Opinion Out of My Mind: Educating Rahul Gandhi on leadership
The suspension of 25 Congress MPs raises only one question. Why not all 44?
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The sight of Rahul Gandhi telling MPs to place their placards so that the cameras can catch them better raises the question whether all this hungama is being staged as part of Rahul’s learning to be a leader.
The suspension of 25 Congress MPs raises only one question. Why not all 44?
Persistent misbehaviour in the chamber, orchestrated and encouraged by the leadership, can hardly be condoned. The sight of Rahul Gandhi telling MPs to place their placards so that the cameras can catch them better raises the question whether all this hungama is being staged as part of Rahul’s learning to be a leader. He was hardly a presence in the previous two Parliaments. He spoke only occasionally and then only to report on where he had just spent the night in the moffusil. He was surprised by the experience as he had spent most of his life abroad. To the rest of us, the idea of people living in a hut without a roof or a secure livelihood would hardly be a surprise. That after all was the fruit of Congress Raj.
Exhaustion has set in and the BJP may concede that the Land Bill needs amendments. That may be described as a reward by the Opposition for its destructive behaviour. Yet the same outcome could have been achieved nine months ago when the Bill was first moved by introducing a constructive amendment, debating it and persuading enough MPs to support it. Other parliaments manage to amend legislation without a noisy paralysis for months on end. Why not India?
Of course there is a reason. Parliament is not a place where you legislate or debate important issues. It is a place for the Opposition to vent frustrations about its impotence. When the BJP/NDA lost in 2004, the leadership was beside itself with anger and incomprehension. Not only had the voters rejected India Shining but they had handed over the reins of power to Sonia Gandhi, a foreigner much loathed by the BJP. Public suicides and head shavings (a gesture of being widowed) were threatened if Sonia Gandhi became prime minister.
Such exemplary democratic behaviour was frustrated by Sonia Gandhi stepping aside. This only doubled the anger and so the BJP under Advani’s leadership spent much of the next two Parliaments venting their frustration at not being rewarded with power. This innovation in destructive parliamentary behaviour was not lost when the BJP won power. The Congress decided to adopt it.
The Congress is even more uncomprehending that after all the sacrifices that many generations of Nehru-Gandhis have made for the nation, the people had the temerity to reject it and that too in the most comprehensively humiliating way possible. Yet the worse was that the BJP had won under the leadership of one man who by all the tenets of the Nehruvian idea of India should have not been there at all. A ‘maut ka saudagar’ who had been derided by all the media hitherto enjoying the patronage of the Congress somehow won by a decisive margin.
What is worse is that the nation was about to be gifted the next generation leader of the Dynasty who had bravely accepted the poisoned chalice his mother had tearfully offered. If only the electorate had behaved itself, Rahul Gandhi could have trained himself for the job which was his, as his father did, by being chosen prime minister.
This blow has been too much for the Congress to bear. It is as if this is a nightmare from which it and the nation has to awaken to know that all is well and the Congress is in power. But the harsh reality is otherwise. Rahul Gandhi will have to acquire his leadership training not in office but in opposition in a Parliament which he never much liked attending.
Nor does he now. Hence every session has to be short enough to be tolerable and adjourned well before lunch. There are better things to do.
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