Every time political analysts and polls indicate that it is time to take Rahul Gandhi seriously, he trots off on a foreign visit and says enough stupid things to prove them wrong. Of the stupid things he said on this visit, his first foreign trip as Leader of the Opposition, the stupidest was that the Lok Sabha elections were rigged. Why do I consider this the stupidest of the things he said on his trip in the United States? Simply because you do not need to be politically literate to know that if Narendra Modi had rigged the elections, he would have at least ensured that he got a full majority.
This simple piece of deduction appears to have escaped the notice of the Leader of the Opposition. So, speaking at Georgetown University he said, “In a fair election, I do not think the BJP would have come anywhere near 240 seats…I don’t view it as a fair election at all. It was rather a controlled election.” In the same breath (interview), it stunned me to hear him say that the Election Commission had not played fair and had done what Modi wanted. This, from a man whose mother ensured that a Chief Election Commissioner was nominated to the Rajya Sabha as soon as he retired and made a minister in the government she controlled. This, from a man whose family presided over rigged elections in the Kashmir Valley for decades. It is time for some history lessons for the man who, a recent poll reveals, is the people’s choice for prime minister after Modi.
The second stupidest thing that Rahul Gandhi said on this visit was that Sikhs in India are no longer able to wear turbans or a ‘kada’. The words were barely out of his mouth when a Canadian Khalistani leader went loudly and visibly public with a statement that basically said, ‘we told you so’. What is it about foreign climes that make the heir to our most storied political Dynasty nearly always spout nonsense when on foreign soil? Remember that on an earlier foreign excursion Rahul Gandhi declared that democracy had ceased to exist in India.
What annoys me deeply about this kind of reckless ranting is that India desperately needs a strong Opposition so that there are guardrails that prevent the delusional overconfidence Modi has exhibited often in the past ten years. The Prime Minister’s autocratic style of governance and the offensive arrogance of some of his ministers have unsettled even Modi’s most ardent supporters. When he failed to get the BJP a full majority this time, you could almost hear a collective sigh of relief across the length and breadth of our ancient land. But this does not mean that Indian voters would have preferred to replace Modi with Rahul. He would do well to remember this. It might persuade him to stop behaving as if he has all the answers.
He may discover that caste is not the only reason why ‘90% of Indians’ are not participants in India’s journey towards prosperity. He rails against the absence of lower castes in positions of power without noticing that this is because they have not been given the tools to rise above poverty and deprivation. The most powerful of these tools is education. If lower caste children had access to good schools, they would compete easily with those who come from the upper castes. It is one of the mysteries of Indian politics that so many ‘socialist’ prime ministers never noticed the urgent need to build schools capable of providing real education instead of just basic literacy.
One of Modi’s biggest failures is that he did too little to improve our lousy school system. If he had put as much energy into this as he did into Swachh Bharat, things could have changed immensely in the past ten years, when most of our biggest and least literate states have been run by BJP chief ministers. The situation is so bad that our vaunted demographic dividend could end up being useless.
There have been other failures of governance in the past ten years, but they have gone unnoticed by Rahul Gandhi and his advisors. Like a needle stuck in a rut, he continues to rant and rail against the takeover of educational institutions by the RSS without observing that there is not much for them to take over. They may tinker with history books, and they certainly have been doing this. But they have failed to address the real problem, which is that most Indian children leave school without learning or skills.
When Rahul Gandhi returns home, he would do himself and his party a big favour if he directed his energy towards giving Indian children the chance of a real future. He said on this foreign trip that ninety percent of Indians lacked ‘access to opportunity’ and hinted that this was because of the evils of the caste system. For months, he has banged on and on about the need for a caste census. Clearly, this would result in more reserved jobs, and more reserved seats in schools and colleges.
The answer is not to continue expanding reservations. The answer is for our political leaders to realise that for India to ever become a fully developed country the most vital change that must happen is for India’s children to have access to real schools.
