Rahul Gandhi, may the farce be with you

This is all Narendra Modi’s doing. He has somehow come to define the ‘ideal politician’.

It is no small feat to successfully turn real life into a sitcom. But it is the stuff of our daily newstainment channels.

An English news channel did just that yesterday when it aired a prime time show on how Rahul Gandhi went to watch Star Wars.

6 hours after Gujarat loss, Rahul Gandhi was watching ‘Star Wars’ at a cinema hall in Delhi. #AreYouSeriousRahul Watch @thenewshour with @navikakumar pic.twitter.com/LriW6Fefe4

— TIMES NOW (@TimesNow) December 19, 2017

The channel also ran a hashtag along with the angry debate: #AreYouSeriousRahul. Lest the viewer dismiss it as baseless outrage, the channel presented some ‘hard facts’:

Hard Facts: 19:00 PM Modi conducted post-mortem on Gujarat election results; at 19:40, Rahul Gandhi watched Star Wars at a cinema hall #AreYouSeriousRahul.

Hard Facts: 19:00 PM Modi conducted post-mortem on Gujarat election results; at 19:40, Rahul Gandhi watched Star Wars at a cinema hall #AreYouSeriousRahul

— TIMES NOW (@TimesNow) December 19, 2017

Senior BJP spokesperson G. V. L. Narsimha Rao, provided some useful details to ‘movie-shame’ Rahul Gandhi: “PM Modi works 19 hours a day and does not take a holiday. When elections are not there, he is focused on his job. He thinks about every issue– how to make a change, how to bring about reform.”

So nice of G. V. L. N. Rao to point out that our PM does the job of a PM only when elections are not happening. It’s becoming quite obvious, thanks.

In all of this, there was a new political lakshman rekha that was being drawn for citizens: “Serious politicians shouldn’t go do leisurely activities like watching movies.”

The bizarre notions about what our politicians should do with their downtime has actually been trending for more than 8 hours since last night.

This is all Modi’s doing, of course. No, really. Modi has not just created a benchmark for leadership but also political branding. He has somehow come to define the ‘ideal politician’ (‘adarsh neta’). Any deviation from that model leads to an immediate interweb-driven backlash.

There were immediate comparisons with Arvind Kejriwal too, who also went to watch a movie right after ending an election campaign in Delhi. Back then, Kejriwal even had the courage to tweet out his opinions about the movies he watched. He faced a backlash too for watching movies and not working.

A contrast is offered: how Modi, a non-stop, no-nonsense, barely-sleeping demigod does no such thing. He does not watch movies, does not believe in entertainment, does nothing except ‘work for the nation’.

Stories are important for creating the image of a politician in a voter’s mind. Stories repeated by random hardcore supporters, and then reinforced by Whatsapp messages, create a brand for a politician. Modi does yoga early in the morning, he works 19 hours a day, does not holiday, and eats mushrooms from Himachal Pradesh to stay healthy. All of this creates a nice aura around him and projects him as someone every man should aspire for. Add to that the fact that he has shunned all desire to have a family, something that is considered a virtue for some bizarre reason.

Rahul Gandhi, on the other hand, is a young dynast who has been brought up in a giant intimate family. His supporters have also made their own little efforts to spread stories of personal virtue, of course. Little stories emerged out of nowhere recently in the media about Rahul helping Nirbhaya’s family, and of possessing a black belt in a Japanese martial art form called Aikido. All of this is underscored by the fact that he doesn’t desire to have a wife and children of his own.

The same wife-less halo surrounds UP chief minister Yogi Adityanath.

So, when the kurta-jeans wearing, exotic dog feeding, janeau-dhari Brahmin Rahul Gandhi goes to watch a movie (that too a Hollywood movie OMG!) on the day when Gujarat assembly election results came out, some people saw an opportunity to turn it into a gladiatorial match of conflated stories of epic proportions. The drama also possibly acted as a nice little distraction from the fact that BJP lost 16 seats in Gujarat this elections. Alarm bells must be ringing somewhere really loudly at the moment. Just in case Rahul’s public image gets inflated, post-Gujarat.

Instead of creepily stalking Rahul Gandhi (and turning viewers into intolerant voyeurs), a more relevant and meaningful debate would have been how the Congress party led by a new president is disrupting Lok Sabha, refusing to participate in bill discussions.

Isn’t the dawn of Rahul Gandhi supposed to mark a new era?

I have been reading and hearing about how the Congress is reinventing itself now that they have a new ‘youthful’ president. Just one look at Lok Sabha TV tells you that they’re pretty much the same. Perhaps holding the Congress accountable for not allowing the House to function, that too in a situation where the current government has established a precedent by having the lowest Parliament sittings ever, would be a better idea.

Does our hard-working Prime Minister watch movies? Never?

I would like to end with just one line here: “May the Force be with you.”

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi walked off stage to Darth Vader’s Imperial March from Star Wars https://t.co/2QwnyJ0Hhn pic.twitter.com/AUDr2HgaD5

— i newspaper (@theipaper) July 3, 2017

Meghnad S is a political analyst and a Parliament nerd. After working with MPs across party lines for the past six years, he now hosts a webseries titled ‘Consti-tuition’, which breaks down parliament in a fun, relatable way.