him into a Hamletian dilemma, if his sycophants are unable to make him the Prime Minister, will not the US and Europe step in?
Ezra Klein in his ground-breaking book ‘Why We’re Polarized’ points out that in the past 50 years in America, partisan identities have merged with racial, religious, geographic, ideological, and cultural identities. Identity was and is still an obsession for two foreign-based religions operating in India. But what they did not bargain for was the sudden and rapid rise of the Hindu identity, under the BJP. Vast sections of the Hindu population across the country are becoming more receptive to the idea of a Hindu identity, that will transcend caste and language barriers. Polarized political identities and polarised political institutions, leading to the politicization of everyday culture, is creating a new political landscape, where Hindu philosophy, culture, and religion are getting pre-eminence.
Political parties like the Congress, Leftist parties and an assortment of regional parties, are struggling to stitch up a new front, resist the forces of change, and also not be at loggerheads with their minority-dependent vote-bank politics. Rahul Gandhi’s prime ministerial ambitions can flounder if the Opposition unity fructifies. This has created the present Hamletian crisis for the Congress party and for Rahul Gandhi. The only solution is keeping everything in ‘as is where is condition’, and hoping that the Western nations will chip in through their NGOs to craft a victory, wherein, Rahul Gandhi would have unimpeded access to the prime minister’s chair. A chimerical proposition indeed.
The author is IRS (Rtd), Ph.D. (Narcotics), Former Director General, National Academy of Customs, Indirect Taxes & Narcotics (NACIN). Views expressed are personal.
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