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

Don't Be Fooled, Rahul Gandhi Is No 'Pappu'

Not enough attention has been paid to the visuals of Congress President Rahul Gandhi playing with his mobile phone for 24 long minutes during the President’s address to Parliament. Was Gandhi being the kid that some Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leaders believe he still is, or was he deliberately doing so to insult the President of India with entitled disdain?

Having been a member of Parliament for over 15 years, Rahul Gandhi is fully aware that at least one camera is deployed to capture his every move and gesture inside the august House.  So it cannot be that he did not know that the visuals would be telecast by every channel into every Indian home. Fresh from another unprecedented rout which has reduced Congress to a shocking 23 seats outside Kerala and Tamil Nadu, a personal defeat in Amethi and a ‘victory’ gifted by Muslim League in Wayanad, why did Rahul Gandhi want to be seen exhibiting the kind of arrogance that he showed when he publicly humiliated Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, when the latter was on a foreign tour? 

When Congress won a second term in 2009, there was a lot of buzz about Gandhi becoming a minister for a couple of years, before occupying the PM’s chair. As the subsequent slap to his Prime Minister showed, Rahul Gandhi—like his mother—saw Dr Manmohan Singh as no more than one of his many employees, serving under whom was unthinkable. The same attitude informed his relationship with Presidents Pratibha Patil and Pranab Mukherjee. President Kovind had to be shown his place too, and through it a warning conveyed to Congress leaders that they should remain In their place, resignation after rout notwithstanding. 

Rahul Gandhi, many believe, is a messed-up—and therefore dangerous—by-product of the marriage of dynastic Indian entitlement and White fundamentalist contempt for everything Indian.

As the great-grandson of Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru and son of Rajiv Gandhi, Rahul has grown up believing that he has a divine right to rule India and Indians. As a result, he considers himself superior to and above every non-Family Indian political leader. In power or not, he expects Congress leaders, age and appointment irrespective, to pay obeisance to him, and non-Congress leaders to put him on a hallowed exclusive pedestal.

As the grandson of Mussolini’s Colonel Stefano Maino and son of Edvige Antonia Albina Maino, Rahul Gandhi manifestly sees India through the eyes of a White man who thinks nothing of India and Indians, and believes, with missionary zeal, that he is here to get Dalits out of the Hindu fold—escape velocity of Jupiter, missionary visas, foreign funds—and to so demonise and emaciate other Hindus—Hindu terror, CVB, intolerance, majoritarianism—that they meekly submit, once again, to be ruled by ‘minorities’, as they were till 1947.

His mother, it must be mentioned, remained an Italian citizen, even though she was living in the house of India’s Prime Minister, till 1983, and became an Indian passport holder only when her own husband came within a step of becoming PM. She learnt Hindi only after his death, and only because she couldn’t do without the poison of power that literally fell into her lap. And it is from her, as he admitted in an old interview to Sagarika Ghose, that Rahul Gandhi learnt about India during his formative years, when his father was busy and mostly away. 

So when he uses BJP and Rashtriya Swayamsevak Singh as key targets of attack, it probably flows from an irreconcilable ideological hate, and not from the politics and values he inherited from his father and paternal grandmother. 

It is not entirely a coincidence that while some leaders of Congress speak about building shelters for cows if their party comes to power, Rahul Gandhi not only takes pictures with Congressmen who publicly slaughter cows to hurt Hindus, but also does not speak up for their religious sentiments, or for implementation of laws banning cow slaughter. Nor is he ever seen with Hindu victims of cow smugglers. 

On the contrary, he has repeatedly spoken about the right of people to slaughter cows for food, even if it means flouting the laws enacted, ironically, mostly by his own party before it passed into his Italian mother’s hands. It is also not a coincidence that ‘Beef Festivals’ were organised brazenly in various parts of India, Delhi included, when he and his mother were ruling India.

Rahul’s latest tweet on Yoga epitomises this visceral hatred.

On the day the whole world was celebrating Yoga, India’s timeless selfless gift to humanity, one would have expected Rahul Gandhi to at least remain silent, if he could not bring himself to say something positive about it as an Indian. But, no, he had to let his bile flow. This was not a tweet by a politician; it was frustrated loser tweeting, riled by visuals of millions of Indians renewing their connect with an ancient Hindu practice that enables individuals to achieve physical, mental and spiritual well-being—and more—souls intact and unsold. 

That he is not bright is clear as daylight, but what is evidently not so is that Rahul Gandhi is not a harmless simpleton brimming with love. It doesn’t really hurt him when people call him ‘dumb’, ‘pappu’, ‘budhu’ etc. A simple man with heart of gold can always move people to vote for him, particularly if the main opponent is not as brilliant and rooted and trustworthy as Modi is.

So while making fun of ‘pappu’ is a good pastime, it has the effect of concealing the oppressive dynastic entitlement and an alien ideological hatred that defines the man, and makes light of the havoc he will ruthlessly create—Tukde Gang in the vanguard — should he ever drink the intoxicating poison of power again.

Never forget the danger, and never dismiss Rahul Gandhi lightly.

A shorter version of this post was published in Swarajya  https://swarajyamag.com/politics/dont-fall-for-it-rahul-gandhi-is-no-simpleton

All Is Not Lost For The Khan Market Gang Yet

View of New Delhi’s Khan Market (@sahajloi/Twitter)

Snapshot

• In the aftermath of the 2009 UPA victory, the Khan Market Gang had proclaimed triumphantly that their ‘Idea of India’ had conclusively defeated the BJP and would prevail for all time to come.
  Also, Amartya Sen is on the dot when he says that BJP has won “something in terms of power, but nothing particularly serious in the battle of ideas”.
  Will a new leadership emerge in the BJP to take the battle for the soul of India forward to fruition?

At the peak of Sonia Gandhi’s power, which she enjoyed for about four years after the 2009 Lok Sabha elections, the Lutyens elite—the ‘Khan Market Gang’, as Narendra Modi calls them—had proclaimed triumphantly that their ‘Idea of India’ had conclusively defeated that of the BJP, which had thrown in the towel after that election, and that it would prevail for all time to come.

The Congress party won 2009 despite 26/11, and the lack of any visible public anger then—Balakot brought it all out—against its tame surrender and cosying up to Pakistan after that barbaric attack, had convinced everyone in its eco-system that they could impose almost any idea or law on the people of India and get away with it.

In 2011, Barkha Dutt, excitedly anticipating a verdict in favour of the Muslims by the Allahabad High Court in the Ram Janmabhoomi case, epitomised that rootless arrogance, even contempt, by declaring that India—Hindus only—had moved on, and was no longer interested in Ram or His temple in Ayodhya.

Such was the extent of BJP’s surrender during those years, that its leaders faithfully observed the Omerta Code when it came to the all-powerful Chairperson of the all-powerful and unconstitutional National Advisory Committee (NAC), and limited their attacks to Dr Manmohan Singh, the nominal Prime Minister, who Sonia Gandhi herself wanted to cut to size lest he pose a threat to her son, Rahul Gandhi.

To cap it all, in the run-up to 2014, so pathetic were BJP’s performances in most state elections where it was in the game or in a direct fight against the Congress—UP, Rajasthan, Karnataka, to name a few—that no one even in BJP believed that it would rise and win power ever again. In fact, there was widespread fear that if the Congress was voted back to power in 2014, then by 2019, Sonia Gandhi would ban the RSS and possibly even the BJP.

Even after a series of mega scams cracked the invincibility of the Congress party, not only did Lal Krishna Advani and his team fail to step into the breach, but the former actually admitted in a blog in 2013, that no matter which regional combination got most seats, it would need either the Congress or the BJP to form a government, and his hope was that it would go for BJP. Neither he nor his BJP had a plan to win 2014. They had simply given up.

On 23 May 2019, the BJP, led by Narendra Modi stormed back to power for a second successive term, with an even better score, both in terms of seats and vote share. This is arguably the first time that a sitting Prime Minister has won a full majority on the basis of performance during his first term. In Nehru’s time there was virtually no opposition, and Indira Gandhi won a second time as a challenger who had taken on the old Congress, and by riding on the Garibi Hataopromise that she would remove the curse of poverty from the lives of the poorest Indians.

This is a remarkable victory indeed. But after just five years of BJP rule and with five more years coming up, certain informed voices are telling us that this is the end of the Khan Market Gang—India’s ruling elite—and of the Congress party, which has been reduced to a Kerala plus Tamil Nadu party, where it has won seats only due to allies, with the Congress President begging the Muslim League for votes.

Exactly the opposite of the collective wisdom that was prevailing before Modi’s shock victory in 2014. Is it really the end for them?

With 303 seats in BJP’s kitty, it is easy to forget what the picture would be if the tally was 200 instead—it can happen in the future, like 2004 did, without warning. Jagan Mohan Reddy says if BJP had got less than 272 seats, he would have extended support to it only if it gave Andhra Pradesh a special status. Others would demand their pound of flesh too, one of which would be an amenable Prime Minister from BJP, who would let allies choose ATM berths, and then look the other way—if not join in—while they went back to the UPA ways and days of—-many allege—unbridled loot. Lutyens elite—powerful once again—would reinforce their ‘Idea of India’, besides reclaiming the few levers of control they had lost in five Modi years.

Also, Amartya Sen is on the dot when he says that BJP has won “something in terms of power, but nothing particularly serious in the battle of ideas”. Unless the latter is won in the court of the people, electoral victories will be limited to a change in the ruling party alone; the ruling elite will remain largely in control.

In other words, as profound a change as the mandate of 2019 appears to be, it is actually partial and is also a whisker away from unravelling.

Fortunately, what Amartya Sen and most fellow travellers do not yet see is that even their victory is/was illusory. Sonia Gandhi, clueless about India and everything Indian, thought she had won it all when she triumphed, with almost zero resistance, in the battle of ideas, in JNU, TV studios, text books and Khan Market. That is one reason why her collapse at the hustings has been so dramatic, twice in a row, and recovery looks so impossible today. If you derisively put a billion people out of the equation, you are always a push away from the abyss.

Be that as it may, the stark truth is that as of now, the scale of BJP’s electoral victory notwithstanding, there is only one man who is preventing New India from sliding back into the old pit. Narendra Modi will win in 2024 too. But will even another ten years in power, with HRD ministers like Prakash Javdekar, to name just one of many such, be able to tilt the balance in the battle of ideas decisively? Will a new leadership emerge in the BJP to take the battle for the soul of India forward to fruition? Or will there be another long—even terminal—relapse, under its old leadership, like there was after 2004, or whenever BJP loses again?

Winning power is a necessary but not a sufficient condition to win the battle of ideas. The coming five years will tell us whether Narendra Modi will do more than the little he could during his tough first term as Prime Minister, to emerge victorious in this sphere too, and reclaim the glory of India that he so wants to. Until then, all is not lost for the ‘Khan Market Gang’.

This piece was first published in Swarajya https://swarajyamag.com/politics/all-is-not-lost-for-the-khan-market-gang-yet

Alliance With Congress: The Fall of King Kejriwal

No one quite took Delhi by storm, not even Narendra Modi, like he did. For a people silently suffering what they perceived to be a humongously corrupt and terror-friendly government led by Sonia Gandhi, for a people who had become disillusioned with politicians as a class, he rode in on a pristine white horse, with a halo so luminous that it mesmerised even the most cynical on both sides of the ideological divide.

Such was the blind belief in him that even when he broke his own promise and became a politician, everyone trusted him when he said that he did so only because politics could only be cleansed, and the system changed, from within. The aura did not diminish one bit even when he took support of Congress to become Delhi’s Chief Minister, or when, in a tearing hurry to become PM, he not only put up over 400 candidates for the 2014 Lok Sabha elections, but himself rushed to Varanasi to contest against Narendra Modi, the BJP’s PM candidate.

Varanasi, fortunately for India, did not buy his lie that while Modi was roaming around in planes and helicopters, he, an aam admi, had come to that city in a train “with only Rs 500 in my pocket,” and would stay there permanently even if he lost. In the event, when campaigning ended, he took the first flight back to Delhi, and has since never set foot in Varanasi.

Defeated in Kashi, he begged forgiveness of Delhiites and swore that he would never betray them again. Not only did they pardon and embrace him, they even gave him a victory like no one had ever got, sending 67 AAP MLAs to an Assembly that has a strength of 70.

Since that dazzling 2015 victory, the story of his precipitous fall from the pedestal he had put himself on, and his un-peeling as an allegedly blindly ambitious con man who is totally devoid of any values and principles, is long and revolting, to say the least. And we haven’t yet seen the bottom.

Arvind Kejriwal has done everything that he had accused the politicians he had entered politics to fight against of doing, and some more. From moving into a 5-acre bungalow, to taking state security, to trying to become CM of Punjab by courting Khalistanis, to cheering the “Bharat Tere Tukde” gang, to accusing other politicians of being corrupt only to apologise later, to abusing and blaming Modi for the mess that he has made in Delhi, there is nothing that he has not done with a vengeance that defies sanity.

The net result is that four years after Delhi voters gave him a stunning, unprecedented victory, he has so totally lost their support that he has again done something that many thought was unthinkable: begging Congress to ally with him in Delhi, Punjab and Haryana for the forthcoming Lok Sabha elections.

As always, even his beggary is devoid of humility, not a tinge.  War against corruption and Congress forgotten, he now claims that he has become a warrior against Narendra Modi and Amit Shah, and demands that the Congress party should play second fiddle to him in his latest “holy” fight with a common enemy. To pressurise the leadership of Congress into submitting to him, he has even gone to the extent of alleging that the party is not allying with him because it is secretly in bed with BJP.

At the same time, even though he knows he has almost completely lost public support, he is not willing to let the Congress ride on his back, on Delhi’s seven seats, in the 2019 edition of his holy war. Initially he tried to fool that party into agreeing to contest only one seat, but later improved the offer to two. The latest is that he is so desperate that he is willing to settle for a 4/3 formula in Delhi, no alliance in Punjab and one only seat in alliance in Haryana.

For Congress, the dilemma is almost like the one that confronted Mayawati and Akhilesh in UP, and Mamata in West Bengal. In order to defeat Modi in 2019, should it let a shrinking-dying AAP ride on its back into Parliament and beyond, at its expense? Should it listen to loyal ‘neutral’ journalists who want this alliance even more desperately than Kejriwal does?

The impact of what Congress does now will be felt in the Delhi Assembly elections which are due after less than a year. That is why Kejriwal is asking for more seats than Congress; he will demand an even bigger share of the pie from it at that time, on the strength of his 2015 score in Assembly elections and 2019 performance in Lok Sabha elections.

In short, Kejriwal, having completely lost the plot and the mandate in four short years, and desperate to cling on to power in Delhi, knows that he has no choice but to cannibalise Congress and reduce it to being a peripheral player in Delhi for years, if not decades. And he believes he can use Sonia and Rahul’s alleged hatred for Narendra Modi, and their burning desire to see him lose, to con them into falling into his trap.

Behind this devious plan lies Kejriwal’s fear that if he contests alone and gets fewer votes than Congress, he could well be forced into becoming a junior partner of that party in the Assembly elections next year. The predator will become prey.

Rahul knows that without an alliance with Kejriwal, he will not win any seat in Delhi. He also abhors the thought of Modi becoming PM again. In alliance, Rahul can win a maximum of three seats, though, given the soaring popularity of Modi and the trademark duplicity of Kejriwal, there is a real possibility that he might not win any, which will make his bargaining position with Kejriwal even worse during Assembly elections. Also, two-three seats of Delhi are not going to change the national picture for Congress. In addition, the possibility of two-odd AAP MPs moving to the BJP after elections, should the numbers so dictate, cannot be ruled out. No one is fighting a moral battle here.

Kejriwal has driven himself into a corner and is left with no choice but to beg Congress for an alliance, but Rahul has one to make. Does he want the immediate fruit of a couple of seats, or is he looking beyond 2019? Is he ready to risk becoming a fringe player in Delhi like he is in neighbouring UP,  or is he eager to reclaim the space Kejriwal snatched brutally from him in 2014.

This article was first published in Swarjya https://swarajyamag.com/politics/the-fall-of-king-kejriwal-what-a-congress-alliance-can-do-to-a-common-man-with-uncommon-aspirations

Is There Really No Wave In This Election?

BJP rally (Arun Sharma/Hindustan Times via Getty Images)

Political pundits have given their judgment: This is not a wave election. 2014 was a one-off, and not only will the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) struggle to cross the 200 mark this time, but even Sonia Gandhi might pull it off on the back of regional leaders who, they believe, will dutifully line up, like Rajas of yore, to offer their loyalty and support to her.

They have a point. No wave is visible. The BJP has just lost three Hindi-heartland states to the Congress, and Mayawati and Akhilesh have stitched up a formidable alliance which, more than anything else, will ensure that votes of 80-seater UP’s 17 per cent Muslims are not split and wasted.

It is also no secret that the BJP’s performance in the by-elections to Lok Sabha since 2014 has been dismal, to say the least, with the party failing to win any new seat and losing as many as nine out of 15 seats it held, including the one won five times in a row by UP Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath.

The pundits are, therefore, justified in dismissing the results of various opinion polls which show, in sum, NDA almost touching the half-way mark, BJP comfortably crossing the 200 hurdle, and Congress failing to wrest 100 by some margin.

Nothing in 2014 pointed to an absolute majority for the BJP. Nothing is pointing to an encore this year. In 2014, the impact of the chemistry of Modi, the ‘challenger’, was unknown; in 2019, analysts and psephologists agree that the chemistry of Modi, the prime minister, will not be enough to beat the arithmetic of the caste-religion combinations that have been formed to defeat him and the BJP.

Before the BJP lost three states towards the end of 2018, the Opposition, Congress and its thinkers, Arun Shourie among them, were convinced that 2019 would be lost if BJP was allowed to make it a battle between Modi and the rest. Thus was born the hare-brained strategy of turning the election into 543 independent elections — one per constituency — that would wish Modi away, though no one quite knew how that could be achieved on terra firma.

Victories of the Congress in Madhya Pradesh, Chhatisgarh and Rajasthan led to the hasty abandonment of that strategy, as Rahul Gandhi’s advisers were convinced that the only way to beat Modi was by turning the election into a Presidential contest between a triumphant Prince and an under-pressure Prime Minister.

That is how, some argued, LK Advani was trounced in 2009 by Dr Manmohan Singh. With the Congress being weaker than it ever was, they reckoned that all that the party needed was to touch its modest tally of 2004, and the rest would fall into place just as it did then. Hence the cacophony of its ecosystem urging all political parties to come together, effectively under Rahul’s leadership, to take on and defeat Modi, head-on.

Regional leaders, however, had different ideas this time. They saw no logic —where they were strong — in letting Congress increase its overall tally at their expense, with the votes of their vote banks, and then lord over them after the elections. On the contrary, in the death throes of the Congress, they spotted a heaven-sent opportunity to bolster their own chances to head/dictate terms to a rag-tag non-BJP government they believed would run the country if BJP lost.

Not crunching numbers here, but suffice it to say that with the Congress left out in the cold in UP and West Bengal — 122 seats — and facing almost unbeatable alliances stitched up by BJP in Bihar and Maharashtra — 88 seats —it will be a miracle if the party gets into three figures. In 2004, when Congress won 145, it had 31 seats in these four states and a whopping 29 in Andhra. This time it is staring at a loss of 50 seats in these five states alone. Add the Modi factor in other states, and it would appear that the party’s overall tally will be between 30 to 60 seats only.

Thus, having made the election Presidential solely on the basis of recent Assembly election results, has the Congress party made its biggest blunder by playing straight into Modi’s hands, or have Rahul and his election strategists spotted something not readily visible, and played a masterstroke?

Coming to the BJP, conventional wisdom also suggests that in the absence of a wave, the combination of anti-incumbency and anti-BJP alliances should be enough to pull the party below the 200 mark, and if that happens, and if Congress can’t cobble up the numbers, a face acceptable to Rahul and his ecosystem will become the PM of a chastened and weakened NDA.

But is there, really, no wave?

The two main parts of a wave are the trough and the crest. Before 2014, both Congress and BJP were in a trough, and both had given up on winning. LK Advani, in fact, admitted as much in his blog in 2013, that the best case scenario would be a coalition which could not be formed without BJP’s support. No one foresaw the crest that Modi created, or its amplitude. After 30 long years, a party won an absolute majority, and it was the BJP’s first such win.

In a wave, a trough follows a crest. So, before we say there is no wave this time, we must first find the trough. Did it follow the wave of 2014? If yes, when did it occur? Did Modi’s popularity ever so plummet in the five years that he has been PM?

After five years in power, Modi’s popularity graph shows, in sum, an upward trend. As per Lokniti CSDS, Modi was preferred as PM by 34% of the respondents in May 2014, while in 2019 the figure has gone up by 9% to 43%. Other pre-poll surveys also show a similar trend. Does this not imply that the crest of the 2014 wave is the trough of 2019, and BJP can only go up from here?

A large number of young Indians are still in awe of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Some, in fact, liken him to Superman—he can do anything. Modi’s rallies continue to attract huge, rapturous crowds across the country. The enthusiasm has not dimmed at all. If anything, Rahul Gandhi has inadvertently added to Modi’s mystique with the low-level personal attack that the latter has brilliantly turned on its head, to convince all except inveterate Modi-haters that India needs this ‘Chowkidar’ even more than it did in 2014.

Pakistan’s generals, influenced perhaps by the belief of some of their Indian counterparts that the surgical strikes of 2016 would make it difficult for Modi to go for another cross-LOC strike, have also done their bit. People are convinced that only Modi could have ordered air strikes on Pakistan proper, a first after 1971. Balakot has reinforced his image as a fearless, disruptive doer who places India’s interest above everything else.

Congress’ tame surrender to Pakistan after 26/11 has come back to haunt it; at the same time, in the battle of perceptions, it has made Modi look much bigger than he was before he ordered the audacious attack. Superman, may we say?

There is no peer — no one even near — nor  any trough, and Modi’s popularity, peaking at the perfect time, is at an all-time high. Therefore, a Mahagathbandhan notwithstanding, it is appears to this writer that the crest of 2014 is moving directly to an even higher crest in 2019.

Pundits will see its amplitude on 23 May 2019.

A slightly different version of the article was published in Swarajya  https://swarajyamag.com/blogs/is-this-really-a-waveless-election

SA'FAI' BEGINS, PURGE NEEDED

The whitewash, sa’fai’, of the damning Faigate revelations that have sinister implications for India, both internally and in its responses to Pakistan, has begun. And, as expected, the usual suspects are at it.

Prannoy Roy and Barkha Dutt’s NDTV, chastened by "guilt-tweets" of Ms. Dutt before and after the Radia tapes rash hit and claimed her, continuing histrionics notwithstanding, has chosen to remain silent lest it is unable to pull its smelly foot out of its mouth subsequently. Their burden has been taken on by two old friends of the channel, the publicly exposed Vir Sanghvi and the yet to be Shekhar Gupta.

Vir Sanghvi, now reduced to writing on the net, the very medium he derided at the peak of his wholly "paid" arrogance, has written another Radia piece “ dressed up” to look as a pat in the back for India, but meant to exonerate his many corrupt liberal friends who have been found to be anti-national as well. If you read the whole piece, you will find that Sanghvi has been unsparing in exposing the well-known game plan of Pakistan – which, let us be clear, means the ISI, which in turn means Pakistan’s Army Chief – for Kashmir which, as he brings out, India has been been warning the world about.

Yet, Mr. Sanghvi wants us to believe that the real issue about Faigate is that Ghulam Nabi Fai's organisation, the Kashmir American Council, was “created by the Pakistani state to con Americans!” You don’t expect men of Vir Sanghvi’s integrity to tell us why the ISI wanted to con the Americans over Kashmir. Because if he does that then he knows he cannot conjure the lame and disgraceful defence that he offers, in just a couple of lines, for Indian liberals and peaceniks, among them Justice Sachar, author of the infamous Sachar Commision report, who were regulars at Fai’s Kashmir conferences that were micro-managed by the sinister ISI. They, he claims, were unaware of Fai’s sources of funding and whitewashes their culpability by saying: “it is sad and unfortunate that they were duped into lending legitimacy to an ISI-sponsored initiative.”

The Editor of Indian Express, Shekhar Gupta, has, for once, beaten Vir Sanghvi and conjured an even more absurd defence of the indefensible, but one that some of those caught will try to employ to escape the accusation of committing plain treason.

Gupta rubbishes Sanghvi's line that those who enjoyed Fai’s hospitality were unaware that he was a Pak/ISI agent. This is what he says of Fai: “But all of it, the injured air of Kashmiri victimhood, and Americanised English would not fool you about who he exactly was, and what precisely he was after. He was a Pakistani lobbyist for “their” Kashmir cause, leading a very cleverly constructed over ground support base for the malevolent movement that was picking strength in the early nineties. You would have to be utterly nuts, delusional or smoking some awful prohibited substance to not figure this out. Would you have known he was funded by the ISI? Again, you had to be from another planet to believe anything else.”

As every donkey and his son knows, Pakistan’s Kashmir policy is driven wholly by the military and its outstanding covert operations outfit, the ISI, that has been fermenting trouble in the Valley and other parts of India for a long, long time. That is the reason why Gupta has abandoned the unaware line. But, he also knows that sleeping with the ISI is an unforgivable act of treason, soaked in blood. So, he bails out the likes of Justice Sachar and many others yet to be exposed by inventing a high moral ground where none can be: “A more honest — and morally totally convincing — answer would have been the straight one. That as an intellectual or, in case of some, as a civil society activist, you were fully within your rights to go and speak at any forum, even if it was funded or organised by the Pakistanis and that just the fact of accepting a free ticket and a tiny per diem would not have compromised your integrity.”

As I understand this bizarre argument, it is perfectly fine for well-known Indians who are representing India to lend respectability and credence to, and bolster the ant-India position of the ISI on Kashmir across the world, knowing fully well that it is one over which three wars have been fought and over which a proxy war is still on. So, by the same logic, Indians should also be at liberty to go to Kashmir and physically fight ISI’s war against India, or do the same in other parts of India by carrying out a terror attacks and killing innocent people.

A war is fought more in the minds than on the battlefield. How can any sane man argue that while Indian foot soldiers of the ISI (a wing of Pakistan's military) are guilty and should be hanged, those who are knowingly furthering its hostile-to-India cause and its war across the globe are not only innocent but have a right to do so?

But Gupta has the the nerve to say that it is entirely irrelevant as to “who accepted Fai’s free tickets and hospitality, knowingly or unknowingly.” Perhaps Gupta no longer needs such petty perks. But, the same gentleman, knowing what he does about the military’s vice-like grip over Pakistan's India policy, was among the first to articulate, and repeatedly, after 26/11 that India should actually strengthen Pakistan and give to it concessions over Kashmir and other issues to “enhance the power and credibility” of Pakistan’s government, one that even prints fake Indian currency in its mints. Then I had imagined that he was writing the nonsense he was because someone in the corridors of power that he lives in had asked him to. Now the picture is getting frightening.

For India, what Faigate means to the Americans is, at one level, peripheral. It is undoubtedly a cog in the big picture, but for us the immediate and extremely worrying concern is that it is the tip of a very large ISI iceberg that is attacking India at all levels in pursuance of the Pakistan military’s single-point objective of bleeding India to death through a thousand cuts.

What the likes of Shekhar Gupta and Vir Sanghvi will not speak of are the scary logical deductions that must come first to the minds of all analysts as a result of Fai exposure as an ISI agent. The simple fact is the Fai was used by the ISI to defeat India internationally in so far as its position on Kashmir is concerned. And it spent millions of dollars over the counter and -- there can be little doubt -- many more below it, to get Indians to help it win this small but integral part of its existential war against India. The real war is being fought and will be fought on ground in India, including Kashmir. Does it take rocket science to understand that ISI must have been spending a thousand times more here, at every possible level, starting from sleeper cells to the media, academia, think tanks, babudom, and India’s political leadership, right up to and including 10 Janpath?

Rahul Gandhi’s assessment, shared with an American, – no electoral politics there – that Hindu terror posed a bigger threat to India than Pak-sponsored terror, is irrefutable proof that – notwithstanding his limited intelligence and grasp – even the future Prime Minister of India (as some believe) is being deliberately misguided by his trusted advisers. This cannot be a coincidence. The ISI has penetrated even his innermost circle.

While one can accept that the daily front paging of Hindu terror is essentially driven by the compulsions of vote-bank politics, it cannot be an accident that the whole mainstream mind-space has become irrationally pro-Pakistan during the last few years.

Sonia Gandhi has appointed the lawyer who defended ISI’s front organisation SIMI, the mother of the Indian Mujahideen who have carried out many terror attacks, as India’s Law Minister. She has also filled the NAC with hate-filled activists of very dubious antecedents and got a former bureaucrat who has given SIMI a de facto clean chit to draft the pernicious Communal Violence Bill that emasculates Hindus and puts the reins of determining culpability of individuals and all state organs, including the military, in the hands of unelected representatives from minority communities, in so far as Hindu-Muslim tensions (let's cut pretences) are concerned.

Seen in isolation, as indeed, liberals and ISI agents want us to, the many steps being taken by Sonia’s government and NAC seem innocuous, even harmless. But when viewed holistically, one cannot miss the fact that there is a method behind it all. Liberals and peaceniks and Hindu-haters are all pushing the “Break-India” agenda of the ISI.

The labyrinth of terror of which Fai was a part runs deep in India and many of these guys who have virtually been dictating India’s policies along all dimensions with regard to Pakistan and, by extension, Indian Muslims, who the ISI has been trying to turn into its assets, are central players in it, many willing, aware. That is why the hushed silence. That is why these fraudulent defences.

“ISI has more freedom of opinion than us.” This tweet unknowingly sums up the picture that India’s traitors have helped paint. They are many, they are powerful, they are dangerous, they have vested interests. And they have already begun the Big Cover Up. They may have much at stake, but India has much more. So, they have to be taken on by the state, by each one of us. The sa’fai’ under way must be exposed, and pressure put on the government to uncover and remove all termites who have gnawed deep into India, right to the doors of Sonia Gandhi who seems to have got caught in a trap of her own making.

The purge has to be ruthless and untouched by any political or personal considerations. This is the real lesson of Faigate.
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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.
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