Congress scion Rahul Gandhi’s utterances on foreign trips used to range from wining and dining to whining about India, peppered all along with hilarious blunders. That has changed, slightly.
He continues to wine and dine and regale us with the blunders. But the whining about Bharat has turned into menacing and more audacious attempts at dividing his own nation.
And to achieve that, he is leaning on untruths, unfazed by scoring self-goals in the process. Here are some samples from his ongoing US trip.
Sample 1
Rahul Gandhi is perhaps eyeing to ride the separatist, Khalistani sentiments — being funded and fanned by the ISI — which has managed to sway a tiny section of the community.
Addressing the Indian diaspora community in Herndon, Virginia, on Monday, he said: “The fight (in India) is about whether a Sikh is going to be allowed to wear a turban…whether a Sikh will be allowed to wear a kada or go to the gurdwara. That’s what the fight is about, and it’s not just for Sikhs, but for all religions.”
That is not just a mauling of the truth, but an unintended reminder of the most horrific anti-Sikh pogrom carried out by the Congress under the leadership of his own father, Rajiv Gandhi, in 1984.
Union minister Hardeep Puri, who is proudly Sikh, was quick to respond: “Sikhs have never felt safer and more honoured than they do now, under the current government. This is my kada and my pagdi. No one ever stopped me from following my religion and wearing those. I am happy in my country. Stop using Sikhs for your poisonous ambitions.”
BJP national spokesperson RP Singh said: “In 1984, 3,000 Sikhs were massacred in Delhi, their turbans were taken off, their hair chopped, and their beards shaved. He doesn’t mention that this happened when the Congress was in power.”
These are documented, incontestable facts. What has not happened in Narendra Modi’s time as PM is any incident of a religious attack on Sikhs in India. PM Modi has himself proudly worn the Sikh turban on multiple occasions, while Rahul Gandhi was busy serenading for votes the nation’s second-largest majority, the Muslims, wearing a skull cap.
Sample 2
Rahul Gandhi predictably attacked the RSS, but again using a false premise.
“What the RSS is saying is that certain states are inferior to other states. Certain languages are inferior to other languages. Certain religions are inferior to other religions, and certain communities are inferior to other communities,” he said. “Whether you are from Punjab, Haryana, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, all of you have your history, tradition, language. And every single one of them is as important as the other one. The ideology of the RSS is that Tamil, Manipuri, Marathi, Bengali are all inferior languages.”
This was probably an extrapolation of RSS’s now-discarded, old slogan, “Hindu, Hindi, Hindustan”. But a call for Hindi to replace English as a bridge language is not the same as Hindi imposition or belittling other languages.
Rahul Gandhi should read the RSS resolution taken by the Akhil Bharatiya Pratinidhi Sabha on the ‘Need to protect and promote Bharatiya languages’ on March 9-11, 2018, in Nagpur.
“The declining trend in the practice and usage of Bharatiya languages, elimination of their words and replacement by words of foreign languages are emerging as a serious challenge. Today, many languages and dialects have become extinct and several others are endangered. ABPS is of the opinion that the governments, other policymakers and the society, including the voluntary organisations, should endeavour to undertake all kinds of efforts to protect and promote various languages and dialects of the country,” it says. “Primary education across the country should only be in mother tongue or any other Bharatiya language. For this, parents should also make up their mind and the governments should formulate suitable policies and frame necessary provisions in this regard.”
Does this read like denigrating Tamil, Bengali, Marathi, Manipuri or any other language?
Sample 3
In the US, Rahul Gandhi showed some trademark dragon love. He said the West was facing an unemployment problem and so was India. But he praised China for not having a jobs problem.
That’s a lie. China’s unemployment has risen to 17.1 per cent in July. It is so severe that Reuters reported on August 21: “Rising unemployment in China is pushing millions of college graduates into a tough bargain, with some forced to accept low-paying work or even subsist on their parents’ pensions, a plight that has created a new working class of ‘rotten-tail kids’. The phrase has become a social media buzzword this year, drawing parallels to the catchword ‘rotten-tail buildings’ for the tens of millions of unfinished homes that have plagued China’s economy since 2021.”
Does Rahul Gandhi’s repeated high praise for China, surreptitiously meeting Chinese officials during the Doklam conflict and other actions stem from the yet-undisclosed MoU that his party, the Congress, signed with the CCP in 2008?
One doesn’t know.
Rahul Gandhi’s recent utterances, his insistence on a caste survey to create divisions, inciting minorities, all oddly reek of the US Deep State’s age-old regime-change toolkit. But in the middle of all these vicious but misdirected attacks on his own country, Rahul Gandhi did not disappoint on the blunders.
When a young student, Arjun Badi, asked him a question about the I.N.D.I Alliance, Rahul Gandhi acerbically tried to correct him, saying it was “I.N.D.I.A. Alliance”, suggesting that the young man was speaking the BJP’s language.
Badi coolly asked him a follow-up question: “What does the A in I.N.D.I.A. stand for?”
Rahul was left fumbling for words and letters. A familiar sight.
Abhijit Majumder is a senior journalist. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect News18’s views.
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