Rahul Gandhi is a f-ing disgrace.” These are the words of a midlevel American diplomat who expended considerable time and effort explaining to colleagues and bureaucrats that the votaries of Khalistan operating in North America were not kind-hearted activists. They were more like the champions of the Confederacy in the American Civil War. Having lobbied for India, the diplomat, a great admirer of Indian pluralism, was aghast at the sight of Rahul Gandhi legitimising the lies of the separatists by claiming, on his American tour, that there is an existential threat to Sikhs in India. Conditions for Sikhs are so dire apparently that they cannot be seen in public wearing the sacred symbols of their faith.
There is a pattern here. His grandmother and uncle patronised an illiterate cleric who nearly destroyed Punjab. His father presided over a pogrom of Sikhs in Delhi. And now Rahul Gandhi has micturated on the sacrifices of two generations of Sikhs who stood by their country against murderous separatists and a homicidal state run by his father. As Rahul Gandhi was prating glibly in an auditorium in Washington, DC, tens of thousands of Sikhs in uniform were patrolling the borders of India. What were they defending? A country in which they are about to become extinct?
Nobody who lives in India could detect even a hint of truth in what Rahul Gandhi said about the state of its Sikh citizens. But within hours of his performance, he was being feted as a promoter of the Khalistan cause by Gurpatwant Pannun, a designated terrorist, and extolled by Sikh supremacist thugs whose comrades in the cause of fragmenting India murdered thousands of Sikh and non-Sikh civilians.
“Why did he do it?” the diplomat asked incredulously.
There are two possible reasons.
The charitable answer is that he was attempting clumsily to atone for the Sikh blood drained by his grandmother and father. But in doing so he was aiding the advocates of Khalistan—mortal enemies of the overwhelming majority of Sikhs, who reject the project to erect a procrustean Sikh-supremacist state in Punjab.
It is a measure of Rahul Gandhi’s conceit—and of his reflexive contempt for his compatriots—that he believes that a country as various and immense as India can be subordinated to the psychodynamics of his family. If Rahul Gandhi feels bad about what his grandmother and father did, there are other ways for him to perform penance that will honour rather than denigrate Indian Sikhs.
He can volunteer at a Sikh temple, he can apologise for his family’s deeds, he can discard his family’s tainted name, he can relinquish the unearned privileges that have accrued to him by the accident of birth. And if he still feels dissatisfied, he can follow the example of Ivan the Terrible and pray for the innocent souls of the departed, or he can emulate Oedipus and blind himself and disappear from public life.
The second reason why Rahul Gandhi did what he did is perhaps closer to the truth: he is a fool. This makes him particularly susceptible to the flattery of the unctuous courtiers who surround him. He is hopelessly in the grip of the delusion that he is the Siddhartha and Mahatma of our times—when, in truth, he is the embodiment of unearned entitlement, an intellectually destitute hereditary despot. That he is the leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha bespeaks the dilapidated state of our politics.
Rahul Gandhi: The most self-unaware
No politician in India—not even Narendra Modi—is more self-unaware than Rahul Gandhi. His prelection on the endangered status of Indian Sikhs was accompanied by the claim that the BJP would not have won as many seats as it did had the general elections been fair and democratic.
Anyone who takes this counterfactual seriously will have to consider another counterfactual: would the BJP have retained power in any form had Congress been allowed to practise fair elections and democracy? The Gandhi family’s paramountcy in India’s oldest political party is made possible by the most total negation of democracy. And it is the depredations of this dynasty that polished the path on which Modi glided into high office.
Does it ever, I sometimes wonder, occur to this family—to the mother, the son, the daughter—that they are not defenders of democracy but the most offensive exemplars of autocracy? Do they ever think about the injuries they have inflicted on India by destroying internal democracy in the party that raised our republic? Do they feel shame? Are they capable of feeling shame? Do the debased minions and lickspittles and trolls who cheer them on, defend them, and abuse their critics—do they feel shame?
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Shashi Tharoor versus Rahul Gandhi
The Praetorian guard of sycophants and careerists that perpetuates the family’s proprietorship of the party has persecuted, driven out, and stamped upon able Congresspersons seen as a threat to the family and its dependants. Their most obvious victim of course is Shashi Tharoor.
I mention Tharoor because he was in the United States at the same time as Rahul Gandhi. Tharoor’s speeches and conversations, however, were of a different order—learned, droll, sophisticated, and insightful. Unlike Rahul Gandhi, Tharoor mounted a defence of democracy and pluralism that gave no quarter to ethnoreligious nationalists of any breed. If Tharoor is not occupying the office in which Rahul Gandhi currently squats, it is because the family and its lackeys thwarted him.
At home, Tharoor remains the most principled defender of Indian pluralism from the assaults of the Hindu nationalists. But, in his opposition to Modi, he has not permitted himself to become a tool of India’s adversaries. Tharoor has frequently decimated representatives of theocracies and tyrannies who have cited the ravages of the BJP government to discredit the Indian project in its entirety.
Tharoor is able to do this because he has the intelligence to recognise that those who invoke Modi to disparage Indian unity are not enlightened humanists. They are benighted ethnoreligious nationalists pursuing their own autonomous ambition to replicate the Hindutva project, on a smaller scale and under a different banner, in some truncated corner of India.
Tharoor’s evisceration of India’s ill-wishers on foreign soil serves the effort to reclaim India from Modi because it demonstrates to voters back home that he and his party are not weak on national security. Rahul Gandhi, on the other hand, treats every foreign sojourn as an opportunity to fortify Modi’s grip on power by undermining the opposition to him.
There is a fiction taking hold in some quarters of India, especially in the talking shops of Delhi, that Indians is warming to Rahul Gandhi. I travelled through 13 states in the months leading up to this year’s general elections. Among the hundreds upon hundreds of voters who expressed to me their disenchantment with Modi, I did not meet a single Indian who claimed to be drawn to Rahul Gandhi. Many millions of voters did turn to Congress. But here is the indisputable truth: Rahul Gandhi led his party to a third successive defeat this year. If Modi is serving another term as prime minister, it is because the alternative before the electorate was Rahul Gandhi and his family-owned party.
Twelve weeks into his tenure as the leader of the Opposition, it is clear that he is unfit to hold any public office of responsibility. In the United States, Rahul Gandhi did more than demonstrate that he is Modi’s deus ex machina. He reminded us once again that he—and his family—are a plague on India.
Kapil Komireddi, the author of Malevolent Republic: A Short History of the New India, is currently working on a book on Dr Martin Luther King, Jr. Follow him on X and Telegram. Views are personal.
(Edited by Zoya Bhatti)