Rahul Gandhi and General Naravane’s Book: A Rehash of the Cold War Era Script

AFTER A TIME, writing about Rahul Gandhi is a pursuit as exhausting as it is inevitable; it is like documenting the slow, rhythmic dripping of a faucet in a house that is otherwise stately. He remains a curio, the Nth wonder of a weary world, a man who has made a career of failure yet continues to receive a free pass of such epic proportions that it is truly surreal.

The wonder of it all deepens when one glances back at his grandmother, Indira Gandhi. Her brazenness was more flagrant, sharp, jagged and ruthless, but she had mastered the alchemy of the ballot box and had inherited the gilded mantle of Nehru's legacy. Rahul, by contrast, seems to have inherited very little beyond a delusional sense of entitlement that he wears like a suit that went extinct half a century ago. 

His recent performances, both within the Parliament and beyond it, are reminiscent of that fossilised era given his flop-ridden trajectory since 2014. What began as a series of nakedly immature displays has progressively soured into something more poisonous —antics that have begun to taste, unmistakably, of treason. There is just no polite way of saying this.

With a sense of disquiet, one watches him wave General Naravane’s unpublished memoir as if it was a conjurer’s trick, or hears him brand a Sikh Minister as a traitor, and one quickly realizes the screenplay he is acting out. It is a Far-Left script, the pages turning with a  sinister hush. 

Most alarming was the video footage released by Kiren Rijiju — showing the women MPs of the Opposition circling the Prime Minister’s seat. It was eerily reminiscent of all those coups that once blossomed like parasitic weeds in the tinpot Communist dictatorships of Eastern Europe and the humid backwaters of South America during the Cold War. In plain words, the video is live proof of lethal behavior, a direct assault against the very architecture of our Constitution and democracy. 

Thankfully, wise counsel prevailed over PM Narendra Modi who absented himself from the Lok Sabha for his motion of thanks.     

Which again, takes us back to Rahul Gandhi’s parliamentary record as a five-time MP. What exactly is the profoundest contribution that he has made to India in any sphere of our national life? The record is as hollow as a drum. He has outlived his utility even as a nuisance, and now appears as little more than a marionette, his strings pulled by breaking India forces who find him a convenient, if somewhat frantic, puppet.

The themes of Rahul Gandhi’s rhetoric sound like a recurring bleak litany: the obsessive clamour for caste censuses, redistribution of wealth, and a total, shivering surrender to the Muslim vote bank. These lethal ideas, embedded in the Congress DNA, have under his stewardship acquired a nihilistic, scorched-earth quality. Even worse, Rahul Gandhi has pretty much obliterated the Congress old guard — the Chidambarams and Gehlots, the men who at least knew the geography of the field — and replaced them with a coterie that is entirely foreign in its upbringing and its bigoted, Marxist fervor.

They are the generational spawn of Karl Marx, a breed that recognizes no borders and possesses a terrifying willingness to burn the house down if they cannot own the keys. It has also shown that rules, etiquette and decency are applicable only to its opponents. 

It is these traits that Rahul Gandhi too, has actioned since his party’s serial drubbings since 2014. The most visible aspect of these traits is his behaviour in Parliament. Displaying General Naravane’s unpublished book in Parliament last week to make scurrilous allegations was a not-too-coincidental occurence in the wake of a venmous essay published in The Caravan, a Far Left propaganda magazine. Its title, Naravane's Moment of Truth leaves nothing to the imagination as to its motivated quest for proving “how the Modi government spun the China border crisis.” It clearly mentions that it took its raw material from General Naravane’s “unpublished memoir.” The Caravan’s agitprop essay once again points to a truth of recent history: how the Congress - Left ecosystem which in its heydays acted like Siamese twins in a highly public fashion, is now resorting to such desperate subterfuge.

But the propaganda was deflated as quickly; General Naravane and Penguin have issued their clarifications, leaving Rahul Gandhi standing alone in the chilling silence that follows a failed explosion.

In the end, one is reminded of what former Karnataka Chief Minister S. Nijalingappa had written in his personal diary on 23 July 1969 — four months before Indira Gandhi split the Congress party. The late journalist Kuldip Nayar recounts the incident in his book, India: The Critical Years. 

From that vintage to now, the Congress picture has remained unaltered while Russia has become unrecognisable and Putin in fact, harbours cold aversion for his country’s Communist past.  

The Communist battleground though, has vastly shifted and unlike the Cold War era, has no single point of failure. It is diverse, disguised, well-networked and its operational methods of recruiting opposition political leaders in democracies have become truly sophisticated. 

To hear Rahul Gandhi hurl allegations at the armed forces or brand his colleagues as traitors is to witness a very old game being played with very new, and very dangerous, stakes. One watches, one writes, and one waits for the curtain of this sick game to finally fall.