 "What made Rahul Gandhi sip old whine with Nicholas Burns?")
The point of Rahul Gandhi’s video conversations has long danced off the page. It is like Real Madrid hypothetically flying down fans from Tahiti as a serious strategy to dent Barcelona in an El Clasico.
What does the Congress heir hope to achieve with these conversations? On what basis does he choose his guests? Who has advised him to carry out this exercise? What did his most recent guest — former and forgettable US diplomat and now think-tank circuit busybody Nicholas Burns — bring to Rahul’s table?
Befuddling.
It is the child turning up the volume in his echo chamber. Why else would he pick someone whose only qualifications seem to be front-running the campaign to deny then elected Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi a US visa, regularly taking potshots at India and its PM, and a conspicuous degree of Hinduphobia?
And behind all that pacifist virtue-signalling hides a Bush-era cheerleader of America’s invasion of Iraq and a mission head in NATO’s Afghanistan and Iraq campaigns. Burns now serves on the board of the pompously named Appeal of Conscience Foundation, which in 2013 rewarded Indonesian president Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono with ‘World Statesman of the Year’ for failing to protect religious minorities in the world’s largest Muslim-majority country and overseeing a genocide in West Papua.
Besides the comfort of whining with a habitual Modi- and India-basher, what did Rahul get out of this? Not more than a hundred Indians outside diplomatic circles would instantly recall Burns. Being a man who lobbied along with evangelists and far-Left to humiliate a democratically-elected leader, his credibility doesn’t compensate for his lack of popularity either.
Burns is irrelevant in Indian politics in the most wholesome way possible.
But Rahul found in him a shoulder to download his angst. “We are a very tolerant nation. Our DNA is supposed to be tolerant. We’re supposed to accept new ideas. We’re supposed to be open, but the surprising thing is that that DNA, that open DNA, is sort of disappearing. I say this with sadness that I don’t see that level of tolerance that I used to see. I don’t see it in the United States and I don’t see it in India,” he said.
Rahul Gandhi will turn 50 on 19 June. It has been the most eventful 50 years for India, but even its most fervent admirers won’t accuse this period of being an example of shining tolerance.
Exactly what kind of tolerance is Rahul missing in today’s India?
The tolerance of his grandmother declaring Emergency when he was five years old?
Or the tolerance of his uncle carrying out mass forced vasectomies?
Or the 1984 anti-Sikh riots under his father’s watch?
Or his dad siding with mullahs to change the law just to deny a poor Muslim widow alimony?
Or concocting the bogey of Hindu terror when his mother’s and his writ ran in the UPA government?
India is not missing tolerance more than it did before 2014, but Rahul is certainly missing the plot. Complaining publicly with friends-with-no-benefits about how bad Modi is isn’t going to change his reality.
But it takes his stature down a few notches. From being the principal Opposition face, he now resembles a poor caricature of a biased TV anchor, or the spokesperson of a far-Left NGO. None of them win elections.
