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Business News/ Opinion / Online Views/  Rahul Gandhi’s misguided revolt
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Rahul Gandhi’s misguided revolt

Rahul Gandhi’s interventions suggest a pattern: silence on pressing issues

Illustration by Shyamal Banerjee/Mint (Illustration by Shyamal Banerjee/Mint)Premium
Illustration by Shyamal Banerjee/Mint
(Illustration by Shyamal Banerjee/Mint)

It was a statement Mao Zedong would have approved. Undermining one’s government in the name of the party was considered a great virtue by that believer of “continuous revolution". On Friday, Rahul Gandhi, the Congress party’s vice-president, publicly came close to that when he declared that an ordinance that permits convicted legislators to retain their seats should be torn up. The statement was made when Prime Minister Manmohan Singh was not in India.

On Friday, Ajay Maken, another congressman, was busy defending the ordinance to journalists in New Delhi when Gandhi made an unscheduled appearance. In a span of minutes, he not only demolished the rationale for the ordinance but pretty much undermined the Singh government.

The common sense idea of how governments work in democracies is simple. The party with the maximum number of seats in Parliament forms the government on its own or in partnership with other parties as a coalition. The imprint of the party’s politics is visible in the government’s policies. But equally, friction between the two is also a fact of life. This is for the simple reason that party and government are two different organizations and unless the two are identical, some differences are but natural. It is only in a one-party dictatorship that such differences are obliterated.

The United Progressive Alliance (UPA) is, of course, no such thing. It has a number of coordination devices for ensuring the government does not deviate from the party’s programmes beyond a point. There is a core group headed by the party chief Sonia Gandhi and the Prime Minister is a member of the group. Then, there are inter-party committees to keep coalition partners informed about government decisions. That is not all; Parliament is another forum where ministers and legislators of the party interact regularly. Rahul Gandhi is privy to deliberations and can, by no stretch, be considered uninformed on these matters.

Thus, what transpired on Friday was not the outburst of a party leader kept out of the decision-making or decision-informing loop of the government. It was a case of a leader undermining, willfully or otherwise, the government led by his party. There is no need to delve into his motives; it is the consequences of his actions that merit attention.

For one, this intemperate outburst took place when the Prime Minister was on foreign soil. He had two key, and difficult, appointments ahead. The first was a meeting with US President Barack Obama. The US has exerted sustained pressure on India to relent on some key safety clauses in the nuclear safety and accident compensation law. As the architect of the nuclear deal with the US, the Prime Minister is in the line of political fire on the issue. The other meeting was with Pakistan’s new Prime Minister, Nawaz Sharif. If only for these reasons, the younger Gandhi should have been circumspect. His inability to appreciate this demonstrates his lack of understanding of statecraft. This is unlikely to go down well with rational citizens, even those who are strident critics of the current Prime Minister.

For another, the nature and timing of his interventions is suspect and these do not serve him politically. These are key attributes for success that any leader, leave alone one with such ambitions as Gandhi, must possess. Gandhi chooses to intervene in a dramatic fashion on matters that do not animate most Indians. His raising the issue of alleged large-scale atrocities in Bhatta-Parsaul village in western Uttar Pradesh—something that turned out to be a much more modest issue; and staying in Dalit households, eating with them while not being able to make a substantive difference are examples of this dramatic preference.

In the instant case, if he were indeed concerned about criminalization of politics and the negative effect of this ordinance, there were three separate occasions when he could have intervened meaningfully. The first time was when the apex court delivered an order outlawing section 8(4) of the Representation of the People Act, 1951 that permitted convicted legislators to hoodwink the system. The second occasion was when the government filed a review petition in the Supreme Court and finally, the third chance was when the Bill to restore the original position on section 8(4) of the RP Act was introduced in the Rajya Sabha. He chose to remain silent on each occasion.

There is a pattern: Gandhi remains silent on pressing issues of the day. To wit: the 2G spectrum controversy and the Commonwealth Games fiasco led by his partyman Suresh Kalmadi. The list is long. And probably he would have remained silent on the ordinance issue as well.

But then the pressure on him from his partymen to “take charge" is immense. There is virtual panic in the Congress about aggressive moves by the Bharatiya Janata Party. Whether there is cause for panic is another matter. Panic-stricken, short-sighted statements are certainly not the response this hope of his party should be indulging in.

Will Rahul Gandhi’s intervention prevent criminalization of Indian politics? Tell us at views@livemint.com

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Published: 29 Sep 2013, 06:54 PM IST
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