It was a performance a little under twenty minutes. Much like a whirlwind cricketing knock in the ongoing Indian Premier League. And it was enough to create a Twitter storm.
Hash tags like #RahulRoars and the inevitable #RahulMeow were top trends.
Back from a 57-day sabbatical from God-knows-where, Rahul Gandhi put up a spirited performance in the Lok Sabha during a discussion on the farm crisis. For once, he looked much more relaxed than usual. Used comments like “suit-boot ki sarkaar” instead of his earlier failsafe “Jupiter’s escape velocity” to press his point. And though he couldn’t even ensure the total participation of the Congress’ 44 MPs, he did pack in enough punch to make his point. That’s where the niceties ended.
Between 2012 and 2014, Rahul Gandhi had tried his hand at playing the poor man’s soldier. In Odhisha, he famously described himself as the “sipahi of adivasis”. At a CII summit in 2012, he tried to position himself as a pragmatic politician who knew how to look after both the needs of the corporate sector as well as the farmers.
In the heat and dust of Battleground 2014, he took a jibe at Modi’s Gujarat model of development, dubbing it a “toffee model”. His argument even then had been that, Mr Modi was in cahoots with the big corporates. He is out to acquire land from poor farmers for big corporates, the young Gandhi scion declared. The result of all that verbal lambasting? His party was handed its worst ever drubbing.
Truth is, the UPA too was trying its best to bring in a Land Acquisition Bill. There were sections of the government keen to bring in a bill which, in effect, would actually have been a copy of what the NDA has already come out with. But it was Rahul who wouldn’t have any of it. So is Rahul Gandhi essentially carrying on from where he left off in 2014? Or has something changed at ground zero?
For starters, there’s the approach of Mr Modi. It’s time that the PM’s minders did something to ensure that industrialist Gautam Adani doesn’t fly to the same destinations as the PM. It’s precisely this kind of public imagery which is being used by the Congress to suggest that the NDA government is a government only of the rich.
The truth of the matter is, a large percentage of farmers don’t want their children to be dependent on farming as a means of living. In his ‘mann ki baat’ address, Prime Minister Modi touched upon this very subject. There might be farmers who are willing to sell their land at four times the market price and get a whole host of other benefits associated with it – including the right to reclaim land, declared the PM. Yet Mr Modi has quickly made the transition, in the words of his chastisers, from a “chaiwala PM” to the “rich man’s PM”. Rahul Gandhi meanwhile seems to going out on a limb and a half-trying to appropriate the “poor man’s leader” position.
While Rahul is right when he says that the foundation of India is its farmers, I get the feeling that he is almost positioning himself as a left-inclined politician. Coincidentally, a senior leader I was speaking to in Parliament did suggest that with Sitaram Yechury at the helm of the CPM, the Congress and the CPM may both have a lot in common than earlier believed. I personally don’t think that if Mr Yechury had been speaking in Parliament on the subject, his views would have been any different than those of Rahul’s. And that’s where the problem exists for Mr Gandhi. The reason why Mr Modi won 2014 was largely because of his pull factor amongst the middle classes. It’s this class which got exasperated with the Congress shenanigans. It’s this class which wants to ride the corporate gravy train. It’s this class which may not be willing to buy the arguments of Rahul Gandhi in the manner in which he has made them.
So while his colleagues may have been over the moon to see his aggressive side, the reality is still quite different. He’s made a good beginning; here’s hoping that it doesn’t turn out to be a stop-gap arrangement before another sabbatical.
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