I have lost it...One Sec

“I have lost it…One Sec”

There is something disconcertingly childish about the 42 year old Mr. Rahul Gandhi. This wouldn’t be worrisome if he was a visiting lecturer from a minor Leftist college. Mr. Gandhi just does not have the heft of a full professor either way.

But this man is aspiring to become the prime minister of India, if all the buzz from his party and the media is to be believed, and he does admit India is “complex”. Unfortunately, there wasn’t one word he uttered that was the remotest bit practical throughout his speech and the reluctantly put Q&A that followed.

Mr. Gandhi dabbled self-consciously with broad- brush thematics, full of tired platitudes and mawkish sentiment. He stumbled through his prepared speech after a fashion. There were no solutions offered.

The biggest single idea stated was that the energy of the people needs to be unleashed. Yes, and infrastructure needs to be constructed. Yes, and everyone needs to be empowered.

It was reminiscent of a lecturer who would have been more comfortable teaching tiny tots at primary school. Analysts who spoke after the performance, even sympathetic ones, were left groping to describe it, and rate it within the context of Mr. Gandhi’s thoughts on Business and Industry.

The captains of said business and industry who were listening to him along with a contingent of senior bureaucrats and officials could barely raise weak applause two or three times during the hour. They did clap more enthusiastically at his assumed modesty, but the undertone was one of confused despair.

This man, the assemblage could see, had no answers for them. Everything that he talked of was on the never-never, with an infinity focus. Urgency and time frames were conspicuous by their absence.

Rahul Gandhi raised a few desultory issues in the most abstract terms leaving his audience quite foxed. He rambled on for over an hour, crossing and re-crossing the same ground with a disconnected, halting, anecdotal, rhetorical froth.

Yes, Rahul Gandhi clearly stated the Congress line on inclusiveness. He spoke of harmony. But he took absolutely no responsibility for the dismal showing of the UPA over the last nine plus years. Yet, Mr. Gandhi was careful to give himself a cop- out by declaring he wasn’t a “hard-nosed politician”. This even though his apprenticeship has taken him to the post of PM- in-waiting.

Or perhaps  one pole of the “diarchy- dual centres of power”  style of functioning without accountability, currently  being followed by the UPA.

Mr. Gandhi   said there is no “guy on a horse” who will come along and fix anything.  He believes it can’t be done by anyone, but this is better translated as he certainly can’t do it, and does not even want to try.

Rahul Gandhi was quite impassioned and sincere that he wants to give voice to the people of India. But he thinks the political system is clogged and cannot deliver. He thinks it is disconnected. He does not believe 4000 MLAs and 700 MPs can run this country effectively because they are not really representative. The Pradhans need to be brought into the political system he said, without giving any clue as to how.

The weird thing about all that he said is that it is at complete variance with the reality of what his Party and the UPA Government practices.

Perhaps Mr. Gandhi sees himself as some kind of political philosopher and critic of the system including his own party and government.

He used various anecdotes and analogies in his by now typical style. He did not agree with JFK’s statement about a rising tide raising all boats by quipping the poor have no boats and the Government must build it for them.

He spoke fitfully of exponential growth as opposed to incremental growth, but did not seem to have much faith in his speech-written lines. Rahul Gandhi spoke of dreams and energy, of infrastructure development, roads, ports, electricity, partnership with business and industry. Speed.

Seeds of a world class system, training, skill development, making education relevant and his speech mascot, Girish the migrant carpenter, come to Mumbai on the Lokmanya Tilak Express from Gorakhpur in UP.

But please Mr. Gandhi where is the action on any of this from your Government in power? Your Government which is disconnected. And which you admit is corrupt.  

But never mind all that. Mr. Gandhi actually panicked when he got his papers mixed up during his time on the CII podium. He said on the mike,  “I have lost it…One Sec”.

To me this sums it all up in his own words.

(762 words)

April 4^th, 2013

Gautam Mukherjee