Rahul Gandhi sparkles; now for more content
On Monday, Congress vice president Rahul Gandhi dominated media headlines across television channels. The occasion was his hard-hitting speech in the lok Sabha on the agrarian crisis and his ‘success' in ‘cornering' the Narendra Modi Government on the land acquisition Bill. The media attention was as much on the fact that he spoke at last, as it was about the content. From available reports, the Monday intervention was only his third speech in Parliament in 11 years. If nothing else, it surely energised his colleagues in the Congress, with the younger ones among them lustily cheering his every word. Congressmen must be feeling relieved that their leader has finally woken up, and it appears that Mr Gandhi, after the rousing reception he has received, is unlikely to slip back into the mute mode. This is good for the Congress, for the Opposition and for democracy.
Although reduced to a mere 44 seats in the lok Sabha, the Congress remains the primary opposition voice which has a constructive role to play in the country's parliamentary system. On the face of it, the 56-day sabbatical seems to have done some good to the vice president. The tone and tenor demonstrated a new-found desire in the Congress leader to match Prime Minister Narendra Modi's ability to come up with catchy one-liners. If, in doing so, accusations can be hurled with a minimal concern for evidence, then so be it! He called the Modi regime a “suit-boot ki sarkar” (a Government for the well-heeled), but did not provide material to counter how this is so, given that the Government has launched a slew of measures for the welfare of the marginalised, such as the Jan Dhan Yojana. Mr Gandhi also alleged that the Government was seeking to snatch away land from the farmers and hand it over to corporate entities that had funded Mr Modi's and the Bharatiya Janata Party's election campaigns. This is an outrageous accusation without substance. Nevertheless, Mr Gandhi has gone about re-inventing himself in style and with a sense of purpose.
It must be said to his credit that he has cleverly twisted the issue of the grave agrarian crisis due to the recent unseasonal rains and hailstorms, to fit it into his party's opposition to the land acquisition Bill. Farmers across the country are for the moment not so much occupied with the nitty-gritty of the amended Right to Fair Compensation and Transparency in land Acquisition, Rehabilitation and Resettlement Bill. Their immediate plight concerns the massive and back-breaking losses they have suffered through the damage to their crops.
The Government, the Congress and the rest of the Opposition should be concentrating on measures that are being taken or should be taken, at the Central and the State levels, to provide the affected farmers adequate and timely relief by way of compensation and other measures. That was the purpose of the discussion in the lok Sabha under the title, ‘The Agrarian Situation in the country'. It may have suited Mr Gandhi politically to launch a diatribe over the Centre's land acquisition Bill, but his effort did little to throw light on the solutions to the crisis at hand. Meanwhile, the Congress vice president must not get so carried away by the accolades as to forget that the new land Bill is good for the rural poor.