Inside Rahul Gandhi

Inside Rahul’s systemDecoding his first big interview

Copyright © 2012 Firstpost

Table of contents

The reality of Rahul

3 things we learned about Rahul from his interview 04

Stuck between Arnab and a hard place: Rahul’s quandary 07

Yes, Rahul is an anomaly but why is he proud of it? 09

Rahul Gandhi and mystery of the strangeness quotient 10

Why Rahul may be happier walking off into the sunset 12

1984 reignited

Frankly lying: Rahul Gandhi on 1984 and Gujarat 16

Rahul and other 1984 apologists: The big lie of Cong’s secularism 18

Has AAP outdone BJP by ordering SIT probe into 1984 anti-Sikh riots? 20

Did Rahul make a big mistake?

Rahul’s TV interview: Congress in damage control mode? 23

How he turned the tables: The Rahul Gandhi interview 25

1984 riots, angry allies: Why Rahul’s interview has backfired 29

How Rahul Gandhi ended up tying himself in knots 31

Rahul Gandhi interview: Why the Youth Congress is cheering 33

Et tu Modi?

The artful dodgers: Now that Rahul has spoken, will Modi follow? 36

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The reality of Rahul



3 things we learned about Rahul from his interview

Piyasree Dasgupta Jan 28, 2014

Y ou know this man. As Pappu, if you are a big Twitter hashtag junkie. As ‘sheh-zada’ if you are an ardent admirer of the

Narendra Modi school of retro nomenclature. Or As the ‘reluctant prince’ if you are a collector of newspaper headlines with great recall value.

Rahul Gandhi probably has more nicknames to his credit than Sushilkumar Shinde has had blonde moments in his political career. We have seen him upset, we have seen him angry, we have see him happy and we have even seen him kicking himself in the posterior (well, in any political discourse, the blows Rahul has rained on the Congress government amounts to exactly that).

Some days we know he is Congress’ PM candi-date, while on other days we suspect he is the Congress PM candidate. And then there are the days that we’re absolutely sure that Congress wouldn’t make him the PM candidate.

In his low key political career spanning roughly ten years (he fought his first elections in 2004), Rahul Gandhi has been the sum total of a series of conclusions we have drawn from his very limited public appearances – most of which survived in public memory because of stand-up comedians trying to outshine each other on Twitter and hence churning a joke out of every

article and pronoun that he utters.

One would have said it was a clever move for the Gandhi heir to appear on a television interview and dispel the air of hopelessness around him. In fact, from the promos on Times Now chan-nel, the hopes went up once the viewers realised that the anchor was speaking in a volume, a few notches lower than what is reserved for his usual guests.

Whether at the end of the interview, it still seemed like a good move is debatable. But here’s what could be gleaned about him from the said interview:

1. Rahul Gandhi either doesn't know or is in denial about what ‘specific’ means

If you are a fan, you might want to read that as Rahul Gandhi needs to shoot his manager right now. Assuming that Rahul Gandhi doesn’t just share Goswami’s deep concern for what the nation wants to know and hence agreed on this interview after a thorough intra-party brain-storming, Gandhi seemed far from prepared to grapple a difficult question or two.

And these weren’t even questions that struck him out of the blue – thanks to an entity called the BJP, these are questions that are metaphori-cally lobbed at Gandhi religiously every other day. So when Goswami declared right at the beginning that he wants ‘specific’ answers to his questions, Gandhi should have realised that the nation doesn’t want to know about the Gandhis from him – they don’t want to throw Prakash Jha out of work just yet. However, Gandhi re-fused to answer a single question in a way that didn’t sound like a particularly unimpressive voiceover for a Gandhi biopic. Sample this:

Goswami: Rahul Gandhi the first point is this; you have just avoided this whole question about whether you are open to PM's post. It



seems to me Rahul that you are avoiding a dif-ficult contest.

Rahul Gandhi: See, if you look at the speech I gave at AICC a few days back. The issue is ba-sically how the Prime Minister in this country is chosen. The way the Prime Minister is chosen in this country is through the MPs. Our system chooses MPs & MPs elect Prime Minister.

Or this:

Goswami: The growing belief is that if Rahul Gandhi has not picked up the challenge official-ly that means that there is a fear of loss, he is avoiding a direct one on one battle with Naren-dra Modi, you must answer that?

Rahul Gandhi: To understand that question you have to understand a little bit about who Rahul Gandhi is and what Rahul Gandhi's circumstances have been and if you delve into that you will get an answer to the question of what Rahul Gandhi is scared off and what he is not scared off.

The real question is what I am doing sitting here, you are a journalist, when you were small you must have said to yourself I want to do something, you decided to become a jour-nalist at some point, why did you do that?

Your take-away? Rahul Gandhi likes the sound of ‘Rahul Gandhi’ and hence likes saying ‘Rahul Gandhi’ aloud many times in a sentence.

In fact, this was the first opportunity during the interview, where Gandhi could have sounded out a strong message to the Opposition by fol-lowing the bible of politics which suggests a slightly adamant, but still strong-sounding ‘no’.

However, his stream-of-consciousness answer that eventually led to Arnab Goswami’s nursery school ambitions, just reinforced the picture of a leader whose goal is as unclear to himself as it is to his party. Then from 1984 riots to Adarsh Scam, from his education to his willingness to be part of the political system, Gandhi batted away every question with catchphrases we are familiar with, thanks to his speeches. In the traditional political narrative of our country, hubris is often read as confidence and Gandhi

missed a chance to dig in his heels as a leader who commands attention.

2. Rahul’s favourite word: system; his least favourite: Modi

Final score: System: 73 Modi: 3

Rahul Gandhi evidently loves the word ‘system’ way more than Yo Yo Honey Singh likes his own name. In fact, it is to him what many would say, ‘mitron’ is to Narendra Modi. While his limited vocabulary is not greatly worrying, what is, is his how his relationship with the word, as it applies to India at present, is completely misdi-rected.

Here is the Vice President of a party, which is the incumbent government, talking about how the ‘system’ needs an overhaul. If ‘system’ is the political establishment that runs governments in the country, Congress while not being re-sponsible for the whole of it, is certainly respon-sible for the biggest section of it.

So did Rahul Gandhi declare he is going to shake the entrenched political malpractices up? No he didn’t. He carefully skirted past the issue of Maharashtra Congress ministers originally implicated in the Adarsh scam report.

Did he strongly demand all political parties be brought under his trophy policy – RTI? No. He said, if the legislature is made answerable to the public, so should the judiciary and the media. Did he clearly enumerate the steps he is tak-ing to make the ‘system’ more accessible to the country. No.

Given the fate of his earlier initiatives to make the party more inclusive, Gandhi’s anti-system assertions lacked the thrust of a concrete action plan.

His web initiative Khidkee fizzled out after a week-long run in which it effectively turned into a scrapbook for platitudes for the Congress.

We have still heard nothing of his initiative to have aspiring legislators fill up a five-page application form for purposes of transparent nomination. No one knows who compiles these forms, who screens them, and what the process



involved in the elimination of candidates is.

3. Rahul is not equal to Congress?

It is probably not just Ajay Maken who has been haunted by his question every time Rahul opens his mouth to speak. Though it was a warped question at its best, Rahul seemed unwilling to shoulder the burden of the wrongs of his party, though he doesn’t quite mind revelling in its history of political hegemony in India.

While it might be slightly unfair to ask Rahul to ‘apologise’ for the anti-Sikh riots as the anchor framed it, the Gandhi heir cannot still afford to not acknowledge this phase of Congress’ history because he was not a ‘functional’ member at that time.

The attempt to dissociate a political narrative from selected phases of its own development can only produce a discordant and desperate appeal to look into the future regardless of the past. And that runs the risk of being read as disregard for the past, lack of penitence and an evident absence of humility. The voter will compelled to ask, if you dismiss the past, where is the assurance that you have learnt from it and won’t repeat its mistakes?

Asked, why he didn’t deem it necessary to speak up during the 2G scam and why was he so re-moved from the party that he didn’t even smell the wrongdoings, Gandhi said, “My position was that I report to the Prime Minister. Whatever I felt I had conversations with the Prime Min-ister. Whatever I felt about the issues I made it

abundantly clear to the Prime Minister. I was involved in the legislation, RTI legislation. And now I have helped pass the Lokpal Bill. I bring you back. The real issue here is participation of people in politics.”

It won’t be completely off the mark to say that Rahul is in a great hurry to distance himself from every scam the Congress has been caught in.

The mark of a good leader is one who knows how to drag his brood out of muck if the party were to be caught in it. His passing the buck on the Prime Minister reveals another pathological problem – his refusal to take responsibility or his expertise to shoulder it alone.

The primary weapon in a political party’s arse-nal is a strong defence – a mix of denial, refusal and counter-allegation. And Gandhi seems keen on defending and promoting just those aspects of the party’s activities he has participated in, leaving the rest to their own devices. It can be read as selfishness, it can be read as ineptitude and it will most certainly be counted as a big leadership drawback. And its ripples are bound to be felt by the several lower rungs of the party who have associated Congress with other lead-ers before Rahul.

Rahul’s anti-Old Congress stance can only gain credibility when the investigations in the sev-eral scams reach a conclusive end. If the Adarsh scam is a template to go by, we’d rather not place our money on that one.



Stuck between Arnab and a hard place: Rahul’s quandary

In the end after some 100 questions, the nation got to know many things from Rahul Gandhi. It’s just

that most of them were not answers to questions Arnab asked.

Sandip Roy Jan 28, 2014

A very telling moment in Rahul Gandhi’s interview with Times Now's Arnab Gos-wami was when Mr.-India-Wants-to-

Know was pugnaciously grilling him about the 1984 anti-Sikh riots in Delhi.

Rahul: All I'm saying is there is a difference be-tween the 1984 riots and the Gujarat riots. The difference is that the government of the day in 1984 was not aiding and abetting the riots. That is all I'm saying.

Arnab: So you don't need to apologise for the '84 riots. If someone seeks an apology from you, will you give it? Your Prime Minister has apolo-gised for the riots. Expressed deep regret. Will you do the same?

Rahul: First of all I wasn't involved in the riots at all. It wasn't that I was part of it.

Everyone knows that the first statement is non-sensical. Congress leaders were very much part of the aiding and abetting in 1984. For Rahul Gandhi to just deny it baldly is rewriting his-

tory, especially since at some point of the inter-view he conceded that some Congressmen were “probably involved”.

But then he can hardly be expected to go on na-tional television and do a grand 1984 mea culpa either on behalf of his party. However, he could have said that unlike Modi, Manmohan Singh has specifically apologized for 1984. Instead it was left to Goswami to remind him of that.

The interview clearly shows how Rahul is in effect stuck between a rock and a hard place. Rahul is held accountable in the interview for all the sins of the Congress, even dating back to a time when he was not involved with the party.

On one level that’s unfair. Modi is not called upon to defend everything the BJP/NDA has ever done. But the problem for Rahul is Modi has his own track record. Rahul does not.

Rahul has created his own predicament. Af-ter spending much of the last decade acting as some would put it as a glorified intern allegedly rebuilding his party, he has little record of his own. He could have been a union minister if he had so chosen but he did not. If he had done that, Arnab could have talked about his achieve-ments and failures there instead of attacking him about everything from the riots of 1984 to corruption scams under Manmohan Singh’s watch.

Rahul’s response to all those charges was simply to duck and recite homilies about empowering women. He tried to set himself up as the outsid-er when in fact he is the prince, not the pauper.



When Goswami asked how the party could preach about attacking corruption and con-template an election alliance with someone like Lalu Prasad Yadav in Bihar, Rahul said, "These decisions of the Congress party are made by senior leaders."

If Rahul honestly thinks he is not a “senior lead-er” in his own party with little say in electoral alliances then someone should tell the party that before it goes to the polls. But in reality it’s a classic Rahul move to shy away from uncom-fortable truths by pretending to be an outsider to the system.

But as elections draw closer that is just not going to work. The Congress, or any party for that matter, needs to be led from the front by someone who actually has a hunger for power. There’s nothing wrong with that, provided one’s hunger for power is about effecting change rath-er than lining one’s own pockets. Rahul thinks it’s a virtue to appear free from that hunger. As he told Goswami:

I don't get driven by the desire for power. I'm just not driven by it. For me power is an instru-ment that can be used for certain things. But for me, it's not interesting to own it, to capture it or to hold it.

The point is his party wants to capture it and hold it. And Rahul does it no favours by his act of half-abdication.

To his credit, Rahul for all his vague replies, put himself up for an Arnab Goswami inquisition though the editor held back on his usual incen-diary fireworks. Perhaps Narendra Modi will do the same at some point but up to this point Modi has avoided the lengthy sit down televi-sion one-on-one. Modi is in reality quite inac-cessible. He is just very visible and his visibility gets mistaken for accessibility.

Bashing Rahul is easy to do and a favourite political sport for commentators. But it’s also a fact that the man put himself through an inter-view that could not have been the most pleas-ant experience. At the end of it he emerged as someone earnest but vague, preferring to re-treat to the safety of the broad stroke instead of answering the specific question put to him. He spoke about himself in the third person as if the whole interview was an out of body experience for him.

In the end after some 100 questions, the nation got to know many things from Rahul Gandhi. It’s just that most of them were not answers to questions Arnab asked.



Yes, Rahul is an anomaly but why is he proud of it?

He had ten long years to prepare for it, and yet Rahul Gandhi turned up grossly undercooked for the first

television interview of his political career.

Dhiraj Nayyar Jan 29, 2014

H e had ten long years to prepare for it, and yet Rahul Gandhi turned up gross-ly undercooked for the first television

interview of his political career. Clearly, he had done some last minute mugging, memorising key words like RTI, youth, women and system, but for an interview that lasted almost 90 min-utes bandying about those terms repeatedly could not earn him a pass grade.

Politics, like some examinations, is a cruel al-most brutal past time. Rahul Gandhi was being honest and sincere when he said that he was not driven by a thirst for power. But in that single admission, he also revealed why he remains unfit to hold high office.

Forget Prime Minister, Rahul Gandhi did not appear convincing enough to be a Cabinet Minister, except perhaps for Youth Affairs or Women’s Empowerment. To succeed in politics, like in any other profession, a person needs to be driven, have a fire in the belly, a keenness to learn, a desire to achieve, an ambition to rise to the top in rapid time. Rahul has none of those.

Perhaps more important than the fact that Rahul Gandhi doesn’t possess those qualities is the fact that he doesn’t perceive the need to try and acquire them. That is the curse of his inher-itance. He is born to lead the Congress party. The thought that he may one day be deposed for non-performance would not have crossed his mind such is the servility of the party to the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty. Thus assured of a per-manent leadership position, win or lose makes little difference to Rahul. Even a huge political loss cannot ignite his fire.

Unlike most other politicians, Rahul Gandhi can afford to lose, just as he can afford to bum-ble through an interview. He can say that he will take full responsibility for the defeat of the Congress because there are no consequences for him — especially since he has no thirst for power. He is an anomaly. To be fair, Rahul said as much. Except that he seemed proud of it.

It is not a matter of pride. It is a matter of shame that India’s oldest political party has a leader (make no mistake, he is the boss) who is not interested in the rough and tough of politics and instead sees politics as a means to a slow discovery of himself (as a non-politician), quite unlike his great-grandfather for whom politics was about the discovery of India. The law of diminishing returns has set into the dynasty.

The only thing Rahul Gandhi seems passionate about is opening up his party and the politi-cal system from its insular state. But again, he doesn’t recognise the contradiction of his de-mocratisation drive — if there is a monarch on top and several princes around him then what democracy is he talking about? Perhaps only at the level of the Panchayat.

Rahul would be taken seriously if he offered to abdicate his political inheritance and worked instead as an evangelist for political reform (and women’s empowerment and youth affairs and freedom of information) in India. He seems like a nice guy with limited talent and a famous name. He only needs to find the right profes-sion.



Rahul Gandhi and mystery of the strangeness quotient

From the Congress’ perspective, Rahul’s approach could only be bad news. They need a commander to

lead them in the coming war, however the chosen one does not even feel there’s a war ahead.

Akshaya Mishra Jan 28, 2014

“Y ou might think I am strange,” says Rahul Gandhi at one point in his interview with Arnab Goswami of

Times Now. He appeared strange indeed, in a positive way though. Take all the malice and hate that usually goes into analyzing him out of the way while judging him from the interview, there are chances that you might discover a person with strong beliefs and sense of commit-ment, someone who is deep into politics but not a politician at all and someone who could be a good philosopher-mentor to a party but never a general leading it to victory.

For most part, the interviewer and the inter-viewee were at different tangents — the latter impatient to fly off to familiar territory and the former trying break the flight by pulling him back to specific questions of controversial na-ture. As usual, Rahul was found at a loss when confronting the difficult questions.

It is intriguing that despite understanding clear-ly that the same set of questions would be flung at him – the media have been doing so relent-

lessly for years — he would be so completely disinclined to keep himself ready with answers. This, coming from someone in constant public focus, would qualify as strange.

He does not appear to be a normal political leader — interpret it whichever way you want. That he does not enjoy being drawn into con-tentious political topics has been evident for sometime. He likes to be seen playing the out-sider and the agent of change in Indian politics, not only in the Congress. He is more comfort-able talking concepts like democracy, empower-ment and rights than touching mundane mat-ters such as governance.

In an age so full of noise, aggression and show-manship, he is surprisingly non-combative and low-key – forget his periodical public outbursts now and then. He has to be strange. Which other political leader of his stature would enter-tain questions on his educational qualification?

To be frank, most of the questions put to him by the media are asinine and don’t deserve to be dignified with answers. Why, for example, Rahul needs to answer the ‘dynasty’ question repeatedly when hardly any party – yes, this includes the BJP too — in India follows perfect democratic practices in conducting itself? Why must he be expected to commit himself on the prime minister question?

The media have reduced the general elections to a glorified version of cock fights in tribal regions. They are disappointed that he is not joining a presidential style hand-to-hand com-bat with Modi. But it is not Rahul’s responsibil-ity to keep the media entertained. Again, what



response do you expect when you ask whether he is scared of Modi. How many times does he need to tell in public that the party is in a bad shape and in need of organizational revival? The questions are pointless because they invite sub-jective answers tied to perspective and context; more so when those putting them have decided the answers and are determined to reject or challenge them if they go the wrong way.

But isn’t it odd that he would be completely unprepared for questions? He was hardly con-vincing when handling questions on his party’s electoral losses, comparing the riots of 2002 and 1984, on his stand on corruption and the Congress support to the Aam Aadmi Party. Surely the interviewer was throwing him in un-

comfortable territory more often that he would have liked. But how long can he evade these? It is true he brings certain freshness and sincerity to politics with his approach, but it would in-deed be strange if he refuses to acknowledge the need to engage the media better.

From the Congress’ perspective, Rahul’s ap-proach could only be bad news. They need a commander to lead them in the coming war, however the chosen one does not even feel there’s a war ahead. He is engrossed in long-term vision. Of course, he talks of the party’s victory in 2014, but there’s nothing in his de-meanour to suggest that he is ready for the tough task ahead. With few other options left, they have to bear with the strangeness quotient.



Why Rahul may be happier walking off into the sunset

Rahul Gandhi, as seen in his first TV interview, comes across as a dynast uncomfortable with his origins

and uncertain about the uses of power

R Jagannathan Jan 28, 2014

R ahul Gandhi’s first major television interview tells us many things we may have suspected about him but didn’t

know for sure.

First, he is nervous and not comfortable under the arclights. He couldn’t hide his discomfi-ture in front of a TV camera as he fidgeted and avoided eye contact repeatedly. Second, he probably means well, but is unsure how to make sense of two contradictory forces in his life: his troubled inheritance and his underlying beliefs. One suspects that he is not a dynast by inclina-tion; dynastic expectations have been thrust on him. Third, there’s a sharp divergence between what he said and what he may really believe in – as was apparent from his uncertain and shifty body language. Fourth, for a politician, he showed no will to power. When asked direct questions, he pouted unconvincing philosophy.

It is obvious that Arnab Goswami’s tough and direct questions forced him to fib – whether it was on Narendra Modi, or the comparisons between 2002 and 1984, or his unease with corruption in the Congress and other people’s corruption.

This leads me to conclude that the only resolu-tion of the dilemma facing him lies outside his party. And possibly outside politics too. He has to forsake his inheritance to be really effective as a person with some aims of making a differ-ence to society. As a politician thrust into a posi-tion of power, he will probably be a disastrous ruler. You can’t rule well if you do not believe power is important to achieving something. You can't do good if you feel guilty about the mere exercise of power.

Let’s look at his various statements and see why the above conclusions are not far-fetched.

Rahul was distinctly uncomfortable with all the questions the anchor posed to him about Modi, or corruption or his own prime ministerial ambitions. He always avoided these questions by emphasising that these were not the ques-tions that bothered him, but how to change the “system”. The word system, as my colleague points out, appeared over 70 times in the inter-view even though Goswami asked him nothing about the system. Rahul said: “The thing that I see is that the system in this country needs to change, I don't see anything else and I am blind to everything else. I am blind because I saw people I love destroyed by the system. I am blind because the system everyday is unfair to our people…”.

There are shades of Arvind Kejriwal in this – which tells us that Rahul is actually an unlikely Congress messiah. He does not see himself as the answer to the party’s drive for power – even if some Congress sycophants do. His main criticism against Modi is also that he wants to



concentrate power in his hands.

He said: “The BJP has a prime ministerial candidate, the BJP believes in concentration of power in the hands of one person. I fundamen-tally disagree with that, I believe in democracy, I believe in opening up the system.”

This, from someone born to power in a dynasty, is a bit thick – unless this view is an indirect expression of his own fundamental ambiva-lence towards the exercise of power. Some time ago, he said that his mother considered “power as poison”. The chances are these are his own views too. He may thus be using Modi’s alleged obsession with power to give vent to his own feelings about power.

It is also likely that he is uncomfortable with his own party’s corruption – though he said confus-ing things at the interview. On the Adarsh probe report, when Goswami asks him why nothing was done, Rahul tells him he has done some-thing: “I have made it absolutely crystal clear right in front of the press what I think about this issue.” When Goswami reminds him that Ashok Chavan (former Maharashtra CM, who is at the centre of it all) still faces no action, Rahul retreats tamely and unconvincingly: “What all I'm saying is that anybody, regardless of who he is, if there is any corruption by any Congress person, we will take action.”

The same ambivalence was evident on Lalu Prasad as well. One may recall that it was Ra-hul Gandhi’s “nonsense” remark that ended the ordinance to allow convicted politicians to continue in office – a decision that affected Lalu Prasad most, as his conviction in the fod-der scam followed soon afterwards. But right now his party is in serious talks for an alliance with Lalu’s party in Bihar – the same party he dumped in order to go it alone in 2009 and 2010.

Rahul’s tame excuse was that it was not an al-liance with Lalu, but his party. “We are making an alliance with a political party.”

Clearly, his heart and his head are in conflict on this issue of corruption. He might be hap-pier having a cleaner party and no power – but heading a party means compromising with evil.

Rahul probably dreads these compromises – but can’t bring himself to say it like it is.

There is the same split evident on 2002 and 1984 too. To most observers, the two events are similar – with the BJP and the Congress in the dock for failing to prevent attacks on a com-munity after traumatic events (the Godhra train fire and Indira Gandhi’s assassination). But Rahul pretended not to see the similarity. It is the kind of wishful blindness that only someone deeply troubled by the comparison can enunci-ate. He said: “The difference between the 1984 riots and the riots in Gujarat was that in 1984 the government was trying to stop the riots. I remember, I was a child then, I remember the government was doing everything it could to stop the riots. In Gujarat the opposite was the case. The government in Gujarat was actually abetting and pushing the riots further. So there is a huge difference between the two things…”.

The inconsistencies in his views are obvious: if he was just a child then, he could not have had much of a first-hand view or memories on how the “government was going everything to stop the riots.” Everyone knows that it was a com-pletely one-sided Congress party-led attack on Sikhs, unlike 2002, where Hindus were attack-ing Muslims and the subsequent communal rioting resulted in many deaths on both sides – but with Muslims losing thrice as many people as Hindus. In 2002, the attacks were less one-sided than in 1984.

And where did he get the idea that the Modi government was behind the killings? He replies: “I mean, it's not me...it's the large number of people who were there, large number of people who saw actively the government of Gujarat be-ing involved in the riots.”

Nor was he entirely convincing in replying to the question of an apology for the 1984 riots. He made it plain that he had nothing to do with 1984: “First of all I wasn't involved in the riots at all. It wasn't that I was part of it.”

But that should make an apology easier – after all Manmohan Singh did it easily in 2005 even though he wasn’t part of the rioting at all.

One possibility is that Rahul may not want to



be seen as disloyal to the memory of his father, who was the principal political beneficiary of the 1984 riots. Rajiv Gandhi skillfully used the riots to win 404 seats for the Congress party by playing on Hindu fears of Sikh extremism. Rajiv never apologised for 1984 – and even made insensitive remarks (“when a big tree falls, the earth shakes”) about it.

The point: Both Rajiv and Modi used a traumat-ic event to electoral advantage. But Rahul chose to see the event differently. That he is willing to believe that Modi is different from Rajiv can only be attributed to filial loyalty – little else.

Perhaps the truest thing Rahul spoke was on the dynasty itself, and it is worth quoting him at some length on this.

“The real issue is that I didn't choose to be born in this family, I didn't sign up and say that I like to be born in this family. It happened, so the choice in front of me is pretty simple: I can either turn around and say okay I will just walk away from this thing and leave it alone or I can say I can try and improve something. Pretty much every single thing I have done in my political career has been to bring in youngsters, has been to open up, has been to democratise.”

He said: “I am absolutely against the concept of dynasty, anybody who knows me knows that and understands that. But you are not going to wish away dynasty in a closed system; you have to open the system. Dynasty or children of politicians becoming powerful happens in the BJP, it happens in the DMK, it happens in the SP, it happens in the Congress party, it happens everywhere.”

This elaborate protestation is a tell-tale indica-tion that Rahul is caught between the dynastic expectations of his family and party even while he himself is not too convinced about it. Which is why he even brings up the question of wheth-er he can “walk away” from it all.

Rahul’s statement that he did not “choose to be born in this family” is probably straight from the heart. He probably feels guilty about his inheritance. The dilemma cannot be solved by him staying in the Congress or playing a role he does not believe in.

If he is true to himself, he should indeed walk away from it all.

(Read the full transcript of the Times Now in-terview here)


http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/Rahul-Gandhis-first-interview-Full-text/articleshow/29455665.cms


1984 reignited



Frankly lying: Rahul Gandhi on 1984 and Gujarat

Why should we trust Rahul to address issues honestly when he was so evidently willing to lie over fundamental issues only to save his family

and his party’s reputation?

Hartosh Singh Bal Jan 28, 2014

I t would have been comic but for the fact that the man who was such cause for na-tional entertainment last night is, and will

continue to be in all but designation, the head of India’s largest political party. It thus has to be seen as a tragedy that we had to listen to such a man speak at such length to say so little of substance, all the while posturing hypocritically and callously about the actual facts that led to the mass murder of innocents.

When Arnab asked him: What is your view, would like to expound your views, your PM ac-cuses Narendra Modi in his press conference of presiding over "the mass massacre of inno-cent citizens on the streets of Ahmedabad." Mr. Rahul Gandhi my question to you is this, do you agree with your PM when he says that?He answered: Well, I mean what the Prime Minister is saying is a fact, Gujarat happened, people died but the real issue as far I am con-cerned...

Gujarat happened, people died, but of course those are not the real issues as far as he is concerned. In the course of another answer he managed to tell us what he thought the real is-sue was:

Look. All I'm saying, all I'm saying is that there is a difference between the 1984 riots and the Gujarat riots. The simple difference is that in 1984 the government was not involved in the massacre of people. In Gujarat it was. The ques-tion is why do these kind of things take place. Why is it that the Gujarat riots took place? The Gujarat riots took place frankly because of the way our system is structured, because of the fact that people do not have a voice in the system. And what I want to do. And I have said it and I

will say it again. What I want to do is question the fundamentals over here. What I want to do is ask a couple of questions. I want to ask why candidates that are chosen in every single party are chosen by a tiny number of people. I want to ask why women have to be scared to go out on the street. I want to ask these questions. These are fundamental questions.

At this point, I began to wonder, as, no doubt, so many others did, is this man for real?

He was lying about the facts. Policemen across ranks were indicted for the killings in Gujarat, as they were indicted for the killings in Delhi. Ministers of the BJP Gujarat government were named in 2002 as were ministers of the Con-gress Union government in 1984. Several Sangh politicians were rewarded for their role in the killings as were several Congress politicians.

He was saying what, under the circumstances, amounted to callous nonsense. The killings did not take place because the people do not have a voice in the system, they took place because the system did not have the courage to take on the



voice of the mob, and in fact collaborated with it.

Given that no member of the Gandhi family ever had been so grilled in public it does verge on the unfair to suggest Arnab should have pushed further, but he should have.

When Rahul said – The difference between the 84 riots and the riots in Gujarat was that in 1984 the Government was trying to stop the ri-ots. I remember, I was a child then, I remember the Government was doing everything it could to stop the riots – what exactly did he mean?

What did he think doing "everything" meant? Given that he invokes his father’s legacy at every step what did he think of his father’s statement about a great tree falling? Why was it that for him the legal process was a defence where the Congress was concerned, it wasn’t where the BJP was concerned?

It betrays political stupidity to be unprepared for a question on why he thought Modi’s gov-ernment was complicit in the killings, but it says something worse about Rahul that he was will-ing to deny the reality of the 1984 killings.

It does not help his cause that his demeanor through the rest of the interview was in keep-ing with such prevarication. After squirming through an hour of further questioning, where he did nothing to improve the disaster the inter-view had already become within the first half an hour, he declared that Arnab had become mired in superficialities. He then informed us that "the real core issues in this election are, 1)Are we going to head towards a democracy, towards deepening our democracy and towards opening up the system or are we going to head towards concentration of power? 2) Are we going to head towards empowerment of women? Are we going to be a half strong nation? Be a half proud nation? Or are we going to actually empower women?’’

Some of these are worthy questions, some of these are born out of an acute misunderstand-ing of our democracy and our Constitution, but really the core question goes well beyond these – Why should we trust Rahul to address any of these issues honestly when he was so evidently willing to lie over fundamental issues only to save his family and his party’s reputation?



Rahul and other 1984 apologists: The big lie of Cong’s secularism

In his blundering fashion, Rahul has undone this silence that surrounds the complicity of the highest level of the party in the 1984 riots -- and exposed the

secular pretensions who support his party.

Hartosh Singh Bal Jan 30, 2014

T he central character of Jaspreet Singh’s book Helium, recently released in India, is the son of a senior policeman who

was an important functionary in Delhi at the time of the 1984 massacres. The book, in some measure, is a story of how he summons up the courage to face up to this past with a degree of honesty.

If only Rahul Gandhi could have summoned up a similar honesty, we might be living in a differ-ent country. But even so he has managed to pro-vide one worthy service. Thanks to his fumbling lies, the denial of justice for the 1984 victims has reentered our political discourse.

Given that Narendra Modi’s presence in the prime ministerial race has already ensured that what happened in 2002 in Gujarat will remain an important issue in the run up to the election, this is as it should be. The problem, however, is the competitive discourse between 1984 and 2002 that has become a part of the rhetoric, not just among the Congress and the BJP but among a host of sympathizers of either party

which includes several commentators.

The desire to make much of the ideological dif-ferences between the Congress and the BJP only serves to hide an ugly reality of this country. Both 2002 and 1984 were examples of majori-tarian communalism, which is why there was no shortage of low level Congressmen who partici-pated in the 2002 killings or for that matter of RSS functionaries who were named in the 1984 killings.

This majoritarian communalism is not the preserve of sections of the Hindu community. In Kashmir, the Muslim majority is also largely equally accountable as far as the events that led to the exile of Kashmiri Pandits is concerned; or for that matter the Sikh majority which stood by in the late 1980s as terrorists selectively target-ed Hindus in the rural areas of the Majha region of Punjab, a story which is yet to be told in all its details.

Both parties, the Congress and the BJP, have seen political opportunities in exploiting ma-joritarian feelings on various occasions in this country. To claim that the BJP has an explicit ideology that makes it more dangerous than the Congress is not borne out by any evidence of communal violence in this country. Evidence that has held true over several decades cannot be dismissed with some rhetoric about ideologi-cal differences, even if it is a man like Amartya Sen propounding it, or the CPI or CPI (M) en-dorsing it.

This majoritarian tendency is one of the great dangers we face, and where Narendra Modi and his forebears are concerned, it is easy to recog-



nize the dangers. His blinded supporters may not like it but that does not change the truth. Where the Congress is concerned, we run into a greater difficulty, as there are a huge number of people who actively seek to intervene and make excuses for its actions, considering them aberrations -- ever though since Indira Gandhi split the Indian National Congress and started a party in her image there has been no ideological moorings to what we now call the Congress.

Thankfully, Rahul’s interview to Arnab Gos-wami has changed the enforced silence around the deliberate manipulation of the process of justice in case of the 1984 massacres. While any other comparison is contemptible, it is true that the Congress has been far more successful at sidetracking the judicial processes. It did so by setting up numerous inquiry commissions that were designed to suppress rather than reveal the truth. When someone argues that 1984 massacres are politically irrelevant today, that too much time has passed and, after all, unlike Narendra Modi, Rahul Gandhi bears no direct responsibility, they forget that this was exactly the response the process of delay was designed to elicit.

The people who make such arguments, who col-laborate with the Congress in the suppression of this uncomfortable truth are by and large intelligent people, but they haven’t been able to make the leap that the protagonist of Helium made to his own culpability.

The comparison with Helium is deliberate. Most of the people springing to the intellec-tual defence of the Congress are also part of a Delhi elite, an elite that extends from the Luty-ens zone to the better colonies of the South of the city. Many share a direct contact with the

Nehru-Gandhi family (some over generations). Many move within the same social circle as Ra-hul. Many are among those who haven’t faced up to the uncomfortable truth of what their own family members or friends in government were doing in November 1984. It is, therefore, no surprise that their responses in favour of Rahul is to an interview conducted by Arnab Goswami, seen by this same elite as an outsider to their world.

Thankfully, in his blundering fashion, without meaning to, Rahul has undone this silence that surrounds the complicity of the highest level of the party in the violence of 1984. The AAP has rightly initiated the process of setting up an SIT for 1984, and already people like Tarlochan Singh have come forward with claims that need to be looked into.

Of course, many will, as they already have, talk about Singh's affiliation to the BJP, and they will be right. He was vice-chairman of the mi-nority commission when the violence in Gujarat took place, and he was party to the same kind of cover up that he is now attempting to expose. But he has provided information about the then President of the country, Zail Singh, repeat-edly trying to call the Indian Prime Minister, Home Minister and the Delhi Commissioner of Police, only to have his calls ignored. Surely, this is verifiable information. Just as IPS officer Sanjiv Bhatt must be listened to even if his wife obtained a Congress ticket in Gujarat, so must Tarlochan Singh.

We must not our personal affiliations temper the anger that we feel at the choice we are faced with, a choice so aptly reflected in Vishal Dad-lani’s somewhat crudely phrased tweet about murderers and morons.



Has AAP outdone BJP by ordering SIT probe into 1984 anti-Sikh riots?

Following through on the poll promise to set up a SIT to probe the 1984 anti-Sikh riots, Kejriwal has

announced that Delhi government will approach the Lieutenant Governor on setting up the SIT on the 1984 riots once the Cabinet approves the decision when it

meets early next week.

Pallavi Polanki Jan 31, 2014

A fter having made significant electoral inroads in the Delhi Assembly elections into a community that has been a tra-

ditional stronghold of the BJP, the Aam Admi Party (AAP) government is aggressively cham-pioning the cause of the 1984 riot victims, much to the unease of the Opposition party.

Following through on the poll promise to set up a Special Investigation Team (SIT) to probe the 1984 anti-Sikh riots, Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal has announced that Delhi government will approach the Lieutenant Governor on set-ting up the SIT on the 1984 riots once the Cabi-net approves the decision when it meets early next week.

The 1984 riots, in which 3000 Sikhs were killed in Delhi, occurred in the aftermath of the assas-sination of then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi by her Sikh bodyguards. The announcement by the AAP government comes days after Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi in a TV interview on Monday, in response to a question on the involvement Congress men in the riots said, “some Congress men were probably involved.”

Gandhi’s comment, being read as an open admission of Congress party’s involvement in the riots has led to angry reactions by members of the Sikh community. On Thursday morning, members of the Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD), ally of the BJP in the state, protested outside the Congress headquarters demanding that Gan-dhi be asked to reveal names of those who are guilty.

But while the Opposition kicks and shouts,

Kejriwal's call for an SIT has stolen the BJP’s thunder on the 1984 riots, a cause that the party has always sought to champion. And the one-month-old Chief Minister didn’t hesitate to rub it in, when he addressed the press Thursday.

"The Sikh community has been demanding that a comprehensive SIT be set up that will gather all the evidence and conduct an investigation on the 1984 riots. Obviously one of the politi-cal parties was involved and therefore it cannot be expected from that party that it will order such a probe. The other party, which was in government in Delhi five years and at the Centre for six, only made demands but did nothing. I spoke to the LG (about setting up an SIT) and he has given a positive response. On Monday or Tuesday, we will discuss it and if the cabinet passes we will to the LG," he said.

By accusing the BJP of ‘only making demands and not doing anything,’ Kejriwal was not only consolidating the support he and his party have received from the Sikh community but scoring



political points over the BJP.

The BJP, though taken aback perhaps by the government’s headline-grabbing decision, is no mood to concede ground to the upstart party.

Reacting to Kejriwal’s remarks, BJP leader Harsh Vardhan said, “He is wrong on that. He should to check his facts first. What the NDA government did he can find out from the records... There is nothing new that he is doing. He is taking up these issues now. We have been taking up these issues for the last thirty years.”

On the government’s move to set up the SIT, Harsh Vardhan said, “We don’t mind if an-other inquiry is set up. We have been asking for these inquiries and commissions... so many things have been happening since 1984. But it is time for the Congress to take action against those who are guilty because now Rahul Gandhi has also accepted it. As far any new inquiry is concerned, we are all for what the government proposes. But let them first concentrate on giv-ing punishment to those who are guilty in the earlier commissions.”

The growing support in the Sikh community for AAP is something that must worry the BJP. The announcement last month by an influential voice in the Sikh community, HS Phoolka, an advocate who has been fighting a tireless bat-tle for the victims of the 1984-riots, that he was joining forces with Kejriwal is indicative of a real sense of disillusionment with the BJP.

Speaking to Firstpost during an earlier inter-view on the reasons why Sikhs were choosing AAP over BJP, Phoolka had said,“...During Madan Lal Khurana’s (former Delhi CM and BJP leader) regime, he always took Sikhs with him. So the Sikhs felt part of the BJP. But after that, over the years, no serious effort was made to carry the Sikhs along and give them a feeling of being part of the party. Of course, the BJP has been supporting the struggle of 1984 and that is the reason I have been working closely with them. But as far as ordinary Sikhs were concerned, they were not very happy.” (Read more here.)



Did Rahul make a big mistake?



Rahul’s TV interview: Congress in damage control mode?

Across the nation, Congress workers believe the interview was poorly planned and Rahul came out

looking inexperienced, unsure, not speaking a leader’s language.

FP Politics Jan 30, 2014

T he morning after "THE interview" -- Omar Adullah's tweeted description, not ours -- was telecast, the Bharatiya

Janata Party predictably went for ridicule. Equally predictably, Congress spokespersons began to insist that their party vice-president had presented himself as a candid and sincere politician. Neither trajectory has answered the post-interview questions we have: Was there a post-mortem? What were its findings? Had he been coached? By who? Were the questions vetted beforehand? Will there be more TV in-terviews? Will his answers change? And, most critically, will he actually answer questions?

When you know it as a party of sycophants, cu-riosity on how Congress insiders reacted to the first television interview of the Gandhi parivar scion are naturally high, especially in an elec-tion year that is still being pegged as a presiden-tial style election between Rahul Gandhi and Narendra Modi.

Notwithstanding the widespread criticism that he botched it, and given today's protests over his comments on the 1984 riots in Delhi, one

does expect the party's official post-mortem of the interview to be a studied one, setting the stage for future televised media interactions, if any.

Newspaper reports now suggest that the debut television interview by Rahul Gandhi has indeed sparked off a debate within the party. On one side are lined up the yes-men, who believe he successfully exploited the opportunity to show-case the UPA's achievements. But the whispers from those on the other side are getting increas-ingly audible, and they believe the interview could have critically damaged the party's pros-pects, especially in urban India where the 9 pm news and debates around it are taken incredibly seriously.

A senior journalist in Delhi told Firstpost that according to his well-placed sources, Rahul Gandhi's coterie is busy assuring him that he did a stellar job. "Perhaps the only person in his trusted circle who can give him negative feed-back is Priyanka," he says, noting that she was sitting in the studio -- allegedly right behind Arnab Goswami -- during the interview. "But even she likely doesn't want to say too much and demoralise her brother."

A report in the Hindustan Times suggests that though Rahul's close advisors have mostly maintained within the party that the interview was well-accepted, feedback from the big cit-ies has been negative, leading to the inevitable blame game.

One Congress minister is quoted in the report as saying the interview was a failure of the media department's planning. "Nowhere does a leader give an 80-minute interview. The standard



format is 22 minutes," the unnamed minister is quoted as saying. A crisper interview slot would have left the inexperienced interviewee appear-ing less vulnerable, is the common refrain.

But the sentiment that he botched up may notbe restricted to Congressmen in the big cities. A report from Bhopal in The New Indian Express says Congress leaders in Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh are equally disappointed. It quot-ed a senior functionary who reportedly told TV channels that the effort was laudable because Rahul showed pluck as admitting in private that the interview had damaged their chances fur-ther. "It was like the interviewer was asking him about Delhi and he was talking about Paris," the report quotes the functionary as saying. Both MGNREGA and RTI, the words the party vice-president appeared to repeat at every fumble, are both achievements of UPA-1, he pointed out. Another party leader was quoted as calling for the sacking of Rahul's media manager.

Then again, it is hardly likely that a media cell or a media manager plans Rahul's media ex-posure; the blame for that decision has to rest on his inner team. So a vote of no-confidence in his media-planning team is, in effect, also an erosion of faith in the leadership of party seniors and key figures strategizing for the Lok Sabha elections, a sentiment that can do no favours for the cadres' drooping morale.

And there is indication that lower rung party functionaries too share a despondence about the much-anticipated interview. According to this report in The Telegraph, junior Congress-men believe the interview was a dud for the party. The long-winding expostulations about structural change and systemic change will not bring any electoral dividends, they believe.

And to top it, there was no clear message to the biggest support base for the party -- the minor-ity communities. Instead, the vague admission of "some" Congress leaders' culpability in the 1984 riots and the equally indeterminate mes-sage to the Muslims while referring to the 2002

Gujarat violence were a huge betrayal of his political inexperience even after 10 years as a Parliamentarian.

One leader is quoted as saying Rahul must first learn what democracy is before venturing to deepen it. Citing YSR Reddy's mass outreach programmes and, more recently, Arvind Kejri-wal's conversion of a street movement against corruption into electoral success as examples of connecting with the masses. "He should have been toiling in Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Madhya Pradesh instead of doing drawing room plan-ning," the report quoted one leader as saying. It also made a reference to Rahul's apparent reluc-tance to contest the contention that Narendra Modi had been given a clean chit by the courts in the 2002 riots cases.

Even without alleging that Modi is criminally indicted, Rahul could have rejected any at-tempt to compare the BJP's prime ministerial candidate with Rajiv Gandhi, instead of offer-ing weakly that the interviewer's colleagues in the media had told him of the Gujarat admin-istration's involvement. "That is not a leader's language," the report quoted a Congressman as saying. The mawkishness over the loss of loved ones to acts of violence was not a statesman's language either.

Obviously, Rahul is still to learn that language, so with elections still a few months away, will there be more interviews?

There will be. Retreat is not an option. Possibly, the next interview will be to a Hindi news chan-nel. In fact, some reports suggest Gandhi’s core team has drawn up a schedule of interviews, one possibly every seven to ten days.

"The end result is that they're going to keep do-ing this," says the senior Delhi journalist. "The rumours are that Aaj Tak is next. But that raises the issue of what that interview is going to look like. No channel can afford to go soft on Rahul after his grilling on Times Now, but how many times can you ask the same questions?"



How he turned the tables: The Rahul Gandhi interview

Three members of the crew, including the director, cameraman and associate director, had visited the

mall barely an hour before the attacks.

Farzana Versey, Jan 29, 2014

I f you are looking for a parody or, more appropriately, a lame attempt at humour, then please skip this.

Rahul Gandhi may not be a great subject for a television interview, he may not even turn out to be a good political leader, but on the much-tout-ed first-ever interview in 10 years (he clarified on camera that this was not the first, but the first formal one!) he did exactly what he set out to do. Say his piece. What seemed like repeti-tion, if not ducking, was a strategy he adopted to bludgeon the inquisitor softly, if not tire him out.

Some in the media have dubbed this a Rahul vs. Arnab fight. I am amazed at the ignorance. No one, I repeat no one, in the higher echelons of power will give such a big interview without vetting the queries. Therefore, Rahul Gandhi must certainly have been aware of what Arnab Goswami (AG) would ask. If AG added spe-cific queries later, then isn’t it funny that at the beginning of the interview he makes it clear and RG says “You can draw me back as much as you want” but would he be okay if he took a broader

look? Think about it. Besides, it does not take rocket science (ahem, those Bharat Nirman ads) to figure out what the nation as filtered by the media would want to know. As he said:

"I have done a little media interaction, prior to this. I have done press conferences and spoken to the media. But mainly bulk of my focus has been on internal party work and that's where I have been concentrating, that is where most of my energy was going."

In the latter half I will reproduce some salient points, with quick notes.

First, the minutiae: This was not a live inter-view; it was conducted at Jawahar Bhavan; it lasted for a little under 90 minutes. According to The Telegraph:

But sources said the Congress leadership want-ed to ensure that Rahul’s “outing” should be with a journalist who has a reputation for being unsparing. An off-the-record session between Priyanka Gandhi Vadra and Goswami, over pa-koras and tea, also helped pave the ground for the interview, the sources said.

It just so happens that those who are building up this “unsparing” interviewer have rather short or selective memories. Some of us do recall his almost obsequious questioning of Bal Thackeray; even Raj Thackeray has managed to stand firm. So, let us not create heroes only be-cause we need to look down on certain people.

Let us talk about some problem areas.

Why was RG not being specific?



Why should he? He will do so in his speeches when he addresses the nation, not for revenue-run TRP-driven media. Has Times Now donated to the Congress Party’s election campaign? Is there a quid pro quo? No.

Arnab did his business of mentioning names – as the tagline of his show states – and Ra-hul spoke about the issue. Yes, the issues are more important. It is the system that deals with individual offenders. If he took the names, or repeated them after AG, he would be a bloody stupid politician and VP of his party.

Why did he not take the Modi bait?

This was by far the best thing Rahul could have done. He treated Narendra Modi as just another guy. The persistent questioning about whether he would agree to a debate with the Gujarat CM elicited what I thought was a perfect clincher: “The debate is already going on.” This effective-ly took the battle to where it belongs – outside the TV studios.

Why did he not apologise for the anti-Sikh riots of 1984?

What would he achieve by doing so? Get brown-ie points from the viewers and a pat on the back from the media, with Times going berserk by claiming that it was their channel that brought about this major penance? The PM and Sonia Gandhi have both apologised, and if RG has to do so it needs to be done to the people who are waiting for justice.

Why did he not come clean about his degrees?

Here you have an anchor who has netted a huge catch, and he is quoting a shark lapping in the shallows. Arnab brought in Subramanian Swamy to put RG on the mat regarding his edu-cational qualifications. With all his Ivy League credentials, Swamy comes across as an uncouth man. Besides, how is it important? This Oxford-Cambridge showing off might appeal to the urban upper middle class, not the majority of the population.

Has anybody bothered to check for how long exactly Modi ran a tea stall that he is using as

his new USP? Is there any evidence of it?

Why did he not commit on the Aam Aadmi Party?

Simple. The AAP is not one that sticks to its own word, so how can anybody else? Here is one bit from the interview

Arnab: Are you using the AAP to split the Anti Congress vote bank, to keep Mr. Modi out of powerRahul: You are implying that we have brought the AAP...This was really giving it to those ones in the politest of tones.

Why did he keep repeating about RTI, empowerment of women, the system?

Because these are crucial subjects, though they don’t sound terribly sexy. Indeed, he used these terms to also answer unrelated queries, but as I said at the beginning, he was here to say his piece.

We have got so accustomed in the past few months to war cry rallies and dharnas that someone who comes across as vulnerable, yet refusing to fall prey, is not easy to accept. Call-ing Rahul Gandhi a fool might prove to be our biggest fallacy.

Here is how he answered some of the questions, from Modi to being attacked, and why moving off-track sometimes seemed to be just the right move:

On Modi

“In my life I have seen my grandmother die, I have seen my father die, I have seen my grand-mother go to jail and I have actually been through a tremendous amount of pain as a child when these things happen to you, what I had to be scared of I lost, there is absolutely noth-ing I am scared of. I have an aim, I have a clear aim in my mind and the aim is that I do not like what I see in Indian politics, it is something that is inside my heart. It is like in our mythology when they talk about Arjun, he only sees one thing, he does not see anything else, you asked me about Mr. Modi you ask me about anything



and the thing that I see is that the system in this country needs to change, I don't see anything else and I am blind to everything else. I am blind because I saw people I love destroyed by the system.”

Ergo: He does not care about Modi.

On right to information

“I am the first person who has been saying over the last five years, talking about transparency in the party. I have made the Youth Congress and the NSUI fully elected bodies. I have spo-ken about the six bills in parliament. I have spoken about the Lokpal Bill and I have pushed the Lokpal Bill. I was involved in the RTI. We worked together to bring the RTI. So as far as transparency in the political party is concerned I am absolutely for transparency. There are questions about the RTI that need to be dis-cussed and thought through. The real question is that our system is based on different pillars. And the question is which ones of these pillars should have RTI…Am I for opening up? Am I for bringing RTI into as many places possible? Absolutely. Am I for creating an imbalance and weakening the legislative structures of this country. No I am not.”

RTI enthusiasts should note that it could be misused. (This is what I had written in an ear-lier piece.)

On his silence regarding the scams

“My position was that I report to the Prime Minister. Whatever I felt I had conversations with the Prime Minister. Whatever I felt about the issues I made it abundantly clear to the Prime Minister. I was involved in the legisla-tion, RTI legislation. And now I have helped pass the Lokpal Bill. I bring you back. The real issue here is participation of people in politics. It is bringing youngsters into the political sys-tem, it's opening out the political system. That's where nobody wants to talk. Everybody is per-fectly happy with 500 people running the entire system in India. Nobody, none of you want to raise that issue. The fundamental issue. How do we choose candidates?”

By reporting to the PM he obviously meant he

discussed it with the PM, instead of with Arnab Goswami.

On alliances

“Our alliance in Bihar is with a political party with an idea not an individual, we are making alliance, and it is not certain that we are going to make an alliance, we are in process of talking to people and our alliance is with an idea, with a party, not an individual.”

What is wrong about this? When was the last time we heard a politician talk about ideas? We have to lump coalition politics; he is telling us beforehand what will swing it.

On possible defeat of the Congress

“If we don't win, I am the VP of the party of course I will take responsibility for it.”

On name-dropping

“I don't actually keep invoking my family name, I have mentioned my family name once or twice and then people report that. The real issue is that I didn't choose to be born in this family, I didn't sign up and say that I like to be born in this family. It happened, so the choice in front of me is pretty simple I can either turn around and say okay I will just walk away from this thing and leave it alone or I can say I can try and improve something. Pretty much every sin-gle thing I have done in my political career has been to bring in youngsters , has been to open up, has been to democratise. I am absolutely against the concept of Dynasty, anybody who knows me knows that and understands that. But you are not going to wish away Dynasty in a closed system, you have to open the system. Dynasty or children of politicians becoming powerful happens in the BJP, it happens in the DMK, it happens in the SP, it happens in the Congress party, it happens everywhere.”

Nothing to add.

On being attacked

“I respond by understanding why I'm being attacked. I'm being attacked because I'm doing things that are dangerous to the system. I'm be-



ing attacked because I'm asking questions that are dangerous to the system. And I'm not asking superficial questions. I'm not asking questions over here (pointing at the ceiling). I'm asking questions over there (pointing to the ground). And everybody understands that this fellow here is not just a superficial chap who talks. This fellow over here is thinking deeply and is thinking long term. That's why I'm attacked. I understand that. And frankly, attack me all you want. Beat me to death. It's not going to stop me. I'm going to keep doing it. And I'm going to ask the questions that are relevant.”

This is exactly what he did. For, how many peo-ple are going to vote or not vote based on 2G, Adarsh, Coalgate? Is not Modi ruling despite the riots of 2002? Did not the Congress return to power after the Emergency and 1984, and the BJP after Babri? Having said this, RG will have to push the system to expedite the judicial proc-ess and respect it.

On being a ‘reluctant prince’

“If you look at my spirit, regardless of what I do, if I'd been born in India, regardless of what I do, I don't like unfairness. It just makes my blood boil. I don't like it. And in whatever I did, if I saw unfairness, I would stand up against it. That's the heart of my politics.”

Rahul Gandhi may not win the elections for the Congress Party; he may not become prime minister now or ever. But, if he continues to fight unfairness, then that should goad many to do so.

The fact that many in the opposition, and even those who have suddenly discovered “balance”, are behaving like a cat on a hot tin roof, even though they call it rolling on the floor laughing, is proof that he has touched a nerve.

(Farzana Versey is a Mumbai-based writer. This article first appeared on her blog.)



1984 riots, angry allies: Why Rahul’s interview has backfired

Firstly, the ghost of 1984 has come back to haunt the Congress party, that too at a time the party was making an all out attempt to target Modi over

the post Godhra 2002 riots.

Sanjay Singh Jan 30, 2014

I t took Rahul Gandhi 10 years to appear for an interview but in less than 36 hours it became sadly apparent that his first open

media exposure had proved to be counter pro-ductive. All it has seemingly served to do so far, is reopen the debate around the 1984 anti-Sikh riots, and goad two of its remaining three allies Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) and National Conference (NC) into raising voices of dissent against the Congress.

The twin developments have no doubt caused some serious concerns within the party. Firstly, the ghost of 1984 has come back to haunt it, that too at a time the party was making an all out attempt to target Modi over the post Godhra 2002 riots.

While the BJP jumped on the issue right after the Rahul Gandhi interview with Arnab Gos-wami was aired on Times Now, AAP leader and Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal went a step further, meeting Lieutenant Governor Najeeb with the intention of reopening the 1984 riot cases and constituting a SIT (Special Investi-gative Team) to probe them. In Punjab mean-

while, the Akali Dal has gone ballistic over the issue.

This is firstly a direct result of Gandhi's admis-sion during that interview that “some Congress men were probably involved” and secondly be-cause of his claim that unlike the Modi govern-ment in Gujarat in 2002, the union government headed by his father in 1984 had tried to stop the riots.

“The difference between the 84 riots and the riots in Gujarat was that in 1984 the Govern-ment was trying to stop the riots. I remember, I was a child then, I remember the Government was doing everything it could to stop the riots. In Gujarat the opposite was the case. The Gov-ernment in Gujarat was actually abetting and pushing the riots further. So there is a huge difference between the two things, saying that innocent people dying is absolutely wrong.”

While Rahul is getting flak from both within and outside his party for reigniting the 1984 riot de-bate, the fact remains that it was Prime Minister Manmohan Singh who led the charge against Modi on 2002, which left other leaders includ-ing Rahul wide open for questioning around the 1984 riots.

The Congress' damage control idea, which was to magnify Rahul’s image as the protector of youth and minorities, unfortunately boomer-anged as well.

Just as party workers were trying to find some comfort in the Congress national ad campaign, “Kattar soch nahi, yuva josh”, which was tar-geted at Modi’s alleged Hindu communalist approach, a young Muslim man, identified as



M Faheem Baig posed a vociferous challenge to Sonia Gandhi and Manmohan Singh at the launch of the National Waqf Development Cor-poration Limited (NAWADCO) in New Delhi’s Vigyan Bhavan. Baig was countering Man-mohan Singh’s claims about minority welfare schemes before being gagged and escorted out of the conference hall by security personnel.

The party will now have to think of new ways to make Rahul appeal to the minorities. An ad campaign is simply not the answer to the trust deficit that has been generated among the mi-nority communities over the years.

The bigger trouble for the Congress however, is coming from its own alliance partners. Two of it’s three remaining allies, NCP and NC strongly indicated that they could desert it in coming elections. Although the National Conference has since reportedly patched things up with Congress, the NCP is still saying that an alliance with the Congress is "very difficult in a demo-cratic process".

But what is worse for the Congress, is that these allies are now softening their positioning to-wards Modi. The third partner Ajit Singh from the RLD has remained silent on the issue but post the Muzaffarnagar riots his political weight has become inconsequential. Singh is now faced with an existential crisis, with members from his own Jat community switching over to the BJP and the supportive Muslim community becoming deeply suspicious of him.

Though the Congress has been trying hard to sew up a new alliance along the same pat-terns of its winning 2004 formula, apart from a weakened Lalu Prasad Yadav’s RJD in Bihar, no other political party is interested in tying up with it. The Congress led UPA2 has so far been deserted by the Trinamool Congress Party (TMC), Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK), Paattali Makkal Katchi (PMK), Telangana Rashtra Samithi (TRS), Indian Union Muslim League (IUML) and some other smaller outfits.

The biggest of its present allies, the nine-mem-

ber NCP came out in the open to counter Rahul Gandhi’s charges against Modi. Senior NCP leader and union minister Praful Patel's state-ment was most revealing, "If the judicial system has given any pronouncement I think we ought to respect it and we need not question it fur-ther... There's no point to comment because it is for each one to give his or her version but the fact remains that perception today is important and if the judicial system has given a certain finality to any controversy, I think we should let it rest there."

His remarks are significant in the backdrop of NCP chief and agriculture minister Sharad Pawar’s earlier expression of doubt in Rahul’s ability to lead the country. The NCP has been at the loggerheads with the Congress on several issues but has so far not broken off ties.

Another long term Congress ally, National Con-ference indicated that their ties had reached at a breaking point. Omar Abdullah came out rather strongly against going into an alliance with the Congress in the coming elections, "Both Con-gress and the National Conference have a pres-ence in the three regions of the state. If we start giving seats to them, we start to lose our iden-tity in those seats, and what is the guarantee that votes will be transferred from the Congress to the NC and vice versa…There are reservations in our party. Sections in the Congress too would like to do it alone."

Since then however, a report in the Hindu sug-gests that The Congress and the National Con-ference are close to resolving their troubles after the former made it clear on Wednesday that it was not opposed to creation of new administra-tive units in Jammu and Kashmir.

The BSP and DMK have refused to have tie-ups with the Congress. The question is when eve-rything else is failing, can an “idea” called Lalu Prasad Yadav and a Rs 500 crore ad campaign convince people in Rahul’s ability to lead the country. There are many who say he had a bet-ter chance if he had not done that interview.



How Rahul Gandhi ended up tying himself in knots

It was indeed a big bold move by Rahul Gandhi and his core strategists to give an open interview of this

kind, but this PR big exercise went completely awry.

Sanjay Singh Jan 28, 2014

R ahul Gandhi made a few revelations not many in the political circles were aware of: Lalu Prasad's Rashtriya Janata Dal

was an 'idea'; Shibu Soren’s Jharkhand Mukti Morcha was a 'view'; the Congress was simply trying to 'assist' the Aam Admi Party to give it a 'chance to prove themselves'; the solution to price rise was women empowerment; and RTI as a solution to corruption was his baby.

The Congress vice-president might have si-lenced some of his critics by interacting with the media and taking some straight questions from Times Now's Arnab Goswami, but the party now has the tough job of defending his naivety, incoherence, an overt lack of confidence while taking questions and repetitive pre-meditated answers even when questions are specific. The hour-plus interview, the first ever since he joined active politics, is unlikely to win admirers for Rahul Gandhi and make people queue up in large numbers at the polling stations to vote for the Congress in the coming elections.

The Congress’ coming alliance with convicted Lalu Prasad in Bihar was not a compromise; it was driven by some ideological principle, he

said. He claimed that "alliance with a political party with an idea not an individual". It looks as though Lalu Prasad, his wife Rabri Devi and two of their nine children Teshwi and Tej Pratap stand for some mesmerising idea that the Con-gress vice-president finds appealing. This, de-spite the RJD leaders' track record of promoting corruption, nepotism, mal-governance goonda raj, et al.

While the political circles have been abuzz with the speculation that the Congress’s alli-ance Shibu Soren’s Jharkhand Mukti Morcha (JMM) and support to AAP are aimed at the singular purpose of containing Narendra Modi’s numbers in the coming Lok Sabha elections, Rahul thinks the partnerships are a principled. "Unfortunately, the political system today is at a particular place and I can't simply ignore the fact that the political system is at that place, so certainly there are points at which you might have to take a decision that you are not a 100 percent happy with but the long term idea for me is to transform the system, to bring in youngsters and make sure they are empow-ered," he said.

He is entitled to see himself as a mythologi-cal Arjun of the Mahabharat, but there are not many who would start seeing him as Arjuna re-born. Rahul comes out as an innocent, well-intentioned person. However, he is not there to be remembered as a good guy but to be the ruler of India. He is seeking votes for himself and his party to rule for another five years.

He is playing up a mix of family emotions and credit for all the great work he has supposedly done. These include his contribution to the RTI and Lokpal, democratising Youth Congress and NSUI, telling the prime minister and party chief



ministers to bring down the prices of food grain and vegetables and winning elections in Karna-taka, Himachal and Uttrakhand. For some rea-son, he didn’t mention the most obvious, Land Acquisition Bill.

Rahul is right when he says: "I look like an anomaly in the environment that I'm in." His notion that he was being targeted because he was asking disturbing questions about the system is equally misplaced, after all it was his family which either built or sustained that same system since India’s Independence.

He is trying to evoke an emotive appeal. "I'm asking questions over there. And everybody understands that this fellow here is not just a superficial chap who talks. This fellow over here is thinking deeply and is thinking long term. That's why I'm attacked. I understand that. And frankly, attack me all you want. Beat me to death. It's not going to stop me. I'm going to

keep doing it."

Those who have witnessed the 1984 anti-Sikh riots in Delhi know that state had turned a blind eye to give a free run to the rioters and big Congress leaders actively aided and abetted the heinous crime committed on the streets of Delhi and outside. It is Prime Minister Manmohan Singh who by making some tough uncharitable remarks against Modi made opposition BJP reopen 1984 riot debate. To be fair to Rahul, he was forced to defend a situation he never want-ed to get engaged in.

It was indeed a big bold move by Rahul Gan-dhi and his core strategists to give an open interview of this kind, but this PR big exercise went completely awry. The lesser mortals in the Congress didn’t like to see their leader so out of depth and being bulldozed by an interviewer on specifics.



Rahul Gandhi interview: Why the Youth Congress is cheering

For the youth Congress cadre, which Gandhi has spent the better half of his decade-long political career

re-structuring, his ascension comes attached with a lot of hope and expectation of being given a chance to

contest assembly and parliamentary elections.

Pallavi Polanki Jan 30, 2014

G oing by the number of times Congress leader Rahul Gandhi spoke of ‘opening up the system’ and bringing in ‘young-

sters’ in his first one-on-one TV interview on Monday night, it seems as if an imminent crack-down awaits the party ahead of the Lok Sabha election.

The interview comes less than a fortnight after the AICC meet at which Gandhi was given the formidable task of leading the party’s election campaign for the upcoming general election.

“The Congress party is an extremely powerful system and all the Congress party needs to do is bring in younger fresher faces in the election which is what we are going to do and we are go-ing to win the election,” said the Congress vice-president during the 80-minute long interview to Times Now. Not exactly heartening news for many sitting Congress MPs, who have been essentially put on notice by Gandhi and told to make way of ‘younger fresher faces’.

However, for the youth Congress cadre, which

Gandhi has spent the better half of his decade-long political career re-structuring, his ascen-sion comes attached with a lot of hope and expectation of being given a chance to contest assembly and parliamentary elections.

Responding to Gandhi’s first big TV interview and what his repeated emphasis on bringing the youngsters meant in practical terms, Rajeev Satav, president of the Indian Youth Congress (IYC) said, “It means India is a young country and it should be represented by youth lead-ers. In that context, in the coming elections we (youth Congress cadre) will get the maximum representation. And the way he (Gandhi) is focusing on youth and women, there will be a systematic plan to develop the next leadership.”

Elaborating on the growing representation of youth within the party and in the elections, Satav said, “In the last four years, almost 70-80 boys from Youth Congress have become MLAs. This would not have been possible if Rahulji was not there. In Rajasthan, for instance, the maximum votes were secured by the youth Con-gress president.

He got a lead of 18,000 votes. In every state youth representation will be there. In Parlia-ment too we are hoping that there will be good youth representation.”

Satav says Gandhi’s influence has meant that more youth have been represented on screening committees and given roles of influence within the party.

Asked what qualities Gandhi will be looking for in selecting youth candidates to fight elections,



Satav says, “Those with grass-root level con-nect will be given power and recognition. Just hanging around 24 Akbar Road (Congress party headquarters), 12 Tughlak Lane (Rahul Gan-dhi’s residence) or 10 Janpath (Sonia Gandhi's residence) will not do the trick anymore. We are focusing on candidates who are working on the ground. He wants to empower the common worker of the party,” says the IYC president.

That Gandhi remains focused on the long-term mission of empowering the youth, says Satav,

was the most important take-away of the inter-view for him as youth congress president.

To what extent Gandhi’s ‘honesty of purpose and commitment to change the system’ (to quote party spokesperson Abhishek Manu Sing-hvi’s description of how Gandhi came through during the interview) will succeed in changing the system that is the Congress party will be evident from how many new faces the party will field in the next election.



Et tu Modi?



The artful dodgers: Now that Rahul has spoken, will Modi follow?

Will the BJP’s prime ministerial candidate also overcome his opposition to the media after

Rahul Gandhi?

FP Politics Jan 28, 2014

C ongress Vice President Rahul Gandhi passed his first national televised inter-view in close to a decade with not so fly-

ing colours and it has now raised the question of whether his biggest rival, BJP's Narendra Modi will follow suit.

While Rahul's interview was a prime time tel-evised interview, Modi's last interview was with a Gujrati newspaper that was pulled off after it invited controversy over a quote on Jawahar-lal Nehru avoiding Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel's funeral. Modi, was last on the interview circuit in 2012 while campaigning for the Gujarat elections, and gave a rather hostile interview to CNN-IBN editor Rajdeep Sardesai.

When asked about how he perceived attacks on him from opponents over the 2002 riots, the Chief Minister, whose star was on the rise in national politics at the time, responded,"I give my best wishes to the Rajdeep Sardesai, that he has been harping on this issue for the past 10 years, that he gets his daily bread by harping on this issue."

"I even heard that those who abuse and slander

against Modi are rewarded with Rajya Sabha seats, Padma Shri, Padma Bhushan. So I give my best wishes to Rajdeep Sardesai that you continue this campaign of yours against me. And may you too enter the Rajya Sabha one day through such "friends". May you too receive the Padma Shri, Padma Bhushan one day. I give my best wishes to you," Modi said.

He also spoke on Gujarat, development and not aspiring for a national post but the hostility was barely concealed throughout the interview.

Modi's track record with English channels hasn't been very good since the 2002 riots, with what was once just scepticism, develop-ing into almost complete hostility towards the Delhi-based English press over their perceived bias against him, notes a piece in the Hindustan Times.

Sardesai, a recepient of this hostility, noted in a column that the once affable BJP spokesperson in the 1990s changed after the criticism over the 2002 riots:

Modi, though, took the criticism personally, believing it was part of an orchestrated cam-paign by an English-speaking, 'pseudo-secular' media. By raising the war cry of Gujarati asmita (self-respect), he transformed the riot report-ing into a virtual confrontation between him as 'protector' of Gujarati 'pride' on one side and the 'villainous' anglicised media on the other. The result was a long period of combative be-haviour, marked by walkouts from interviews, scorn and ridicule of journalists, and, in some instances, even the threat of intimidation by his groupies. Gone it seemed was the Mr Nice Guy of the 1990s to be replaced by a leader intoler-ant of any form of hard questioning.



The high point in the Gujarat Chief Minister's hostility was perhaps the 2007 interview with Karan Thapar, which Modi walked out of. With Sardesai, the fact that he was on a moving bus may have prevented him from walking out, but he chose to ignore questions on the subject of apologising for the 2002 riots completely, pre-ferring to wave to people instead.

The BJP, expectedly, sees nothing wrong with its Prime Ministerial candidate staying away from the English media and says he had suc-cessfully reached out to people through non-mainstream media and international media outlets like Reuters.

"Since he did not trust the mainstream media, Modi avoided intermediaries completely, and reached out to the people directly with the most innovative political campaign," an unnamed BJP leader was quoted as saying in the Hindus-tan Times.

The tweets, hangouts and Facebook posts may have been used better than any other Indian neta but the Chief Minister is yet to have his 'Rahul' moment on Indian television since being anointed Prime Ministerial candidate. The BJP may believe that the media wants Modi than he wants them. However, the fact remains that its prime ministerial candidate may not have been able to use conventional media to his advantage yet and hasn't chosen to take any hard ques-tions on his achievements from sceptics on the national stage.

Past interviews, despite their controversies , haven't hurt the rise of Modi's popularity and after Rahul's handling of a televised interview, the BJP's Prime Ministerial candidate may just be losing out on a good opportunity to show up his favourite target.



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Inside Rahul Gandhi