When Prince Alarming spoke
You don’t say!
Darius Nakhoonwala
Rahul Gandhi’s return and thereupon the coverage of his speeches has had a man-bites-dog quality. It doesn’t happen often. So when Prince Alarming spoke, not once but twice, everyone took note.
There were three types of edits: the ones about the mere fact that he had returned; the ones about his speech at the farmers’ rally; and the ones about his speech in Parliament on the land bill where he called the BJP suit-boot ki sarkar.
Here’s a sample: “Rahul Gandhi also forgets that the biggest land grab in India's history was operated by "suited-booted" people during his government's rule, under the garb of the scandal-ridden sham of creating special economic zones. And who was it who funded the Congress all these years if it was not "suited-booted" people?
The edit concluded saying “There is no shortage of people who think that Mr Gandhi needs some basic lessons in politics. On the evidence provided by his third (or fourth or fifth …) major intervention in Parliament in 11 years, he also needs some lessons in elementary economics and in Congress history.”
Then there was the Pioneer, which wrote an unexpectedly kind edit. Noting that this was only the third time in 11 years that Mr Gandhi had spoken in Parliament, the edit cheered him on.
“Mr Gandhi, after the rousing reception he has received, is unlikely to slip back into the mute mode. This is good for the Congress, for the Opposition and for democracy… Mr Gandhi has gone about re-inventing himself in style and with a sense of purpose… It must be said to his credit that he has cleverly twisted the issue of the grave agrarian crisis due to the recent unseasonal rains and hailstorms, to fit it into his party's opposition to the land acquisition Bill...”
And it concluded meekly: “The Congress vice president must not get so carried away by the accolades as to forget that the new land Bill is good for the rural poor.”
These two edits were the only surprises. The rest ran the usual bumpf. The Indian Express said that “The fact that Rahul spoke at all has overshadowed what he said, and for that, he must bear much of the responsibility… (the) speeches signal, at last, an acknowledgement that the Congress leadership needs to be seen and heard, that political communication is important and that reticence is not a good idea in an argumentative democracy.”
The Economic Times said Mr Gandhi’s speech “posited the release of land for industrialisation and urbanisation as a battle between industry and agriculture, as a class struggle between the rich and the poor…This is not the way for India to modernize”.
The Telegraph, like The Business Standard, asked if Mr Gandhi was serious. “If Mr Gandhi seriously believes in what he is saying and is not attempting to score a few points off Narendra Modi, he must announce in no uncertain terms that he is marking a clear break from the policies of his great grandfather, Jawaharlal Nehru, and his grandmother, Indira Gandhi.” Ouch!
The Hindu was ambivalent “Whatever the government’s explanation for the changes sought to the earlier land legislation, the sense of the farmers and the rural poor is that they are being short-changed to please the industry lobby. If the Congress is able to channel some of this resentment into its own fight against the Modi government, it could well mark the beginning of a reversal in the party’s fortunes.”
The Times of India did not bother to write an edit.
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