Example politics

Rahul Gandhi has been put on the mat for his ill-advised statements that police action against those protesting land acquisition in Greater Noida was accompanied by several unreported fatalities and rapes. It seems to be difficult to find victims or relatives of victims willing to back up Gandhis claim. The question must then be asked: is it not irresponsible for a senior public figure,an MP who stands high in the Congress hierarchy,to bring into the public domain claims about atrocities which he is unable to back up?

He speaks too rarely on issues on which Indias politics needs to take a call so,the occasions when he does acquire a certain weight. Unfortunately,he has chosen to go about his engagement with voters by parachuting himself into the middle of one fraught problem after another. Thus,when he speaks,as in Niyamgiri after the decision to halt the Vedanta project,or as he did now,he is looking less for a way forward,and more for words to address a polarising situation. And this problem has been intensified,in this case,by the Congresss attempts to turn UP politics into an either-or,zero-sum game with the incumbent BSP government. What Gandhi seems to have ignored is that politics is about more than examples. It is about issues the word we use to detach the specific from the general,the word we use to ensure that a certain dispassionate analysis intended to help citizens at large will be employed. When,instead of engaging with the issues in this case,with the problems and possibilities of using agricultural land for infrastructure and urban expansion only the most noticeable,fraught examples are dealt with and addressed,our politics begins to warp.

In the end,the problem remains that Gandhi,like the Congress president,and some others in the Congress party,speaks too often to these issues as an insider-outsider. The politics of interaction is for them; the politics of issues is for other people. It is the Congresss own government that has continued to sit on the land acquisition bill; it is the party that has consistently failed to make a political case for the changes it will bring. When examples are sought and blown out of proportion,more than just reputations will suffer. So will the depth and thoughtfulness of our politics.