MILLIONS of Indians evidently see Rahul Gandhi as their candidate to steer the country out of its deep mess driven by hate-filled divisive politics and a K-shaped economic trajectory plying unprecedented inequality.
That seemed to be the unspoken sentiment, if not consensus, at the massive Sunday rally of opposition parties in Delhi against vote theft.
The issue has brought out angry youth on the streets.
Rigging of polls betrays, however, an inability to secure popular support through clean elections, which is a blessing.
India is not alone in subverting democracy.
Narendra Modi’s ride-or-die friendship with Benjamin Netanyahu reveals a shared scorn for secular democracy and minority rights.
Netanyahu hopes to disenfranchise Palestinian MPs (strategically called Arabs by a clever political fiat) even as they mock him in turn by holding the balance of power, principally against him, after last week’s elections.
Likewise with Modi, whose controversial victories in Bihar and West Bengal recently benefited enormously as his handpicked election commission disenfranchised millions of Muslim voters and other potential opponents of the regime.
Netanyahu rewarded Modi’s friendship by giving his government the Pegasus spyware among other contraptions to undermine democracy.
One would readily go along with the view that Gandhi makes for a great candidate to don the mantle of prime minister and also restore its prestige.
He has displayed the drive to nurse Indian democracy back to health.
But is he as equipped as, say, streetfighters like Priyank Kharge or M.K.
Stalin or Akhilesh Yadav to deal frontally with the push which will inevitably arrive in the process of dismantling entrenched fascism? That Sonia Gandhi and both her children — Rahul as the leader of the opposition in the Lok Sabha, Priyanka Gandhi as an outspoken and gritty parliamentarian — called out Israel’s genocide in Gaza, while major parties other than the left looked away is cause to celebrate the family — and also something to worry about as it puts them in the crosshairs of many a foreign and domestic interloper.
The fact that the RSS chief hosted an Israeli diplomat as chief guest at the Hindutva body’s annual day on Dussehra is troubling.
Has anyone bothered to ask Rahul Gandhi if he was himself interested in the job that so many appear keen to award him? A pivotal question needs to be flagged here about widespread faux expertise over a future prime minister from the opposition.
Has anyone bothered to ask Rahul Gandhi if he was himself interested in the job that so many appear keen to award him? A fair guess based on history and Nehru-Gandhi genealogy is that Rahul Gandhi harbours no such ambitions.
We could perhaps glean the truth of this hunch from Sonia Gandhi’s soon-to-be released memoirs.
The BJP routinely accuses Jawaharlal Nehru....
