Desperate Rahul falls back on emotionalism
When the living fail to fetch votes, invoke the dead. Realising that the Congress's campaign, which he virtually leads, is not shoring up the electoral fortunes of the party in States going to polls next month and in December, party vice president Rahul Gandhi resorted to shrill emotionalism at a public rally in Rajasthan on Wednesday. He recalled the assassinations of his grandmother Indira Gandhi and father Rajiv Gandhi in a bid to squeeze whatever political mileage is left in the tragedies. He did not stop at that; Mr Gandhi ominously hinted that he too may be eliminated in a similar fashion but that he didn't care. In other words, he not just sought sympathy in the name of the former Prime Ministers but tried to gain some brownie points for himself on the pretext of supposed victimhood. Besides being desperate and rather insensitive, the attempt could well be a failed tactic, because the issue before the people today is not the sacrifices made by his family members (nobody contests those sacrifices) but poor all-round governance that his party-led UPA Government has given the country. The strong anti-incumbency sentiment cannot be diluted by tear-jerkers. Moreover, what message is Mr Gandhi really trying to conveyIJ Since militancy had claimed the lives of the two Prime Ministers, he cannot be seriously blaming the Bharatiya Janata Party or other Right-wing elements for the tragedy. Yet, the Congress vice president tried to disgracefully inter-weave the killing with what he called the “politics of hate and anger”, which he claims the BJP is engaged in. Because in the same breath he lashed out at the opposition party for “burning” Uttar Pradesh, Gujarat, Jammu & Kashmir, and more. He tried to equate the opposition party's ‘politics of hate' with that of the militants. These are not just blatant lies said with a straight face; they can inflame communalism. But Mr Gandhi is so swept away by his “straight from the heart” talk that he doesn't appear to care for the consequences. In his over-zealousness, he has forgotten the bitter truth: Several hundred communal riots have taken place in the country during the Congress rule since independence. The massacre of Sikhs in 1984, for instance, happened not just with a Congress Government in New Delhi but it was plotted and executed apparently by certain senior leaders of the party, none of whom has so far been brought to book.
The Congress vice president's accusation that the BJP has been pitting one religious community against the other deserves to be dealt with contempt, more so given the dubious role his own party has been playing in doing exactly the same thing. The UPA regime seeks to bring a Bill that distinguishes one community from the other to fix accountability for communal unrest, and the Union Home Minister writes to State regimes asking them not to target “innocent Muslims”. If these are not communally-biased moves, what isIJ