Rahul Gandhi’s verbal volley from Europe turns the tables on BJP-RSS

Democracy is supposed to be freedom from tyranny. But in today’s India it has become tyranny in the guise of democracy.

If Rahul Gandhi’s message during his event-packed tour of Germany and the United Kingdom can be summarised in a few short words, it is this.

After his high-impact presentations in Hamburg and Berlin, that the Congress president achieved his principle objective of sounding the bugle for the election season in India by telling the world that the Congress party was determined to fight with all its might to reverse the results of the 2014 Lok Sabha polls.

Even while he was only part-way through his schedule of eight engagements in London - five on Friday and three more on Saturday, his trip to Europe already assumed the makings of being agenda-setting and perhaps even potentially game-changing.

In each of his interactions Rahul Gandhi sought to put forward his core thesis in front of the free world – that from 1947 to 2014 successive Indian governments, irrespective of the political ideologies that guided them, had pursued the goal of meeting people’s aspirations through secular and inclusive policies and programmes.

In contrast, he told whoever was willing to listen, since 2014 the Narendra Modi government was frog-marching the nation along a wholly autocratic track - by trampling on basic freedoms, stifling voices of dissent and seeking to force all sections of the population to accept and the RSS way of thinking.

Inevitably Rahul Gandhi’s verbal volley of ideas and allegations has provoked snarling protest back home in India from the ruling BJP and its mouthpieces in the media.

The initial reaction was to feign outrage that an Indian political leader should be so outspokenly critical from foreign soil. But this tactic was blunted when it was pointed out that Narendra Modi had frequently lambasted the Congress party during his numerous NRI rallies abroad.

The vitriol tongued Prime Minister has even been quoted as saying on foreign soil that he was “ashamed to be an Indian” because of the incompetence of past governments.

This also punctures the propaganda by pro-BJP spokesmen that the Congress leader was denigrating the country with his remarks. This cuts no ice outside the ruling party’s echo chambers - Rahul Gandhi’s speeches and statements were entirely about saving the country he loves from the clutches of dictators. The thread of his narrative was his optimism about India’s past and future. His criticism was directed only at the “poison being spread” by the present government to destroy the liberal ethos of the country.

What seems to be infuriating the defenders of the Modi doctrine most is the lethal manner in which Rahul Gandhi has gone beyond Modi and targeted the RSS directly. Even on the issue of demonetisation, he contended that it had been done at the behest of the Sangh chiefs.

Nobody has ever dared to say this before and the party spokesmen were caught off-guard and without an effective retort.

For a audience comprising western scholars and Indian expatriates, Rahul equating the Rashtriya Swayam Sewak Sangh mindset with the Muslim Brotherhood’s ideology provided a new perspective from which to understand what Hindutva implied and involved.

Despite their fulminations and protestations,  Hindutva protagonists know full well that the comparison is not odious -  there is more than a kernel of commonality in the core thinking of the two organisations or movements as they describe themselves.

Rahul himself listed the historical and ideological similarities. The Brotherhood and the Sangh both suffer from tunnel vision when it comes to the perceived superiority of the religious community they represent and both stubbornly justify the means they adopt to achieve their ends.

The broad range of topics and issues raised by the Congress president has further hindered the efforts of his critics to discredit him instantaneously.  Selective quotes from his speeches and statements in Hamburg, Berlin and London have been used to pin him down on micro points - but the sheer volume and variety of his salvoes have made the task difficult for his distracters.

From continued Chinese intrusion in Doklam to the side-lining of the External Affairs Minister, from the bypassing of the Reserve Bank to attempts to weaken major institutions, from the failure to generate employment to the disruption of the informal economy,  from the contrast between the plight of the farmers, Dalits and minorities to the enrichment of a handful of elite business houses -  the fusillade of allegations unleashed by the Congress president has turned the tables on the BJP-RSS.

For the past five years and more, beginning well before the 2014 elections,  it was they who were firing a torrent of charges and it was the Congress and party leaders like Rahul and Manmohan Singh who were at the receiving end.

Now, it is Modi and his RSS mentors who are being bombarded by a bewildering barrage of bullets.

With his finger on the trigger is a young political leader who they had mocked to their heart’s delight and considerable malice too as inexperienced, ignorant, incapable and inarticulate.

Suddenly, the same young leader is speaking from eight different high-visibility platforms all in the space of four days – and proving that he is neither as inarticulate nor as empty-headed as they had projected.

The audiences in Germany and UK have been given new insights into the Indian reality – but more importantly a sizable section of voters in India will have taken note.