Rahul Gandhi has ascribed to himself a new mission. And it’s a grandiose one. As if safeguarding the Constitution wasn’t ambitious enough, the Congress scion now claims he’s “fighting” the “Indian State itself“. We’ll never know if he intended to make an ebullient declaration of hostilities, but it certainly came out that way.
Addressing scores of fawning Congress party leaders while inaugurating a spanking new party headquarters for the ages, the Congress general secretary said, “If you believe that we are fighting a political organisation called the BJP or RSS, you have not understood what is going on. The BJP and the RSS have captured every single institution of our country. We are now fighting the BJP, the RSS, and the Indian State itself.”
Conflating the Modi government with the Indian State betrays a profound lack of familiarity with the architecture of India’s polity. This is inexcusable, especially when one considers that Rahul Gandhi is the Leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha. And even if Rahul Gandhi genuinely meant to say that he and his party need to prepare themselves to fight the capture of the State by the BJP-led NDA and the RSS, then he could have phrased his remarks along the lines that “We are now fighting the BJP and the RSS takeover of the Indian State itself”.
Anyway, Rahul Gandhi’s clumsy conflation of the Modi government with the Indian State has triggered a bitter war of words. The BJP has attacked Rahul Gandhi for quoting out of the “Urban Naxal” playbook. The term “Urban Naxal” is a euphemism for a section of so-called activists who support ultra-left-wing insurgencies against the Indian State.
Even if for a moment one were to give Rahul the benefit of the doubt and acknowledge that he might have made a clumsy syntax-related error, there’s no explanation for why the Congress party would name its new headquarters after Indira Gandhi.
After all, the only time in Indian history when the Indian state was “captured”, in a manner of speaking, was under Indira Gandhi’s tenure as Prime Minister. And we’re going back almost five decades, when in 1975, Mrs Gandhi imposed Emergency upon the country by suspending the Constitution. In one stroke, the Indira administration virtually seized every conceivable lever of the State’s machinery.
If Rahul Gandhi and other Congress party notables are so very concerned about upholding the salience of the Indian State, wouldn’t they have thought twice before naming the new head office after the former Prime Minister who laid siege to it for 21 long months?
