No Mr Aiyar, The Gandhi Family Is Not The Glue That Congress Needs To Stay Together

In a column in The Times of India on 21 July 2019, Swaminathan S Anklesaria Aiyar makes a pitch for Sonia Gandhi and her family, and posits that the family is the glue without which the Congress party will disintegrate. He then proceeds to compare former prime minister Indira Gandhi with Sonia Gandhi—apple and orange—and deviously employs election results post-Rajiv Gandhi to substantiate his argument. 

The highest tally of Lok Sabha seats that the Congress party achieved after the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi was 27 long years back, in 1991, when it won 244 seats. Since Sonia Gandhi was not even in the frame then, Aiyar dismisses that victory, saying “Congress failed to win outright”. In 1996, a Sonia Gandhi-less Congress won 140 seats, and Aiyar rightly says it lost.

Now compare this to the spin he gives to the performance of the party after Sonia Gandhi took charge of it, after allegedly locking the then Congress president Sitaram Kesri in a toilet. In the election that followed her throwing out of Kesri, Congress won 141 seats, just one more than it did under him, but Aiyar calls this score "respectable". Worse, he not only gives a complete miss to the much lower 1999 tally of 114 under Sonia Gandhi, but also goes on to assert that "she led the party to victory in 2004 and 2009".

In 2004, Sonia Gandhi won just five more seats than Kesri did in 1996. In 2009 she won only 206, and that too thanks to Dr Manmohan Singh and the rejection, by core voters, of a secularised Lal Krishna Advani, in an almost presidential-style election marked by a low turnout. However, as per Aiyar, while 1996 with 140 seats was a defeat, and in 1991 Congress "failed to win outright" with 244 seats, 2004 and 2009 were victories “which proved that Congress needed the family to win elections”.

The Congress suffered its most humiliating defeat ever in 2014, when it was reduced to an unbelievable 44 seats under the leadership of Sonia Gandhi and Rahul Gandhi. The rout was so overwhelming and debilitating that one would have expected a seasoned columnist like Aiyar to have dwelled on it, and the causes for it, at length. But, no, just as he skipped the 1999 elections when Congress won only 114 seats, he gives this unprecedented rout also a complete miss, because it too does not fit with the case he is trying to manufacture for the Gandhi family.

If all this was not enough, Aiyar makes a further mess of his argument by pinning blame on the downward spiral of the Congress party, both before and under Sonia Gandhi, on its dumping of Nehruvian secularism and aping of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). In fact, his only comment about the second consecutive rout of the party in 2019 is a disparaging one about the temple run of Rahul Gandhi in the run-up to the elections.

No wonder Aiyar is silent about why the ‘janeudhari’ Congress president lost in family bastion Amethi and, worse, why he chose to contest from a constituency where the communal and fundamentalist Indian Union Muslim League was needed to carry him to victory, and the majority was inconsequential. Why, even Sonia Gandhi would likely have lost from Rae Bareilly — despite non-BJP parties not putting up a candidate — had the BJP put up a strong candidate against her.

The rejection of the mother-son duo is that deep, across the country, but Aiyar cannot see it, or pretends not to.

Although she ruled India for 10 years and has been in the spotlight since the assassination of her husband Rajiv Gandhi in 1991, little is known about what and who Sonia Gandhi really is as a person, and what her beliefs and ideologies are, except that she is an Italian by birth and a Roman Catholic by baptism. The same mystery surrounds her son too.

But the one thing that they both openly share, and are most charged up about, is their intense dislike, bordering on hate, for the Hindu Right. Sonia Gandhi told journalist Vir Sanghvi as much just after the 2004 elections. A few days back, Rahul Gandhi too left no one in any doubt when, in his letter of resignation as Congress president, he stated that “every single living cell in my body resists BJP’s idea of India.”

Aiyar, once again, conveniently misses both these visceral disclosures, only because they bust his “aping BJP” fantasy.

It is true that Rajiv Gandhi and other Congress leaders made feeble attempts to assuage the feelings of the majority which felt short changed even in free India, and that too despite a bloody communal Partition. But after Sonia Gandhi seized control of the party, all that changed completely, as I suspect Aiyar knows but will not admit.

Over the years, an increasing number of Indians have come to believe that the ideological problem of Sonia Gandhi and Rahul Gandhi is not just with the Hindu Right, but with the Hindu majority itself, and that they identify only with Christian and Muslim minorities, who they consider their core vote bank. The task of bringing in the Hindu vote needed to make up the numbers to grab power has been outsourced by them to regional and caste-based parties, most of which see power as a means to maximise the personal wealth of their leaders, all means fair.

It is only the fear of losing the complete majority vote — own and of allies — that compels them to publicly attack the majority indirectly via the Hindu Right.

Remember, the target of the draconian Communal Violence Bill that both Sonia Gandhi and Rahul Gandhi pushed hard, despite strong opposition, is not the Hindu Right, but every single Hindu living in India. Similarly, every single Hindu is suffering the consequences of the 93rd Constitution Amendment, which Sonia Gandhi rammed through in 2004, even though she did not have the mandate to do so, as Congress won only 145 seats. Only Hindus have been disadvantaged by her sectarian Right to Education Act. And who can forget how Hindu terror was invented and the fact that Rahul Gandhi believes that radical Hindus are more dangerous for India than jihadi terrorists nurtured and unleashed by Pakistan?

In sum, it can be said that the Congress party did not flounder in 2019 because Rahul Gandhi tried to ape the BJP. On the contrary, it probably drove away a significant number of additional Hindu voters, who saw through the Hindu charade that Sonia Gandhi and her children were enacting to attract their votes. That is why they won a mere 23 seats in all of India outside Tamil Nadu and Kerala.

In the 21 years that Sonia Gandhi and Rahul Gandhi have been at the helm of the Congress party, they have not been able to win a single election for the party. If one must compare Sonia Gandhi with Indira Gandhi, as Aiyar does, it has to be on the scale of seats won by them in various elections.

Despite the Gandhi brand name and the large legacy vote that Sonia Gandhi inherited, the figures of 141, 116, 145, 206, 44 and 52, in the six elections that Congress has fought under the Sonia Gandhi family, show that the family has not been able to establish a connect with the people, and now stands totally rejected. Only Swaminathan Aiyar can see in this Gandhi family the winner that Indira Gandhi was, when it is clear that only a non-Gandhi leader can pull the Congress out of the Gandhi swamp.

In a column in this magazine on 8 July 2019, this writer had argued that the grand old party is in the agonising throes of death and desperately needs fresh non-Gandhi air, if it wants to survive. The ecosystem, however, continues to peddle the lie that the family is the glue that is keeping the party together, and not the gas chamber that is killing it. What do you think?

This was first published in Swarajya on 23rd July 2019

Can Someone Pull Congress Out Of The Gandhi Gas Chamber?

More than 10 years too late, Sonia Gandhi and Rahul Gandhi have finally been forced to look at the writing on the proverbial wall. The Congress president has formally taken responsibility for his failure to lift the grand old party, even marginally, above the shocking and humiliating bottom it hit in 2014, and resigned.

Unfortunately, not even a whiff of contrition or respect for the will and wisdom of the people emanates from Rahul Gandhi's resignation letter. Instead, it reeks of an undiminished sense of entitlement, hatred for the majority, fake love for Muslims and Dalits, and an almost missionary assertion that he will keep pushing the Congress party to strangle itself with his ‘Idea of India’.

It matters not to him that this so-called idea, alien to even his own father, has been so vehemently rejected by the people of India, that they have not only reduced his party to a once unthinkable 23 seats in all of India outside Tamil Nadu and Kerala, but also handed him a humiliating personal defeat in the family bastion of Amethi.

Sonia Gandhi too continues, overtly unfazed, as the chairperson of the United Progressive Alliance (UPA), and together the duo have evidently no intention of gracefully stepping aside and giving the Congress, gasping for fresh air, a chance to rise and reclaim its place as the premier national political party of India.

Although the duo ruled India for 10 long years, a closer examination of all the elections that they have been actively involved in, especially the two verdicts that gave and kept them in power, reveals that, despite their power surname, Sonia Gandhi and Rahul Gandhi have not won a single election for the Congress party, and should have quit in or before 2009.

In 2004, only eight seats separated the Congress (145) and Bharatiya Janata Party (137). That was a verdict against the government of Atal Bihari Vajpayee, and not, by any stretch of imagination, a vote for Sonia Gandhi. Between 2004 and 2009, even though no scam had yet come to light, neither she nor Rahul Gandhi was able to enthuse Indians to come out and vote them in again. On the contrary, they lost a string of states during this period — Uttar Pradesh, Gujarat, Karnataka, Punjab, Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Madhya Pradesh, Chhatisgarh and Jammu and Kashmir. Their victory in Delhi was due to Sheila Dikshit, and in Rajasthan, they won only 96 seats to BJP’s 78, despite the fact that the latter had 60 rebel candidates out of whom as many as 27 won.

Their 2009 ‘victory’, thus, not only came as a surprise to many, but it also led even BJP leaders to hastily conclude that their party was past its peak, and Sonia and Rahul Gandhi would rule India, unchallenged, for decades. In hindsight, it is evident that nothing could have been farther from the truth.

What should have been an easy victory for the BJP in 2009 turned into a big shock defeat for two main reasons.

One, Sonia Gandhi, sensing that there was no enthusiasm for her and Rahul Gandhi among the people, played a masterstroke by making Prime Minister Manmohan Singh — "Singh is King” — the face of the Congress party. Singh, who had a clean image, had caught the imagination of the people with the manner in which he pushed the nuclear deal; in that act of his, they saw in him a patriot who had stood up to Sonia Gandhi, to protect India’s national interest. That solitary display of spine and intent by the prime minister led the people to believe that India was safe in his trustworthy hands.

Two, just a year after the 2004 debacle, causes for which he evidently misread, Lal Krishna Advani went to Karachi and called Jinnah secular. With that one blunder, he lost forever the trust of many of BJP’s core voters and destroyed his political career. To make things worse, in 2008 he blundered by not only opposing Singh’s nuclear deal, but in also trying to bring down his government and installing Mulayam Singh Yadav as prime minister, in a clumsy and shady manner. That killed whatever little enthusiasm there still was among core and potential BJP voters, and they showed their anger by staying at home on voting day.

So when a crafty Sonia Gandhi surprised everyone by projecting Manmohan Singh, and not her own unpopular son, as the prime ministerial candidate, Advani, imagining that the mild Singh was no match to him, played right into her hands. He made the contest presidential, which effectively put Sonia and Rahul Gandhi out of the contest. The rest is history. In that direct battle of trust, people made Singh the king and knocked Advani out.

Unfortunately, everyone, docile Singh included, soon forgot that people had voted for the prime minister, and that the Gandhis were undeserving beneficiaries of the faith that people had reposed in Singh who, as it appeared then, had also got the economy roaring. Instead, even though the Congress won just 206 seats, the family ecosystem built an aura of invincibility around Sonia Gandhi and put her on a pedestal above all, and beyond any criticism by anyone, BJP leaders included.

It took five more years and Narendra Modi — not to forget social media that ‘routed’ embedded mainstream media in a parallel battle — to shatter that myth of invincibility. And it has taken another five years, and an even more humiliating defeat, to ram home the truth that Rahul Gandhi and his mother never could, and never will, win the trust of the people of India.

Perhaps, Rahul Gandhi too had sensed the mood of the people in the run up to 2019; that is why he allegedly struck a Faustian bargain with Indian Union Muslim League to enter India’s Parliament. Who would have imagined in 1947 that 72 years after a bloody, communal Partition, the president of the Congress party would be reduced to such communal beggary, in India?

Unfortunately, going by the cringe-worthy sycophancy displayed by senior Congress leaders, many much older, and all certainly wiser, than Rahul Gandhi, there is little hope that the Congress party will break free from the shackles of the Gandhis, despite the fact that they have not been able to win a single national election for the Congress since the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi in 1991.

After 18 years of failure and a disconnect with the people that is almost surreal, it is unbelievable that, in an arrogant display of sheer contempt for voters whose trust they never could win and have now irretrievably lost, they are still marketing themselves as the last and only hope for the Congress.

The grand old party is in the agonising throes of death. It is gasping for fresh air and not more of the family gas that is choking it.

The BJP faced a somewhat similar situation after its tally dropped to 116 in 2009. That party too had an entrenched cabal that did not want to give up its power and perch, party’s fate notwithstanding. Had its key leaders not made the inspired choice they did in 2013, it would probably have found itself staring at 44 seats in 2014 and irrelevance in 2019.

Captain Amarinder Singh, Jyotiradiya Scindia and Sachin Pilot, to name just three, are all capable of reviving the Congress. They can all do what Manmohan Singh did for the Congress in 2009, and more, sans the Gandhis. The family ecosystem never tires of praising them and the huge talent pool that they say the Congress has. But at this most critical moment in its history, it continues to peddle the lie that the Gandhis are the irreplaceable glue that is holding the 183-year-old party together.

Does the Congress have a Rajnath Singh who can pull the party out of the Gandhi gas chamber before it is too late, and oversee a smooth and complete transition of power?

First published in Swarajya https://swarajyamag.com/politics/will-the-congress-step-out-of-the-gandhi-gas-chamber

MODI: TURNING BLEATERS INTO BEATERS

“India has decided to uproot Congress,” thundered Narendra Modi at the recently concluded National Council Meeting of the Bharatiya Janata Party. And when he added -- to rapturous applause of BJP workers who had jampacked Talkatora Stadium to listen to him -- that “sweat and hardwork of BJP Karyakartas will ensure that this happens,” he re-ignited the flame that had forgotten itself and breathed life back into BJP’s drooping Lotus.

In that incandescent moment, Narendra Modi turned bleaters into beaters. In that power moment, many of the millions of Indians glued to the TV were transformed from despondent doubters to enthusiastic believers. In that electric moment, BJP’s baton finally went into the hand it had been gasping for.

Lal Krishna Advani, a veteran of 85 summers, epitomises almost everything that went right and then wrong with the BJP. While he can rightly claim credit for turning a once two-MP party into a party of beaters, he equally is responsible for turning it into a flock of bleaters, particularly after the BJP lost power in 2004.

What has been the constant wail of Advani and his key advisors/acolytes? The one thing that has troubled them – continues to – most is “political untouchability”, ostensibly due to BJP’s communal agenda, as defined by the party’s irreconcilable political foes, led by the Congress party which preaches secularism but practices nothing but naked communalism.

Advani, as he himself admitted during his valedictory address at the council meeting, suffers from a deep-rooted inferiority complex, one manifestation of which is his self-perceived lack of eloquence compared to Atal Bihari Vajpayee and even Sushma Swaraj. Add to it the fact that none of those he picked to give direction to the party after its defeat have either a popular base anywhere or a record of governance to speak about, and you know why BJP looks like a warship stranded in the high seas, sails torn, engines seized, oars broken, rudder gone, GPS knocked out.

When you constantly bemoan political untouchability and, to get rid of it, crave quick-fix political and not popular acceptance, you not only lose direction and purpose, but also the vigour necessary to beat your political opponents where you are meant to: at the hustings. Your readiness to bed anyone -- no matter what the compromise – as strategy to snatch power, conveys to the voter and worker alike that this leaderless, rudderless, self-serving party is no different from the one it seeks to unseat, why take a risk?

When you speak to your party workers and leaders, you are expected to connect to them, convince them that victory is going to be theirs, and motivate them with a few big ideas and slogans that catch, if not fire, their imagination.

But if you heard Advani speak on March 03, 2013, minus shots of the audience, you would never have known who his target group was. There was nothing to differentiate the speech from an op-ed in a newspaper or a blog post for an entirely different, remote audience. There was not one word in there to enthuse the cadre he was addressing.

You don’t tell your workers, as Advani did, that the only hope for the party is in seeking more and more alliance partners – NDA Plus. This is tantamout to an admission by the leader that he has no idea or plan -- perhaps even desire -- to deepen and increase the footprint of the party and make it win on its own. No better way to promise defeat and demoralise everyone. Copy-pasting old templates that have little relevance in the present is a sure way of ensuring that your party has no future.

You can also not enthuse your party workers by telling them to rubbish the Congress – in whose bed some top party leaders are widely perceived to be in -- while maintaining strict Omerta about the principal threat, the Sonia Gandhi family. On top of that if you tell them to praise the performance of BJP's state governments, but go to the people and ask for votes for an unnamed PM, or for a leader who has contributed nothing to that fine record and has no base of his own, you can be sure no one is going to do so with any conviction, if at all.

And if the only innovative idea you have is a xerox of the one that the Congress party has been flogging to death, one whose ever widening range and scope is disturbingly divisive and worse, then you should not be surprised if you are roundly rejected by voters again.

Fortunately, this time Advani's word was not the last. He knew it too, even as he spoke, without conviction, without applause.

No one went to Talkatora Stadium to listen to the same speeches, the same ideas, the same leaders who cannot win more than their own seat and have not figured out in years how to win one more for the party. They went there to listen to the man they believed had the torch to light their way to the destination they had lost hope of ever reaching.

Narendra Modi was acutely aware of and alive to their -- and the nation's -- pent up frustrations and high expectations. He realised that they needed to be made to believe that victory was going to be theirs. He knew he had to show them the bull's eye, and also how to shoot at it.

Yet, no one was prepared for the vehemence with which he went for the holy jugular of the 'Termite' party - the Nehru-Gandhi Family. The impact was immediate. It was as if a door had been opened to the forbidden fortress, without taking which victory is not possible. No more potting around this side of the moat, hoping that the fortress will fall on its own; no more letting the defenders within fearlessly fire all weapons and keep you helplessly pinned down.

To convince them that the fortress was ready to be stormed, Modi also identified a few weak spots in its walls as well as weapons in his and BJP's impressive, proven armoury: mission vs commission; aspiration vs despondency; participatory governance vs rule by 5-star NAC activists; great CMs vs ordinary puppets; surajya vs destructive dynastic rajya.

Not once did Modi tell his workers -- and voters listening with rapt attention -- that they were not good enough to beat Congress, that he had more faith than them in workers and leaders of other political parties whose support he was desperate for, that the BJP was in no position to form a government that would not be as hobbled as the Congress-led government is due to difficult, unprincipled allies.

If you tell your troops all this before you launch them into battle, they won't fight for you. If you tell voters fed up of weak, corrupt coalition governments that you can offer no better, they won't vote for you. This is something that BJP had, mysteriously, forgotten.

Lions don't bleat. Narendra Modi has always fought and will fight to win. For India -- he was never the regional satrap that he was made out to be. This is the spirit he suffused Talkatora Stadium and many Indian hearts with, when he called upon the people of India to treat defeating the family enterprise called Congress a national duty, and outlined his and his party's mission and vision for India. This is the spirit that the BJP sorely lacked. This is the spirit he wants to fill all 125 crore Indians with. This is the spirit that India needs.
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MODI'S DOUBLE BLOW HITS WHERE IT HURTS

Ram Guha is deeply disturbed. Narendra Modi’s power punch at the recent India Today Conclave and a visit to Ahmedabad have hit him where it really hurts, and not for the reasons he has mentioned in the latest of his no-holds barred attacks on him. There can be no greater pain for a deceiving craftsman than to see his much praised creation of cleverly constructed falsehoods so graphically exposed for its worthlessness in front of his eyes so quickly.

Those who heard the Gujarat Chief Minister speak at the Conclave were, to their own surprise, wowed as they have never been in recent years. The man they heard and saw was no ordinary politician for whom ‘governance’ and ‘aam admi’ are mere words meant to be conveniently used to gain and enjoy power.

For the first time, perhaps, they saw a real leader, arguably the only one in India today, who deeply understands and has seamlessly integrated the needs, concerns and ambitions of a poor villager with the vision of a strong and prosperous India that can better the best. In rapt attention they listened, and spontaneously cheered, as Modi detailed his experiments with governance in Gujarat to convince them that India can be energised and transformed from the indifferent, diffident nation it is to a confident and focused one that can actualise its huge potential and make this century its own. In the process, without attacking anyone, Modi also made everyone acutely aware of the serious leadership and value deficit that is eating into India's entrails, even its soul.

Not surprisingly, it is Modi’s Mahatma Mandir that Guha has picked on to hit back at him. Guha simply is unable to accept the fact that Gandhi has been reinvented and his mass-movement strategy used with great success, not by the Congress party that remembers the Mahatma perfunctorily on October 02 every year, but by a man who comes from an ideological background that Guha has dexterously and viciously demonised in his many distortions of modern India’s history.

The Modi blow is double, because, lip service to Gandhi apart, both the Congress party and its ideological props like Ram Guha have projected Jawaharlal Nehru – dynasty’s dictates – as by far the tallest visionary, thinker and maker of modern India. They have successfully kept Gandhi trapped in goat milk and charkha and lion cloth and non-violence, none of which have contemporary resonance.

Modi has taken him out of that frozen-in-time cage and put him in territory that they have successfully been selling as Nehru’s alone. To make it even more unpalatable, Modi has symbolically named one of Nehru’s ‘temples of modern India’ that he has built after the Mahatma. This is blasphemy. Its implications are enormous. Modi has understood that for long and a horrified Guha has just been blown by it.

Gandhi and Nehru, as I understand from the little that I have read, heard and seen as an ordinary citizen, were poles apart along one critical dimension. Both were England-educated lawyers from privileged backgrounds, but only one of them made the real, internal transformation without which our freedom struggle could not have become the unstoppable, empowering mass movement it did. Nehru did little more than change his clothes to bask in Gandhi’s light. He never connected with the masses at the mental frequency and with the emotional intimacy that Gandhi did.

It was Nehru’s elitist disconnect that led him to surround himself with like-minded people and transplant and impose an economic ideology and perpetuate a model of governance that not only did not resonate with the people but spawned an enduring culture of sloth and indifference, one that established only an impersonal and imperious connect between the ordinary Indian and the state. In hindsight, it is evident that is the state that shackled the entrepreneurial and creative genius of ordinary Indians and led to the ‘Nehru’ rate of growth, the burden of which his advisers quickly and dishonestly passed on to India’s Hindu majority.

In Gujarat, Narendra Modi has removed many shackles and reinvented the existing tools and structures of governance that have failed elsewhere, to unleash the real ‘Hindu’ rate of growth that India failed to achieve for six decades. In short, in that state, he has demolished the myth that Guha and his ilk have created around Nehru. No wonder they are blind to his almost Gandhian lifestyle or his burning desire to see that India gets its second and real freedom. It burns them to see that that the tryst with destiny that Nehru spoke about is being given real shape and will be turned into reality by someone who is not only not from the dynasty but who, given a shot at India’s top job, will rewrite history and free India from the clutches of a self-serving elite that has done great harm to the country.

That is what hurts the Guhas of India. They have connected themselves to the world but have failed to connect to the India outside their cocoons. Worse, they do not even feel the need to. That is also what afflicts the dynasty they are promoting, one that has given them so much. That is why their borrowed, theoretical prescriptions for the poor and the marginalised do little to empower them in the real sense and bridge the yawning, demeaning gap.

Modi, on the other hand, has achieved the seemingly impossible, something that lowly Hindi/local language speaking Indians were not expected to even conceive, much less crystallise and deliver better than the best educated the Nehruvians have 'given' to India with an air of misplaced, sickening superiority. He has shown the audacity to dream and think big, real big, but not in the elitist and defeatist Nehruvian mould. He has understood the importance of linking the man in the village to the man on the moon, as it were, and, thanks to long years among the people as one of them, has found the right ways to deliver to him the dream that so far the Guhas of the world thought was meant only for a privileged few like them.

That is why Guha wants to take you to Sabarmati Ashram to see Gandhi. The leader of the aam admi of colonial India must remain there so that the aam admi of free India remains where he is without asking why. He must not know that had Gandhi been alive today, he would have been found not there but in Modi's Mahatma Mandir.

By putting Gandhi there, without saying so, Modi has taken Nehru out of the ruins of the modern temples that he built and sent him back to Anand Bhavan, the family mansion he never left, where he and the dynasty belong. How can such a 'megalomaniac' get anything but a gutter gore from a chuha like Guha?
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Related reading:
1. Delusions of intellect by Sandeep (Must read)
2. Will Modi accomplish his 'Mission Impossible'?
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SONIA, THE NEW QUEEN VICTORIA

One did not expect Left-liberals, geographically and culturally displaced as many of them they are, to join the dots crying to be put together. But the fact that their poor cousins across the fence have not noticed, or have pretended not to, gives an indication of how decisively the balance of power has shifted and got concentrated in the last few years.

The Wikileaks on Sonia Gandhi and Rahul Gandhi are far more significant and, at a fundamental level, much more disturbing than appears at first glance. They confirm the belief of many that under the unquestioned leadership of the duo, a paradigm shift has taken place in the very idea of India. This change, cleverly disguised as political, is actually deeply cultural, even civilisational.

Although she rules India and has been in the spotlight for a long time, little is known about what and who Sonia Gandhi really is as a person, and what her beliefs and ideologies are, except that she an Italian by birth and a Roman Catholic by baptism. As per the leaked American Embassy cable, after meeting Sonia Maria Shriver comes away with an impression that she “presents an intriguing enigma of a warm private personality that remains concealed and is available only to her closest confidants and family members.” The same can be said about Rahul Gandhi too; few Indians know what his views are about anything, much less what his vision for India is, if there is any that is.

Vir Sanghvi, the belatedly exposed and disgraced on-hire “dresser” of stories, had, a few years back, given India a tiny first-hand peek into Sonia Gandhi’s mind when he quoted her as telling him that she abhorred the Hindu right. At that time it was only logically viewed by most as a continuation of the inherited political viewpoint of the secular Congress party, battling the BJP to rule India. But the same cannot be said now.

Shriver has unpeeled a very telling layer of Sonia Gandhi’s personality, one that explains why she took Indian citizenship only after Indira Gandhi’s assassination in 1984, when her husband Rajiv Gandhi suddenly became India’s Prime Minister. As per Shriver, “despite her carefully erected India persona, her basic Italian personality is clearly evident in her mannerisms, speech and interests.” (italics mine)

The saree, the pallu, the well drafted speeches in Hindi and the few carefully choreographed interviews, then, are manifestations of political compulsion, not genuine interest in or understanding of India; Sonia's "Indianness" remains as notional as it was before 1984. Her “inherent opposition to the social conservatism of the Hindu right” likely flows from her European and Christian moorings. She is almost the new Roman Brahmin; her view is not simply political. But since it fits nicely with the manufactured secular-communal divide that is the bedrock of Congress party’s political strategy, the deceit has remained unnoticed by all except trusted Indian courtiers who have not talked.

Rahul Gandhi, Wikileaks all but confirms, is more a chip of the Italian block than of the family whose surname he carries.

Little is known about the young Gandhi’s religious and cultural beliefs. Publicly he has been saying that he is blind to religion and that the Indian flag is his religion. But, a couple of months back he gave a glimpse of his leanings when he shocked the whole nation by equating the RSS with the banned SIMI that eulogises Ghaznavi, rejects democracy and secularism, and aims, with the help of Pakistan and terror, to establish an Islamic state in the whole of India. A furore followed but died quickly, helped by a pliant media and the widespread perception that Rahul Gandhi is still a “baba”, who has much to learn.

But, this was not an isolated and immature political remark made to garner Muslim votes by playing down SIMI’s agenda that mirrors that of state sponsored/protected Pakistani outfits like the LeT. Rahul’s exaggerated abhorrence, as it were, for the Hindu right would have remained under the wraps but for Wikileaks. As per a leaked cable, US ambassador Roemer recalled Gandhi saying to him over lunch in 2009. "Although there was evidence of some support for Laskar-e-Taiba among certain elements in India's indigenous Muslim community, the bigger threat may be the growth of radicalised Hindu groups, which create religious tensions and political confrontations with the Muslim community."

This is difficult to believe, much less swallow. The Prime Minister and others have been saying for years that the greatest threat that India faces is from Maoists. The whole world is grappling with the threat of Islamist terror. India has been battling it for over two decades and thousands of innocent Indians have lost their lives in numerous terror attacks, the worst being 26/11. How can any informed Indian, much less a future PM, one who has access to information not available in the public domain, say – and that too not to Indians but a foreigner -- that a few radicalised Hindus are a greater threat to India than the LeT helped by some Indian Muslims, SIMI, IM etc? The only ones who will readily share this view are the Pakistanis and, let it be said, aggressive Christian missionaries, not to forget the liberals who are often – some unsuspectingly – the secular mask of the latter.

Arundhati Roy, daughter of a Hindu father and a Christian mother, articulates openly what Sonia and Rahul Gandhi cannot, for obvious reasons. Roy says India is not a sovereign, democratic, secular republic. She calls it is a corporate, Hindu satellite state, or an essentially upper caste Hindu state. The hatred for all things Hindu is unconcealed in her speeches and writings. She equates Hindu organisations – the “socially conservative” Hindu right of Sonia -- working for the upliftment of the tribals in Maoist affected areas with Nazis. She has not one to say word against the Christian NGOs and missionaries either doing the same and/or converting Hindus – Muslims they will not dare -- to Christianity in the jungles of Dandakaranya or anywhere else in the country. That is why she projects Maoists as fighting against a “Hindu” state, as she does Kashmiri Muslims, who she has convinced herself were discriminated against by their Hindu king before 1947.

In a similar vein, Digivjay Singh, former Chief Minister of Madhya Pradesh, and reportedly right hand man of Rahul Gandhi, has also been vocalising what the latter cannot in as many words. Initially, he mindlessly repeated what the original plan of Pakistan and some Indians was: 26/11 attack was a RSS conspiracy. Mind you, had Ajmal Kasab not been captured alive, this is what would have been passed off as the truth by the Congress party, much to Pakistan's glee. Although Singh backed off in the face of severe criticism, he continues to allege that ATS chief Hemant Karkare was under threat of and was shot by Hindu terrorists. He was snubbed by Karkare's widow and failed to provide any evidence of his claim that Karkare has rung him up about the danger he was facing. But this ex-royal has so lost his mind and integrity to his master that, tacitly encouraged by Rahul, he continues to try and make the RSS look a far more lethal and anti-India terror organisation then any that Pakistan has been able to produce till now, perhaps even more dangerous than the Al Qaida.

This battle is clearly not political and is not limited to the RSS or the Sangh parivar. The leader-inspired hatred is visceral, the kind no one today exhibits even for Pakistan which, in fact, is now being almost fawningly courted with an eye not just on Muslim votes but also to ensure that the deeper war against Hinduism itself is not challenged or deflected either socially or electorally. The message is unambiguous: if you speak of and for Hinduism beyond the four walls of your house, you are not just communal, you are radical, you are anti-national, you are a bigger threat than even the LeT to the new 'India' that Sonia is attempting to forge.

In sum, under Sonia’s rule, Hinduism is being subtly projected as oppressive, fascist, backward, anti-secular, even anti-Indian. No wonder Roy believes, and rightly so as is now evident, that Sonia and Rahul -- the “People’s Prince” as she calls him fondly -- are not part of this Hindu state. They are here to rid India of the Hindu tag. That is the new definition of secular. That is why things have come to such a pass that the moment anyone utters the word ”Hindu” positively, he becomes an untouchable; to pass muster as a secular Indian, you have to openly criticise everything Hindu, see no good in the religion, and do exactly the opposite in respect of Islam and Christianity. That is why, to give an example, the moment a Hindu swami is found having consensual sex, the media plays the tapes 24/7, hitting at the religion through the person. That is why when the entire Western media is full of news about pedophile Christian priests and questions the Pope on his handling of many such cases, the media, crawling and corrupt, blocks out the news totally. India’s tragedy is that its smug, deracinated, copy-cat zombies who influence public opinion either cannot see, or do not wish to, the insidious dynamics at work.

Sonia’s limited connect with, and interest in, India is manifestly driven by her desire to rule it, whatever it takes, and ensure that her son wears the crown. She has no time or respect for its ancient culture or any or its religions. May be a coincidence, but Priyanka’s husband is Robert, whose mother was of Scottish origin; the names of her two children, Raihan and Miraya, are not Indian. Rahul’s girlfriend, the one he is likely to marry, is a Columbian. The Nehru-Gandhi family is, for all practical purposes, now a European family. That is why, aided actively by a media populated by similarly cross-bred journalists, and a few Rajput royals, among others, selling their — and India’s -- souls again, another attempt is being made to uproot India from India, to erase it from this land, may be even partition it once again. Unbridled, unprincipled plunder, the tried and tested grease of the invader and coloniser, is again being effectively employed to create, buy, keep firmly in line greedy, myopic, even motherless tribal chieftains, and the throne secure.

Sonia, make no mistake, is the new Queen Victoria.
'

BY SUBJECTS, OF AND FOR DYNASTIES

Two things stand out in the front page of The Times of India of October 20, 2010. One is the boast of Robert Vadra that he can "definitely win an election from anywhere" and the second is that his "exclusive" interview has been given top billing by the newspaper.

Businessman Vadra's cockiness does not come as a surprise, nor does the fact that one of India's leading newspapers has chosen to put him on the pedestal it has. Both obscenities tell a tale of a steepening decline that, if not reversed, will inevitably lead to the demise of India's democracy.

The shocking Commonwealth Games loot and the sordid drama in Karnataka have, yet again, brought to fore the reality that politics is now almost wholly about business. And business in India, as we all know, is about keeping the money in the family. The ownership virus has, therefore, spread deep into politics, with dynasties, big and small, sprouting everywhere.

The Nehru-Gandhi family, supposedly steeped in modern, liberal values, started the slide that has now become an avalanche of sorts across India. If Laloo Yadav is promoting his son and Bal Thackeray his grandson, it has nothing to do with Biharis, Marathi manoos, Indians or India. It is only about protecting and enhancing family wealth 'for generations to come,' as Amitabh Bachchan's says in the Binani Cement ad. The cadre-based BJP, late to the dynastic party, is making amends. Only the communists remain unaffected by the dynastic disease, but in their case rigour mortis has already set in.

There is no better recent example of this rot than Jagan Reddy who, thanks to the active help of his Chief Minister father YSR Reddy, has become easily the fastest growing businessman ever in India, with his Income Tax jumping from Rs 2.92 lakhs in financial year 2008-09 to an unbelievable Rs 84 crores for the first six months of the current financial year. Note that this is the 'white' component of his income. Considering the fact that bribes are mostly paid in cash, one can safely conclude that in the six years that YSR was CM, the father-son duo successfully plundered Andhra Pradesh like no one ever has. Yet, no questions have been asked, no sting operation done, no inquiries ordered. In fact the sole inquiry that had to be ordered against one of YSR Reddy's principal 'financiers', Ramalinga Raju, only because he could not cook the books of Satyam any longer, has, not surprisingly, run aground and is not likely to unearth anything against YSR or any other politician.

With politics proving to be such a risk-free, even though criminal, route to astronomical riches in super quick time, how can India remain the democracy that its founding fathers wanted it to be? It has to become an oligarchy. Of plunderers.

What we are witnessing now is the shaking out of ordinary Indians from the top rungs of power and wealth. It began slowly with Indira Gandhi, but, with the economy expanding rapidly and the corruption and plunder becoming badges of honour to brandish and brag about without even the tinge of fear of getting caught and put behind bars, it has gathered a momentum that no one would have imagined a few years ago. This sorry development could not have taken place without the active involvement and support of the liberal media that have embraced colonially-seeded social norms, repelled the egalitarian values that they were meant to imbibe, and joined the plunder party that, as watchdogs, they are supposed to bust. That is why a Vadra figures where he does, in the manner that has. That is why colossal corruption is winked at in the manner that it is and buried where it should never be.

The new rajas, big and small, are taking control of India, not as benevolent rulers in the mould of the Ram that Mahatma Gandhi wanted them to, but as daring, no-limits, no-conscience robbers. Elections have become tools to enhance the hold and power of dynasties. The naive poor are being bought with TVs, cycles, goats etc that you and I pay for. Thanks to the arithmetic of elections, the Muslim community has been reduced to a nautch girl, as it were, to be lured into their beds at election time, again with your money and mine.

Whore-ism is the new synonym of secularism, plunder of politics. What we call democracy is now increasingly of and for dynasties. In the new order, the 'by' people can only be subjects, not sovereigns.
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Related reading:
1. Elections 2009: Dynasties empowered, not youth
2. Women's Bill: Empowering gharanas not women
3. The more Rahul's Congress changes, the more it's the same

35 YEARS ON, EMERGENCY MINDSET IS ALIVE

On June 25, 1975, the people of India had their first brush with dictatorship. Ironically, this 'coup' was executed by the very person who had sworn to protect democracy and the constitution. Indira Gandhi, the daughter of Jawaharlal Nehru, stunned by an Allahabad High Court verdict that found her guilty of violation of electoral laws, decided that she was bigger than the the law of the land. So, she staged a bloodless coup against the democratically elected Prime Minister that she was, and became India's first dictator.

Much credit has been given to her for holding elections in 1977 and then smoothly handing over power after she was voted out by the people. Perhaps some of it is deserved. But, it needs to be remembered that she went in for elections only after she was reportedly assured by the IB and others that she would win. However, when defeat shocked her, she was reluctant to hand over power to the Janata Party; that was her arrogance. She reportedly turned to Army Chief, Gen TN Raina, a fellow Kahmir Pandit, who she had chosen over the senior and much more distinguished Lt Gen PS Bhagat for the top job, and asked him to take over. Nehru's daughter asking the Army to take over India so that another politician did not! Couldn't be worse, could it? Fortunately for India, Raina refused. The rest, as everyone says, is history.

The Emergency was also India's first brush with the tyranny of the Nehru-Gandhi family. Indira Gandhi drafted her younger son, Sanjay Gandhi, who later died when the plane he was flying crashed into a tree, to help her run India with an iron fist and, boy, the duo took over the country and the Congress party completely. Their power was near absolute. Within the Congress, no one had the courage to utter a word against them; opposition leaders who did were put in jail; the media simply crawled.

As a result of the terror that the mother-son duo unleashed, and as often happens with despots, they were told by sycophants just what they wanted to hear. But in 1977, the people told them what they should have been hearing: how hateful their rule, their excesses had been, and how unacceptable. The tidal wave of public anger, particularly in North India where the Emergency really hit hard, was so huge that Indira Gandhi was defeated in her own constituency by a midget called Raj Narain.

Much has been written about what happened during the two dark years that the Emergency remained in force, and little purpose will be served by repeating it here. What is of real relevance now is whether the right lessons have been learnt and whether there is any danger of another politician placing himself/herself above everything else in the manner that Indira Gandhi did.

How much has really changed in the last 35 years? Is the Congress party more democratic now after that painful experience? Have its leaders developed a spine or are they still supine? Has the media, now free and more powerful than ever, learnt at at last to walk or has the gangrene that had set in then led to amputation of vitals? Have political opponents of the Congress learnt their lessons or has the experience of power corrupted them too and turned them into poor clones of the Congress, no longer real alternatives that can give a new direction and purpose to governance and to the nation?

The answers to the above questions are reasonably clear. In fact Family tyranny has got even stronger; don’t let the soft edges and the media spin fool you. Consider the following:

• Then the Congress was run by Indira Gandhi her son Sanjay Gandhi; today it is by Sonia Gandhi and her son Rahul Gandhi.
• Sonia Gandhi has already been Congress President longer than Nehru and Indira ever were. To make matters worse, there is not even a whisper of a demand either in the party or in the media to revive democracy in the party and give other leaders a chance to rise to the top. Sonia is now effectively Congress President for life. This is something unheard of in any political party in any democracy in the world. If this is the example that the GOP is setting, democracy is sure headed to death.
• Sonia Gandhi may not be PM but she is far more powerful than the PM whose authority has been even further eroded -- manifestly to ward of any threat or challenge to her -- by a magical instrument known as the Group of Ministers (GOM) that is routinely tasked to take major decisions, shielding her from criticism but not credit, to ensure that only what she wants is done, but without being held accountable should anything go wrong.
  
• Sonia Gandhi is the Supreme Commander of a government democratically elected by the people but she does not speak to them directly or even through the press. Natives of the party are left to do all the explaining and blame-taking. Even Indira Gandhi was never so arrogant and aloof.
• No one in the Congress party can utter a word against any member of the Family, living or dead, out of fear. It is above and beyond criticism. Like God.
• Surprisingly, almost no one in the opposition too criticises the Family. Manifestly that too is out of fear. The Congress has blatantly misused the CBI and other state instruments to tap phones and use other means to ferret out incriminating information about political leaders. That was apparently the sole achievement of the previous NSA. With corruption having reached unprecedented proportions and honest political leaders nearing extinction, most know that they are vulnerable. Blackmail, or the threat of it, is the new password that seals everyone's lips. Of course, everyone is allowed to hammer and make fun of Dr Manmohan Singh; that keeps everyone happy and undamaged. Even Nehru and Indira, tall leaders, were never so exalted.
• The media crawls without having to be even told, eagerly. The rules of the game are clear, crossing of the Lakshman Rekha means swift and silent banishment to obscurity. Media is now big business with big money at stake. Makes eminent sense to keep the government on the right side and put the Family in the Pulpit. With corruption levels in the media now at par with those in the political class, vulnerability to blackmail and harassment is also as high. So, the Family has to be out of bounds for everything except reverence. No surprise that the anniversary of the Emergency has been blacked out. The new generation should not get ideas hostile to the Congress even in short attention span it has.
  

The the manner in which the furore over the duping of the victims of the Bhopal Gas disaster of 1984 has been handled by the government has dramatically underscored yet again the harsh truth that the Family is now totally beyond the pale of criticism. What started off as one $15 billion compensation suit in the US -- more to follow -- was turned into a paltry $475 million deal by the Rajiv Government with Union Carbide, Rs 30,000 for the dead and Rs 8000 for the injured. Billions would undoubtedly have been paid as bribe to top Congress leaders by Union Carbide for being let off the hook so unbelievably cheaply, over the dead and dying. But this scam, many times bigger than the Bofors one that brought Rajiv down in 1989, has been buried with exceptional haste. Rajiv Gandhi has been swiftly proved innocent of any wrongdoing in the gas disaster, not only by a pliant Group of Ministers who real job was to do that, but by almost the whole mainstream media, with leading journalists resorting to disgraceful tricks to successfully achieve this 'Mission Impossible'. The opposition too is silent; we know why.

The Emergency mindset is, thus, not only alive in the Congress, it is now even stronger than it was during the Emergency. The aam admi remains largely unaware because his testicles are not physically on the line now. But, there is enough evidence to suggest that he is no longer as relevant as he should be in a vibrant democracy. The Congress has sorted out the arithmetic of elections in a manner that has made him almost irrelevant, bar a sop here and there before elections to prevent a large swing. The opposition has also understood this game of numbers and has learnt to live with it, and make the best out of it wherever and whenever it can, even if means that some key leaders have to risk selling out to the Congress directly or via the CBI etc.

That is why there is zero possibility of any politician imposing the kind of Emergency that Indira Gandhi did again. But that is not because democracy has taken deep roots or is vibrant. That is primarily because there is no need for any politician to do with a hatchet what he/she can with a fake smile, except to set the occasional example. The corruption pie is now humongous, and there is enough for everyone to get something out of it. No one wants to spoil the party; keeping the mouth shut and treating the Family above all is a small price to pay. As long as the going is good. As of now, the highway ahead is paved with gold; there is no need or time to look on the side where the poor reside.
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May also like to read:
1. Politics and media: a new Nadir
2. Khaoists: Plundering India's future

GILANI, GILANI AND GILANI CORP, AND THE 'G' EFFECT ON INDIA

The surname Gilani must have a strong karmic connection with India.

Syed Ali Gilani is the one separatist Kashmiri leader who has been steadfastly saying that Jammu and Kashmir is Pakistan since ethnic Kashmiris are Muslims. Even though 'moderate' separatist leaders have 'toned down' their demand to 'Azadi' (Independence) - do overlook the latest statement of the Mirwaiz that China is also a stakeholder - Gilani refuses to budge. He in fact has gone to the extent of justifying Pakistan's policy of infiltrating terrorists into India by asking, "Why did India send its troops to East Pakistan to support the movement there?" Needless to add, he represents the 'basic issue' that India does not want to acknowledge, as it attempts, yet again, to find a resolution to the Kashmir problem, without knowing how and without any understanding of the dynamics that will be set in motion if any concession is given to Pakistan. A country that mindlessly created a problem in 1948 and then foolishly allowed it and Gilani to become bigger and bigger over 63 years, can scarcely be expected to get proactive overnight and find a thought-out "solution" that is in India's best long term interest.

Syed Yousaf Raza Gilani is the present Prime Minister of Pakistan. He blew hot and cold after at least 10 terrorists from Pakistan attacked Mumbai on November 26, 2008. Initially, not only did he deny that the terrorists were Pakistanis, his government even went to the extent of calling them Hindu-Zionists who were planted by India to spoil the 'pak' name of peace-loving Pakistan. It was only when the paternity and village of Ajmal Kasab could no longer be hidden, did the reluctant admission come, thanks primarily to Uncle Sam. But that culpability did not deter Gilani from making hawkish noises, particularly about Kashmir. In fact, just eight months after 26/11, he ambushed an unsuspecting Dr Manmohan Singh and got him to admit in writing that, effectively, India was sponsoring terror in Baluchistan and other parts of Pakistan. If that was not enough, not only has he allowed the masterminds of 26/11 to roam free, he and his government are now accusing India of supporting the Taliban in Pakistan, and pressuring it to solve Kashmir, undoubtedly in Pakistan's favour. This Gilani is the face of the Pakistani establishment that has never been able accept, among many other things, the reality of Pakistan's size and live in peace with a bigger, secular India.

Syed Daood Gilani is much in the news now, as David Coleman Headley, the name he adopted in 2006 to escape suspicion for his frequent trips to India, Pakistan and elsewhere on chilling terror missions. Son of a Pakistani diplomat father and an American mother, he went to a military school in Pakistan, before moving to the US. He was in India just before 26/11 and in Pakistan when the attack took place, fuelling speculation that he was deeply involved in that terror attack. The US says that some elements in the ISI could be linked to him and that it will soon confirm whether he had any connection with 26/11. Gilani had also been travelling freely to different parts of India, reportedly to find recruits for the Indian Mujahideen and to set up sleeper terror cells. According to some reports, he was even given a satellite phone by an official of the Pakistan consulate to enable him to make calls to Pakistan without being detected. Our useless intelligence agencies, working overtime to prove that there was no involvement of locals in 26/11, would never have got wind of his activities had the FBI not homed on to him. The scale of his involvement in terror activities is still unfolding. Five serving and retired Pakistan army officers have already been arrested for their links with him. Much more is expected to follow in the coming days and months. This Gilani represents the brainwashed aam admi, the foot soldier who executes Pakistan's policy of using Islamic terror, jihad, as an integral instrument of the state.

In many ways, this 'Gilani, Gilani & Gilani Corporation' exemplifies what Pakistan was, is, and is likely to remain, particularly with respect to India. There may be moderate voices in Pakistan, especially in the media. But the harsh truth is that those who conceptualised and moulded Pakistan, and are now running it, metaphorically belong to the dangerous 3G corporation. This is something that India needs to get firmly into its head. Unless that is done, we will keep getting ambushed during parleys and wasting away the blood of thousands of sons of India, by losing on the negotiating table what they have been repeatedly protecting and gaining with their valour and sacrifice.

Hang on. Is it a mere coincidence that India has, perhaps, an even deeper karmic connection with another surname beginning with 'G'?

Mahatma Gandhi, Indira Gandhi and Family Gandhi are all intimately linked with, and have shaped, the destiny of India. The first Gandhi led India to Independence and Partition. The second Gandhi broke Pakistan in two. Rajiv Gandhi reportedly frittered away a golden opportunity to cut Pakistan to size for good in 1987, enabling it to launch its ongoing proxy war against India in 1989. Sonia Gandhi and Rahul Gandhi are now in the saddle. Are they going to complete the task that Indira and Rajiv left unfinished? Or are they going to commit the blunder that Indira Gandhi did in Shimla in 1972, and wind up creating an even more dangerous situation for India in the long run?

Funny isn't it that both Gilani and Gandhi have six alphabets each and sound pretty similar too? India has been effected in the extreme by the 'G' effect of both. One will have to give way. The former cannot win unless the latter chooses to lose to it in a fit, or fits, of the same naive large-heartedness that led to the downfall of Prithviraj Chauhan. One can only hope that the Gandhis of Delhi do not make the same mistake again. But with an Italian connection, you never know...
'

CONSPICUOUS CONSUMPTION AND CONSPICUOUS POVERTY

"Mr. Sharma, can you comment on this damning article appeared in Times London . Our politicians, bureaucrats have already crossed lines into Criminality with their corruption and inefficiency, now our High flying media has joined them with gross delinquency of "basic duty" by not reporting on this. We the people of India are equally responsible..."

How does one respond to such a question asked by an Indian who is deeply upset by the stark reality of the conspicuous poverty that afflicts over 880 million Indians, in the light of the vulgar and conspicuous consumption flaunted by their affluent chosen representatives? Does one agree with him that the leaders elected by these poor - the rich don't give a damn about voting - are no less than criminals because of their corrupt ways? Or does one take the line of the urban rich, exemplified by media tycoon Prannoy Roy, who ask as to what is wrong if political leaders stay in five star hotels and otherwise splurge, as long as they are spending their own money?

Is it in order to view businessmen, CEOs, dons and politicians through the lens of the same money? That is indeed what many are doing, to justify the extravagance of politicians. Should politicians not be accountable to their "employees and customers" like CEOs are? If in a "company" of 1.3 billion people, more than 67% have a sub-human existence at less than $ 2 a day, should a little over a thousand of its top executives living in Delhi happily splurge tens of thousands of that amount, whether out of tax payers' money or their own earnings? Should not their pay and perks and lifestyles be linked to their pathetic performance due to which the income of so many 'employees' remains so low, 62 years on?

That brings us to another question. Where have much of the earnings of most of these politicians come from anyway? How have politicians who have no occupation other than politics become multi-millionaires? The rich Sachin Pilot, for example, is the son of a middle class Air Force pilot who joined politics. The late Pramod Mahajan, who was shot by his brother over money, manifestly 'made' thousand of crores as a politician, not an industrialist, if rumours are true; he had no other source of income, one hears. Jagan Reddy, the overnight-rich-businessman-turned-politician son of YSR Reddy, could certainly not have become anywhere close to a multi-billionaire had he been just another businessman operating in an honest environment. The examples are endless and well known. Everyone knows that barring say a Shashi Tharoor or Vijay Mallya, who earned good money before they got into politics, there will hardly be an Indian politician who has become wealthy as a politician by honest means.

Worse than the conspicuous consumption of these leaders is the "austerity drive" that has recently been launched by the government, for only a year, because of the drought. Ironically, had the government kept quiet, much information about the colossal waste of tax payers' money by politicians would have never come to light, along with the fact that this drive is just a farce to con India's people.

Sections of the media have been and are sleeping with politicians and political parties, no doubt. Let us not forget that the media is another business that has to survive and grow in the thoroughly corrupt environment that many, including the UN, have spoken about repeatedly. Every one knows that in India things don't move unless the system is "oiled" well. What better way to do it than keep the really powerful politicians in power really close?

Notwithstanding the above constraint, we must accept that there still are some in the media who can speak, and have done so, even if guardedly. They are the ones who have told India that this whole drive is a farce. Let us start from the very top. Sonia Gandhi travelled Economy Class once to Mumbai with heavy security. Sagarika Ghose told us that she saved Rs 7,500. Rahul Gandhi travelled similarly protected by train and, as per some channels, 'saved' Rs 445. Karan Thapar asked the question that if Rahul Gandhi really feels that politicians have a duty to be austere, then "why is he, a bachelor, living in...one of the largest government owned bungalows...he is not even entitled to it". MJ Akbar has, in similar vein, called this austerity an eyewash and asked as to why Tharoor, Krishna and Nilekani should not be made to contribute the money that they were spending from their pockets for their hotel bills to the Prime Minister's Relief Fund!

It may be recalled that Rajiv and Sanjay used to stay with their mother, Indira Gandhi. Today, Sonia, Rahul and Priyanka occupy three sprawling bungalows that must cost the government a huge packet to maintain and secure. If the Gandhis genuinely identify with the 880 million poor they represent and are sincere about cutting out wasteful expenditure, then the family should stay together in one bungalow. Robert Vadra, who faces no security threat, should also be taken off the SPG protectee list. Many crore rupees, not a few hundred, will be saved. But no, Rahul Gandhi will talk of only the khadi kurta pajama that he wears to define 'austerity'.

It is not that all in the media have done their bit. As far as I know, there has been no meaningful linking of the conspicuous consumption of the politicians and this austerity drive with the extreme poverty that has now been reported by Times London and earlier by others. And as always, there are the usual suspects in the media who are fuming at the security being provided to politicians, except the Gandhis, of course. Then there those who actually are grateful to Sonia Gandhi's for the austerity drive, and who resent politicians not for their filthy spending or for travelling first class, but for the special treatment that they get at airports. That is the only place where media maharajahs and maharanis lose out to them!

For many in India's media, India is no more than an exclusive bubble that contains them and politicians alone. Of late, film stars too have made an entry - with great TRPs, they bring in the moolah for the media, don't they? 880 million Indians live on another planet.

"Also look at the pic on the article.... Is this the symbolism of British media.... was there a need to put such a striking and appalling picture on the web page...", asks the same agitated Indian. In my view, the photograph that graphically depicts "India's damned generation" is apt for it. It has hurt him because it has forced him to confront an ugly reality that he and I and many others want to wish away, and don't want the West at least to tell us about. We desperately want to believe only that India is firmly on its way to becoming an economic giant. We want to see the gleaming Delhi Metro but not the poor shitting by the sides of the railway tracks; we want to talk of Mumbai as India's commercial capital but not as a city where 54.1% people live in slums. To top it, very few of us know or even care about the grind that life is for the poor in rural India.

How far our politicians have gone from the people and how arrogant they have become about their extravagant lifestyles is best exemplified by Civil Aviation Minister Praful Patel who says mockingly about the austerity drive: "at least we have to appear to be austere, if nothing else". How things have changed in the last sixty years. Democratically elected leaders have become rulers, royalty, above and separate from the people whose voice they were meant to be. No wonder a media personality says: "Hypocrisy is essential for public life". Hypocrites and worse in politics have little to fear. Powerful sections of the media understand their predicament and are one with them too.

But, it is no use blaming the media and the politicians alone. Conspicuous consumption is existing gleefully with conspicuous poverty only because all of us have let it take root. We have allowed politicians to deflect our attention from their criminal ways to issues of caste, region and religion, knowing full well that they are not going to add even a rupee to the recurring income of the really needy even as the coffers of the greedy are rapidly filled. Also, as some of us have moved up the ladder of prosperity, we have conveniently forgotten that many, many more remain at the very bottom, filling their stomachs on empty slogans like "garibi hatao" and gullibly believing in fake austerity drives undertaken by their so-called leaders.

So, if we really don't want to see disturbing pictures of stark poverty staring at us, we all have to do our bit to either make our leaders change themselves, or change our leaders. Till that happens, for 880 million Indians, things are going to change very slowly indeed.

Picture: Timesonline
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Readers may also read: Austerity and aam aadmi: games politicians play!

REMEMBERING RAJIV: CONGRESS IS WORSE THAN MAYAWATI

Mayawati has been in the cross hairs of the media's sights for constructing dalit memorials at state expense. Much has been written and spoken about how she is mindlessly squandering public money on building her own statues. In a recent program on NDTV, a very agitated Prannoy Roy called for a complete ban on such activities because they utilise the tax payers' money for furthering the cause of a political party. With a straight face, Salman Khursheed of the Congress party agreed with him completely.

Are Indians fools? Don’t they know that the biggest culprit by far in this game is the Congress party? Don't Prannoy Roy and others like him also know this? Then why has there never been a similar uproar till now?

Today is Rajiv Gandhi's birthday. Without a worry about what the much flogged "aam aadmi" might say or feel, the Congress party is brazenly using the occasion to make maximum possible political capital of it at state expense. Newspapers have been saturated with advertisements by various departments of the central government to sell Rajiv Gandhi to India. Examples of two newspapers published from New Delhi should give you an idea of how the minds of Indians have been carpet bombed by the Congress today with Rajiv ads:

Hindustan Times

Full Page

1. Rural Electrification Corporation, Ministry of Power
2. Ministry of Food Processing Industries
3. Ministry of New and Renewable Energy

Half Page

1. Delhi Government
2. HRD Ministry
3. Delhi SC, ST, OBC, Minority and Handicapped Finance and Development Corporation
4. Women and Child Development Ministry
5. National Literacy Mission Authority
6. Commerce and Industry Ministry
7. National Commission for women
8. Department of IT, Communication Ministry

Quarter Page

1. Government of Maharashtra

The Times of India

Full Page

1. Rural Electrification Corporation, Ministry of Power
2. Ministry of Food Processing Industries
3. Ministry of New and Renewable Energy

Half Page

1. Delhi Government
2. HRD Ministry
3. Ministry of Housing & Urban Poverty alleviation
4. Ministry of Rural Development and Panchayati Raj
5. Ministry of Social Justice & Empowerment
6. Women and child development ministry
7. National Literacy Mission authority
8. Commerce and Industry Ministry
9. National Commission for women
10. Department of IT, Communication Ministry

This is not the first time that this has been done. Nor is Rajiv Gandhi the only one who is so remembered. Jawahar Lal Nehru and Indira Gandhi are also so remembered on their birthdays and death anniversaries at government expense, and this has been going on for decades. Has the media ever complained? Is it complaining even now, in the light of its own moral outrage at what Mayawati is doing? How can it? It is raking in the moolah by publishing these advertisements. You don't criticise the "hand" that feeds you, do you? If someone carries out a detailed analysis of how much money has been spent by the government - and paid to the media - over the years, the mind boggling figures will expose one reason why large sections of the media find it almost impossible to be objective and unbiased in their political reporting and analysis.

This is not all. The Congress has also gone berserk naming almost every government funded program that can get it some votes after these three members of the dynasty. In a petition to the Election Commission, journalist A. Surya Prakash has listed 450 Central and State government activities named after Nehru, Indira and Rajiv. He questions the morality of attaching of a politician's name to government programs aimed at improving the lives of citizens, because they give the impression that the politician needs to be thanked for what the citizens have got in his name. Not surprisingly, he says, Mahatma Gandhi's name adorns only the Backward Region Development Fund.

It also needs to be remembered that it was the Congress party that started this ugly culture of creating memorials for political leaders and the naming of roads, bridges, airports, buildings and what have you, after them. Mayawati was not wrong when she tauntingly said that the real estate value of the three sprawling samadhis built in Delhi for Nehru, Indira and Rajiv far exceeds the amount that is being spent by her for building dalit memorials. In addition, Teen Murti House and 1, Safdarjang Road, where Nehru and Indira respectively stayed as PMs, have been converted into national memorials. In fact, these three leaders has been similarly honoured at state expense across the country, locking real estate worth thousands of crores. It needs no imagination to grasp that hundreds of crores of rupees are being spent on their maintenance and upkeep annually.

It goes without saying that these too are political advertisements designed to benefit the Congress party and, even more importantly, the Nehru-Gandhi family in its political quest. Have you ever heard any media star say anything against this misuse of power and tax payers' money?

It is time to seriously start putting an end to this tradition that the Congress and the media have colluded to perpetuate. To start with, there should be a blanket ban on advertisements in the media at state expense. If any party wants to highlight the good work that it has done or an achievement of its leader, the bill must be footed by the party and not by the government. This will hurt the media because no party can afford to cough up such huge amounts. The call is on the integrity of the media.

Similarly, naming of government funded schemes etc after politicians should also be banned, as should the practice of naming of every important bridge and building after them. At best, a limit of three or so for naming landmarks across the country/state after a PM/CM should be laid down. Similarly, all memorials - and not just those being built by Mayawati - should also de-politicised and put to better use for the good of India's citizens . If some political party wants, it should build and maintain a memorial or two out of party funds. Citizens should not be made to pay for any memorial except that of Mahatma Gandhi. At best, the government should maintain an additional combined memorial for all Prime Ministers.

If, however, the media and the Congress want to remain happy with what has been happening over the decades to their mutual benefit, then this fake and dishonest talk generated by Mayawati's move to remind the country about its dalit leaders at state expense should be cut out completely. As everyone with integrity knows, no party or individual is in any position to replicate what the Congress party has done and is continuing to do without even the pretence of any moral or ethical pangs, thanks primarily to a similarly disposed media.