Opinion Express View on Rahul Gandhi in Parliament: Dil se, dimaag se

When Rahul Gandhi stood up to speak in Lok Sabha during the no-confidence motion his party has moved against the government, he was armed with a sense of vindication. And he had an opportunity. Gandhi has just been re-instated as MP after being disqualified in March on account of a Surat court’s questionable conviction of him in a 2019 case of defamation — the Supreme Court stayed the conviction last week, after asking hard questions of the trial court, which had not given reasons for awarding Gandhi the maximum sentence, and of the high court, which had rejected his application to stay the conviction. Having made a comeback to the House, Gandhi was now going to lead his party’s charge and ask questions of the government — this government, arguably more than other governments, evades answerability and this has been especially evident in Parliament on Manipur, where the crisis goes on, the ethnic violence has not died down. Gandhi, moreover, has been to Manipur, and has seen and heard, first hand, its distress and tribulations. In the event, in Lok Sabha on Wednesday, when Gandhi sat down after an intervention that lasted for nearly 40 minutes, there was a strong sense that an important opportunity had been missed.

Gandhi began by recounting his experience of his 130-day Bharat Jodo Yatra. It taught him, he said, to listen to the aam aadmi. “Bharat ek aawaaz hai (India is a voice)”, he said, evocatively, and to listen, you have to set aside your arrogance or “ahankaar”, and “nafrat” or hate. Then he came to Manipur, and recalled his visit to the relief camps in that state. At this point, those listening to him expected Gandhi to carefully find the words and images to communicate the enormity and detail of the crisis in the north-eastern state and to help frame the sharp and pointed questions that the government must be pinned down and made to answer. Because the search for justice and accountability in Manipur demands nothing less from the Opposition leader. Especially one whose refrain is the need to listen and how it can be part of the process of healing. Disappointingly, what they heard and what they watched, instead, was Gandhi spiralling, precipitously, into a plague-on-all-your-houses name-calling. Gandhi’s accusations of political abdication could, at best, be described as plain anguish. In their sheer undifferentiatedness and un-specificness, they were, in fact, self-indulgent and opaque. In the context of Manipur, they amounted to a moment lost by the Opposition, which is also an abdication.

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In the first part of his speech, Gandhi had said that he would speak “Dimaag se nahin, dil se…” not with the head, but from the heart. It had seemed, then, to be a promise – of plainspeaking, saying it like it is. What better example than Manipur to use the Bharat Jodo prism to help shine light on the failure of the government. But, as it turns out, it was almost as if Gandhi knew he was going to let himself and his side down. It seems he had started his speech with a confession.