Listening to Rahul Gandhi during his speeches and conversations in India is often a comical relief. The same cannot be said when he is out of the country. From being the funny man of Indian politics, often uncharitably called “Pappu” by his politico-ideological opponents, he suddenly becomes out and out dangerous.
Rahul’s “funny man” mask falls this time again when he is in the United States. He has emerged as a prophet of doom, of terrifying prospects for India. Being out of power for nine straight years, and with 2024 not looking good either, he seems to have gathered a coalition of not just anti-BJP parties and institutions but of anti-India outfits. His ‘allies’ aren’t just the ones looking to uproot the BJP but are antithetical to the very idea of India and are bent on derailing the India Story.
Now, that’s a Faustian bargain. Once committed, it cannot be undone without violent, malevolent repercussions. Rahul’s grandmother, Mrs Indira Gandhi, allowed the militancy in Punjab to fester by initially appeasing the Bhindranwale and Co., but once the Khalistani genie was out of the Punjab bottle, it couldn’t be pushed back before destroying a whole generation of Punjabis — and consuming the life of Mrs Gandhi herself on 31 October 1984. His father, Rajiv Gandhi, too committed a similar faux pas with the Velupillai Prabhakaran-led Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, which too ended disastrously with the assassination of the former Prime Minister in Sriperumbudur, Tamil Nadu, on 21 May 1991.
The main architect of Rahul Gandhi’s foreign visits and interactions has been Satyanarayan Gangaram Pitroda, popularly known as Sam Pitroda. Head of the AICC’s Overseas chapters, Pitroda, a US-based engineer-turned-policymaker, was Rajiv Gandhi’s go-to person on India’s modernisation/computerisation programme in the 1980s. One can sense Pitroda’s deep sense of loyalty and gratitude for the Nehru-Gandhi family while reading his memoirs, Dreaming Big: My Journey to Connect India, wherein he writes how he and his wife, Anu, met Rajiv Gandhi in 1985 when the Indian prime minister was on a US visit. During the meeting, Rajiv reportedly told Pitroda’s wife: “Anu, I know Sam wants to come to India. I want you to make sure the children’s admission to school is taken care of. It’s very important, and Sam may not understand these things in Delhi. Let me know. It’s essential to get them into the right school.”
Rajiv had invested wisely in the Pitroda relationship, which is still paying dividends for his family. And as the recent Rahul visits to the UK and the US suggest, Pitroda retains the former AICC chief’s trust.
There is no doubting Pitroda’s resourcefulness, especially in the West. But this time, for Rahul Gandhi’s events in the US, he has enlisted the support of archetypally dubious anti-India elements — from Islamists and Khalistanis to neo-Ambadkrites and Dravidian fanatics, all pushing for India’s balkanisation of differing shapes and sizes. Being an old hand in the West, Pitroda — and by extension, Rahul Gandhi — is expected to know the DNA of these outfits. This manifests the growing desperation in the Congress party. Maybe, the current generation of the Congress leadership, like Mrs Indira Gandhi and his son, Rajiv, believes these disparate, dangerous genies can be used and then put back in the bottle!
Though Rahul Gandhi’s “Muslim League is secular” comment has received a lot of brickbats, it shouldn’t surprise given that the Congress has been in alliance with the Kerala-based Indian Union Muslim League (IUML) for decades now. How else can the GoP in alliance with the IUML if the latter weren’t a secular entity? It doesn’t matter if the leaders of the IUML, before Independence, had overwhelmingly worked for Jinnah’s Muslim League and its Partition plan. In the Congress’s ‘minority-first’ notion of secularism, to actively participate in the creation of an Islamist Pakistan and then to stay back in secular India to continue the battle for ‘Ghazwa-e-Hind’, can be qualified as a heightened sense of nationalism, patriotism! As one Muslim leader mockingly told VS Naipaul, they unequivocally fought for Partition and then refused to leave the country. Now, that’s called having the cake and eating it too.
It’s, however, Rahul Gandhi’s growing propensity to use the typical Soros-ian toolkit terms — “democracy is in danger”, “press freedom is sliding”, “minorities are selectively targeted”, “democratic institutions are compromised”, et al — that should be a cause of big concern. In his endeavour to speak what the West wants to hear, he has blurred the distinction between the government and the state. When the “funny man” Rahul questions India’s democratic credentials in the West, he instantly becomes dangerous. He seems to suggest that India is too enfeebled to self-correct itself and would need Western “assistance”. His sense of desperation gets the better of him when he even defends an Indian “journalist” arrested by the CBI for sharing sensitive defence information with foreign intelligence agencies. He calls it “an assault on press freedom!”
What Rahul Gandhi and his team don’t care to understand is that by discrediting India and its democracy, they have actually reduced themselves to being a pawn in the larger anti-India game being played in the West. The trick is, as David Horowitz and Richard Poe explain in their seminal book, The Shadow Party, “to exert pressure for radical change from two directions simultaneously — from the upper levels of government and from provocateurs in the streets”. Through Rahul, these powerful Soros-ian forces are discrediting India from the top, and with the toolkit-oriented protests (Shaheen Bagh, farmers’, wrestlers’, etc), India is being squeezed from the bottom.
“The majority of the people would have no idea what was going on. Squeezed from ‘above’ and ‘below’, most would sink into apathy and despair, believing they were hopelessly outnumbered by the radicals — even though they were not. Thus could a radical minority impose its will on a moderate majority, even under a democratic, parliamentary system,” add Horowitz and Poe.
However, the biggest threat that Rahul Gandhi poses today is to the India Story, through his extreme Left tilt. He wants to rewind the clock to pre-1991 India, excessively focusing on the redistribution of wealth when the fact is that India lost its first 50 years precisely doing the same thing. It focused exclusively on wealth redistribution while failing to create it in the first place. Here a Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel anecdote that the late Nani Palkhivala mentioned in his book We, The Nation, comes to mind. It so happened that a group of socialists approached Sardar Patel and advocated the distribution of wealth among the poor. Patel listened to them patiently but when he could bear anymore, he told them to take his wealth and redistribute among the poor but leave the nation for good!
Just the way his assault on India’s democratic credentials gets Western legitimacy, Rahul’s extreme Leftism too suits the American-European interest. At a time when India is the world’s fastest growing economy, with the IMF identifying it as a “bright spot” in the world economy, there’s a powerful lobby led by billionaire George Soros that wants to derail this India Story. The West just can’t let India propel out of its ambit into an orbit of its own. With China already out of bounds, this is the last thing the West would want: To let India become too big to become absolutely autonomous, to sort its own problem. This way the global power centre would decisively shift Eastward.
The Soros-ian West looks at Rahul Gandhi as a pawn to checkmate not just the Modi government but India as well. It’s for the Congress leader to decide if he wants to fall into this dubious, dangerous trap. For, he may gain power but lose the nation. But most likely, he may still lose both power and the nation, as his speeches in the US may get applause in the West but have a negative chain reaction in India. What’s bad for the nation cannot be good politics either.
The author is Opinion Editor, Firstpost and News18. He tweets from @Utpal_Kumar1. Views expressed are personal.
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