A Worn-Out Old LP

I HAVE A BONE TO PICK with some of my media friends who claim that Rahul Gandhi has finally arrived. No matter what gloss you put on it, especially after his party incidentally improved its tally from 52 to 99 in the Lok Sabha polls, underneath, Rahul Gandhi remains the same as before. And to prove the point I don’t have to look far. Rahul himself provides the evidence almost daily. The latest is his proclamation in Prayagraj, Uttar Pradesh. At a Samvidhan Samman Sammelan, he lamented the absence of Dalits among the winners of beauty pageants. “I have checked the list of Miss India, which did not have any Dalits, Adivasi or OBC woman…” A few weeks earlier, in Lok Saba, he had flashed the photo of the halwa ceremony in the finance ministry, rhetorically questioning the absence of Dalits. Or, previously, harped on few Dalit secretaries in the Government of India.

Like a worn-out old LP, he seems to be stuck on a caste survey without which, he suggests, the hitherto weaker castes cannot be expected to make any progress. All through the early decades of his own party’s dominance, the fruits of Independence had remained the exclusive preserve of the traditional high castes. It may be a sobering thought for the Gandhi scion to consider that under the stewardship of both Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi, upper castes had outnumbered Dalits and OBCs, both as MPs and MLAs, nearly three to one. Indeed, his father and grandmother had most stubbornly refused to publish the Mandal Commission report, which he ought to know, was established by the first non-Congress government led by Morarji Desai. The new champion of SCs/STs needs to remember, too, that the 27 per cent reservation in public service and educational institutions was granted by another non-Congress government led by VP Singh.

Rahul cannot hope to erase from public memory the marked upper-caste bias of the Nehru-Indira governments in order to present himself as a champion of Dalits. Indeed, his grandmother would have saved herself the ignominy of standing the Constitution on its head had she, after her disqualification by the Allahabad High Court, stepped aside and made Jagjivan Ram, admittedly a competent minister in successive Congress governments, prime minister. The idea of a Dalit as prime minister was clearly repugnant to her. To use Rahulesque reasoning, his mother, if she was really solicitous of the welfare of Dalits and OBCs, could have anointed one of them as prime minister instead of picking a Sikh who would dutifully obey her diktat.

Rahul insults the intelligence of Dalits and OBCs by robotically chanting about caste without being able to persuade his own party’s chief minister in Karnataka to publish the report of the caste survey in the state. Nor does his daily fealty to the Constitution seem sincere when he pooh-poohs the Supreme Court directive for a survey of the SCs/STs in order to ensure that the weakest among them too reap the benefits of reservations.

CALL IT THE MODERN-DAY fight between man and machine. For over two years now, I get multiple calls daily wanting to sell a plot of land, variously in Noida, Gurugram and Goa. Each time it is a disembodied voice emanating from a number listed in Indore, Ahmedabad or Bengaluru. Despite complaining to the phone company, the nuisance persists. Fed up, I now allow the phone to ring and go off on its own, or often immediately reject the call. The frustration is that you cannot even shout at the robot.

ACCORDING TO The Guardian, a public petition supporting a change in law aimed at making lying by politicians illegal, leading to disqualification from holding public office, is set to be passed in the Welsh parliament. The idea is to restore public trust in politicians. Can you think of any Indian politician surviving such a law? All of them without exception will stand disqualified, won’t they?

beauty pageantscaste censusDalitsNational PoliticsOBCsParliamentRahul Gandhi