Why Rahul needs to wind up his overseas lecture tours

After the Virginia fiasco over his controversial remarks about the Sikh community, Rahul Gandhi’s overseas speaking tours, which once seemed like a good idea to showcase his party’s alternative vision for India, need a fresh look.For one, he has run out of anything new to say and is now reduced to repeating himself.But more critically, his audiences consist overwhelmingly (often wholly) of the converted: Congress-leaning Indian expats and students mobilised by the Indian Overseas Congress and other sympathetic groups.Outside the expat bubble, there’s zero interest in India’s domestic politics.No wonder, his appearances barely get a look in from the mainstream media.It is, therefore, pertinent to ask: who’s really listening to his message?If the purpose is to acquaint foreign policymakers with the Congress party’s concerns about India’s direction of travel under the Narendra Modi government, it’s clearly not happening.In the circumstances, Rahul would be well advised to take a break from these outings and instead focus on domestic politics, where he would be more useful.But if he must persist with them, the Congress would have to do a better job of managing them. Or rather managing him. medium nocaptionhttps://youtu.be/8SOxeiI4QrQ?si=PNr2ybaZYGAj7LSlThe row sparked by his cringeworthy expressions of concern for the rights of the Sikh community during his recent American tour should alert the Congress leadership to the danger of allowing him to go on stage without a proper script.Of course, he is his own big boss and is not used to being told what to do. But someone (Sonia Gandhi? Priyanka?) needs to bell the cat if the party wants to avoid more unnecessary controversies and embarrassments.The faux pas he made in an attempt to present his party as a protector of Sikh rights and security was no ordinary “mis-speak”. It was like dropping a clanger, considering the troubled history of Congress-Sikh relations.It was the stuff of elementary schoolboy error not expected from an experienced frontline political leader, given that one of the worst atrocities against Sikhs was committed by his own party activists following the assassination of Indira Gandhi by one of her Sikh bodyguards in 1984.Anyone with a half-decent sense of history would have gone out of their way to avoid blundering into such a sensitive territory, even if paid to do it.Rahul can go on clarifying until he turns blue in the face that his remarks were taken out of context and misinterpreted — and maybe they were — but ultimately it’s his own tone-deafness that is the problem.It’s one of the hallmarks of a mature leader to be able to spot a potential political minefield from a mile and avoid it.This, however, is not the first time that Rahul has blindly walked into one — like one of Alexander Pope’s “fools who rush in where angels fear to tread”. medium nocaptionhttps://youtu.be/cso9OauLnUc?si=-4c2pHS4qDA34LYSRahul may have come a long way from his “pappu” days, but a question mark still hangs over his communication skills and grasp of complex political ideas.While he is good at hit-and-run one-liners (“suit boot ki sarkar”, “chowkidar chor hai”), he struggles to develop an argument and take it to its logical conclusion.The result is a series of random observations without context.Which is what appeared to have happened in Virginia as he jumped from one subject to another while making it up on the hoof as he went along.He has clarified that the context of his remarks about Sikh rights, which got lost in his helter-skelter presentation, was his broader attack on the Modi government for its treatment of minorities.While he was at it, he saw a Sikh gentleman in the audience, turned to him and said: “The fight is about whether a Sikh is going to be allowed to wear his turban in India or a kada in India. Or he, as a Sikh, is going to be able to go to gurdwara. That’s what the fight is about. And not just for him, for all religions.”The BJP, he said, had been “spreading lies about my remarks in America”.But by then, the damage was done with even liberal Sikhs describing his remarks as “inexplicable and bizarre”, as journalist Harinder Baweja, whose family suffered during the Congress-instigated 1984 violence, wrote in these columns recalling how they reopened old wounds.“I lived in Delhi that year and have a searing memory of my father, a proud Indian Air Force officer, returning home during the carnage wearing a helmet. It was the only time ever that he had been forced to remove his turban. He secured his life by removing it but — in the process — suffered an indelible wound that struck at the very heart of his identity,” she wrote.Several Sikh groups issued a joint statement asking Rahul to withdraw his remarks, while the BJP, of course, went to town with his statement, accusing him of hypocrisy and politicising a sensitive issue.Union minister Hardeep Singh Puri, himself a Sikh, said, “If there has been one time in our history when as a community we have felt anxiety, a sense of insecurity and existential threat, it has been the times when Rahul Gandhi’s family has been in the seats of power.” medium nocaptionhttps://youtu.be/1xgwArZoVoY?si=E8068cBsaDLhFzEaBut all this said, the BJP-Congress ding-dong goes strictly beyond Rahul’s clumsy remarks in Virginia.The real issue amid this fuss is an unseemly scramble between the liberals and the Hindu right over their conflicting narratives about where India is headed.From where the liberals sit, it’s all doom and gloom: India is going to hell in a handcart with democracy in the throes of death, democratic institutions collapsing, majoritarianism playing havoc with minority rights and an economy in the doldrums.For the BJP and its “bhakts”, on the other hand, it’s all about the sunny uplands of Modi’s “new” India: economy booming, pseudo-secularism replaced by social justice for all (“sab ka saath, sab ka vikas”), corruption banished, “amrit kaal” is here…Neither of the two narratives — the liberal yarn about a Nehruvian “golden age” or the RSS’ claim of a “civilisational renaissance” — tells us the full story.The reality is more complex: a mix of a few facts and lots of mist of nostalgia, historical inaccuracies, egregious denials and wishful optimism.The truth is closer to what a London Times reader Michael Cunningham, who has lived in India wrote: “India is a wonderful country in which terrible things happen… and many of those are due to religious differences.”The main problem is not so much the liberal-right divide as the unprecedented extent of polarisation with no consensus even on the official name of the country: “colonial” India or “civilisationally” authentic Bharat?Meanwhile, if and when Rahul travels abroad next, he would do well to take along a good scriptwriter and a speech coach with him.Read more from the author here.