Rahul Gandhi’s security profiling isn’t an issue
Union Minister and leader of Rajya Sabha Arun Jaitley is not off the mark in remarking that the Congress leaders' attempt to play up a routine police check on their vice president Rahul Gandhi as ‘snooping’ is tantamount to creating a “mountain of what is not even a molehill”. Inside and outside Parliament, agitated Congress members have been claiming that their leader was being snooped at. They have accused the Government of ‘political espionage’. This is simply ridiculous. Surely political espionage is not conducted in the open and through police officials in uniform having no training in such activities. The police officials visited Mr Gandhi's residence to collect material for a routine proforma that is filled for various important persons in the political sphere. Mr Gandhi is, therefore, not the first person to be profiled.
Sections of the media have shown that a number of heavyweights, including Mr Atal Bihari Vajpayee (as Prime Minister), Mr Pranab Mukherjee (before he became President) and even Congress president Sonia Gandhi and Mr Manmohan Singh have been similarly profiled. Given that much of the information the police sought is available on the Internet, it is obvious that the police officials were only conducting a formality. The Congress has no answer. It does appear that the party is so touchy about its vice president that it sees red on even the most innocuous action of the Narendra Modi Government. Moreover, what is the espionage all aboutIJ What information was the police seeking to get that could qualify as ‘espionage'IJ This information-gathering exercise is part of a transparent security profiling that has been going on since the last 28 years. In other words, it happened during the Congress-led UPA regime's rules as well. One does not remember any outcry from the non-UPA parties over such security profiling in all these years.
It cannot be a coincidence that the Congress has made Mr Gandhi's routine profiling a major national issue at a time when the party's vice president is missing from action in Parliament. It is perhaps to ensure that the ‘out of sight is out of mind' factor does not kick in that the party has decided to use a non- issue to restore its leader's credibility in the public domain. The unfortunate part is that Congress leaders have exploited the matter to stall the functioning of Parliament — there was ruckus in the lok Sabha and a walk-out by Congress members in the Rajya Sabha on Monday. This is disgraceful, because the issue simply did not warrant such extreme action. It can only be hoped that, now that the Congress has derived its share of publicity on the issue — though it has only exposed itself in the process — better sense will prevail and the party gets on with the important task of legislating and debating matters that concern the 1.2 billion people of the country, and not waste its time on an issue which involves a privileged individual.