Opinion Looking into the void
When you do that, does Rahul Gandhi also look into you?
Minus the speeding motorcycles, the return of Rahul Gandhi has elicited the sort of media frenzy which used to attend the movements of Princess Diana. However, this is one of the very few things that are clearly not his fault, and perhaps we should respect the Congress party’s request not to speculate on his whereabouts. But a vast gulf of possibilities yawns between should, could and would. And therefore, we must.
There is no such thing as bad publicity, and Gandhi’s absences have brought more mileage to the Congress than his feats. The prince of escape artists debuted at Manmohan Singh’s farewell dinner by the extraordinary stratagem of not being there. His latest act was a sudden sabbatical coinciding with the budget session of Parliament, when he was expected to lead the Congress fightback against crucial legislation moved by the BJP.
Absence makes the heart grow fonder, and there are now more Rahul Gandhi jokes on the internet than the combined corpus of Chuck Norris and Rajinikanth humour. The void disturbs and provokes. In the remote past, it raised questions that led to the finest pursuits of civilisation: religion, ethics, philosophy, physics, mathematics. Now, the standard of discourse has fallen. When we look into the void, we see Rahul Gandhi.
We also see his dogs blurred by window glass. We learn of his mother and sister visiting his home well before his arrival, and wonder if they were there to air the linen. We discover that he arrived on a flight from Thailand. Or was it Vietnam? We learn that for 57 days, he travelled incognito, without bodyguards. Who was he with, then, Gumnami Baba? And, confronted by so many extraordinary questions, the Congress wants us to be incurious? A most curious expectation.
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