Modi is human, too

LAST WEEK, speaking in Jammu a few days before he set off to conquer the US, equipped with his trademark soliloquies to which we shall return presently, Rahul Gandhi triumphantly proclaimed: “We have finished Modi psychologically… I sit in front of him in Parliament… I know his confidence is finished…” How good a face-reader he is may be hard to tell, but we can tell that in no way is Modi finished. Far from it. Hurt? Yes. And he has every reason to feel hurt. Not angry, but hurt.

Modi is human, too, isn’t he? It is natural for him to feel hurt after devoting all his energies, all his waking hours without a break, slogging 17 to 18 hours daily for 10 long years fulfilling his prime ministerial duties. How can anyone hold it against him if he feels betrayed by the outcome of the last parliamentary polls? He had trusted the people. After all that he has done for the people and, as any impartial observer would tell you, he has accomplished a lot during the decade he has been at the helm, it might hurt that the simple folks that a majority of voters are, they were taken in by the unremitting campaign of calumny and falsehood a desperate Opposition had unleashed against him.

To scream collectively from the housetops that the “Constitution will be overturned, reservations will be abolished” was to frighten people into voting for the parties they had no intention of voting for at the beginning of the campaign. But the collective rope trick the opportunists performed had momentarily bamboozled the people to deny the ruling party a clear majority. It is another matter that Rahul, despite the no-holds-barred abuse of Modi, ended up a third time on the trot with only a two-figure tally.

Making the same point of mass deception, Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath narrated a folktale in the Assembly the other day about how four thugs got together to diddle a farmer out of the freshly bought baby goat he was carrying home on his shoulders. “Standing on different points en route to the farmer’s village, each thug accosted him with the question, ‘Arrey, why are you carrying this sickly little dog home?’ After curtly countering, ‘You seem to be blind, it is a goat,’ when finally a few hundred yards from home, the fourth thug shot the same question at him, the farmer developed self-doubt, wondering if it could really be a dog after all. He flung away the goat. Thus, the thugs got away cheating the poor farmer.” Moral: Do not expect the voter to buy the “Constitution will be dumped and reservations snatched” lie again. The farmer knows that it is a goat, not a sickly pup.

Now, about Rahul’s skills as a face-reader. Well, if he were really good at reading faces, how come after looking at himself in the mirror, he failed to read the message? And despite it indicating otherwise, he carries on as prime minister-in-waiting.

Coming back to the soliloquies on his nth tour of the US. Expectedly, Sam Pitroda hand-held his charge and warmed up the Texas audience of Indians with the following remark: “It is BJP propaganda about Rahul being a Pappu; on the contrary, he is an intellectual, a scholar…” All that stuff which we have heard before from other courtiers. And Rahul, yet again, firmed up my belief that Rahul Gandhi, before and after the 2024 polls, remains the same, the difference in perception arising in the mind of the beholder due to BJP’s less-than-spectacular showing in the election. It is that failure that has led people to ascribe to Rahul Gandhi the qualities he did not have in a rational discourse.

Otherwise, to ramble on about the definition of a devta, and as to who is qualified to be a devta, “one who is the same inside and outside…”, or to claim the 2024 Lok Sabha election removed the “fear of Modi”, but in the same breath, assert that “Sikhs [in India] are afraid to wear a turban and kada and to visit a gurdwara”, cannot be the outpouring of a normal mind. When someone in the audience asked about the contradictions in the “I.N.D.I. alliance”, he interjected: “Don’t call it I.N.D.I. alliance. Only BJPwallahs call it.” Only for the questioner to follow up: “What then does ‘A’ in I.N.D.I.A. stand for?” Rahul: “Alliance.” The questioner had the audience twittering with him.

Finally, some of our media too have been ‘sanewashing’ Rahul for a long time.

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Virendra Kapoor