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Rahul's temple run is smart politics

prasad1

Active member
Disclaimer:
I am not a Rahul Gandhi fan.


Rahul Gandhi's self-discovery as a practising Hindu and an 'uchch koti' (upper tier) Brahmin has confounded his ideological adversaries and outraged his likely friends. He's got tough love from both. We are arguing here that he has made a most audacious and smart political move at this juncture.


The BJP was so irritated that it first wanted to know his gotra as evidence of his claim to being a janeu-dhari (sacred thread-wearing) Brahmin. It unsettled them even more when the gotra was disclosed.

They fielded their science and technology minister to raise profound 'technical' points on how Brahmin gotra travels down the generations.

See what political chutzpah by the top leader of the Congress, India's largest claimant of the secular space, has achieved.
Until not long ago, the debate was on whether Rahul is a Hindu at all or a closet Christian. Then, it moved to whether he is a Brahmin. Now it is about whether he can claim to be a Kashmiri Kaul Brahmin from the Dattatreya gotra.
Since religion, caste and gotra has now been made so central to national politics, this is progress.



A move up the value chain. Definitely for Rahul and his party.
We don't know yet if Rahul did this to a plan or is it just that he went to a couple of temples during the Gujarat elections and then the law of unintended consequences took over.

If you are a Rahul/Congress supporter, you can use that expression 'political masterstroke' usually copyrighted by Modi-Shah supporters.

If you are from the BJP, you might say he's recklessly walking into an unprotected political place. He will not get the Hindu vote and lose the secular vote, particularly the Muslim.

As they'd put it in heartland Hindi: Duvidha mein dono gaye, maya milee na Ram (I lost both in my confusion: Worldly pleasures and God).

I'd prefer a different description.


https://www.rediff.com/news/column/rahuls-temple-run-is-smart-politics/20181214.htm
 
Rahul has the Left-secular-liberal commentariat in a tizzy. They see it as a betrayal of everything the Congress stood for, a fundamental rewriting of its ideology and a final goodbye to India's syncretic tradition.

The latest, and a particularly well-argued piece by Suhas Palshikar in The Indian Express asks if he really wanted to show he's a believer, couldn't he visit places of worship of all religions, as his grandmother Indira might have done.


Endorsing this, Nehru and Mahatma Gandhi's biographer Ramachandra Guha wrote: 'Rahul Gandhi's amoral temple-hopping is an absolute betrayal of the best traditions of the party he claims to represent. Both Gandhi and Nehru would have been appalled by this shameless pandering to majoritarianism.'


Writing in ThePrint, progressive editor and intellectual Dilip Mandal lists 30 privileges that he says Brahmins get by entitlement and tempted Rahul. The criticism gets shriller as you move sharper to the Left.

Let me pick an argument with all of these.

The central charge against Rahul is hypocrisy. Now when was hypocrisy a liability in politics? It is, on the other hand, an essential tool. Show me one politician who isn't a hypocrite and I will show you a loser.


Early on in my years of learning about Indian politics, I had once asked then Haryana chief minister Om Parkash Chautala if his and his family's lifestyle, while claiming to speak for the poor farmer, wasn't hypocrisy. He said, "Bhai sahib, hum rajneeti karne aaye hain, ya teerthyatra pe? (Are we doing politics, or a pilgrimage?)"


This is a deeply religious country. In all large polls, including Pew and Gallup, more than 99 per cent Indians say they are believers, leaving atheists a fraction even of our NOTA voters.


There is no vote against the Gods here. Nehru got away with his agnosticism because it was still the afterglow of the freedom movement and he was, after all, Nehru. His daughter was quick to rectify this, never shy of mandirs, sadhus, poojas and her rudraksh string.

https://www.rediff.com/news/column/rahuls-temple-run-is-smart-politics/20181214.htm
 
If Rahul wants to pick up the sacred thread where his 'daadi' left it, especially when the BJP, which reduced his party to 44 in 2014, claims monopoly over Hinduism, it's smart politics. Why cede your Gods to your rival?

You can call it amoral, and you are welcome to find a truly moral politician, a maryada purushottam. I'm yet to meet one.

Compromises would follow. Rahul's Congress is guarded on triple ,em>talaq, blank on the Ram temple, one with the RSS on Sabarimala. Check its cow and cow urine-laden manifesto in Madhya Pradesh.

Liberal disappointment with Rahul is understandable. But he cannot survive in politics with Nehruvian hard secularism.

It won't win him elections anywhere, not even in JNU, and he would end up the most illustrious loser in modern India's history.
Further, if he were to return fully to his grandmother's way, he would look to deny the BJP monopoly over both, faith and nationalism.

https://www.rediff.com/news/column/rahuls-temple-run-is-smart-politics/20181214.htm
 
29rahul-pushkar.jpg


IMAGE: A pandit shows Rahul Gandhi a register containing his family’s lineage at the Pushkar Sarovar, Pushkar, Rajasthan. Photograph: PTI Photo

I would like a forensic review of that register!!!!!!


We live in an India very different from what Nehru left behind.


Jurist Fali Nariman made this point brilliantly in his Constitution Day speech. Quoting scholar Granville Austin, he said, 'Austin saw in our Constitution three strands -- protecting and enhancing national unity and integrity; establishing institutions of democracy, fostering social reforms. Taken together, they form a seamless web. But yet lurking in the distance, there is an omnipresent fourth strand, culture.'


That culture, which includes religion and tradition, is where the Congress and the UPA, under Sonia Gandhi and her mostly Leftist National Advisory Council, lost their way. They began looking alien.


India was no longer willing to accept that degree of clinical, near-agnostic secularism. One of the lines spoken in those years by Manmohan Singh -- minorities have the first right on their country's resources -- continues to haunt the Congress even now.

The UPA vacated the Hindu-nationalist space fully for Narendra Damodardas Modi's BJP.

Rahul's shift probably fails the test of philosophical perfection, but it's interesting politics, displaying an unfamiliar risk-taking ability. He has deliberately stepped on an unfamiliar pitch. There are many in the BJP/RSS who think they've got him just where they wanted.

We had said earlier we would prefer another description for Rahul's move. So here it is. This is like walking into a political chakravyuha. He can now win or perish. He cannot retreat.

And if he plays the 'a-bit-of-this-and-a-bit-of-that' game, he knows where that landed his father by 1989.

https://www.rediff.com/news/column/rahuls-temple-run-is-smart-politics/20181214.htm
 
Last edited:
29rahul-pushkar.jpg


IMAGE: A pandit shows Rahul Gandhi a register containing his family’s lineage at the Pushkar Sarovar, Pushkar, Rajasthan. Photograph: PTI Photo

I would like a forensic review of that register!!!!!!


We live in an India very different from what Nehru left behind.


Jurist Fali Nariman made this point brilliantly in his Constitution Day speech. Quoting scholar Granville Austin, he said, 'Austin saw in our Constitution three strands -- protecting and enhancing national unity and integrity; establishing institutions of democracy, fostering social reforms. Taken together, they form a seamless web. But yet lurking in the distance, there is an omnipresent fourth strand, culture.'


That culture, which includes religion and tradition, is where the Congress and the UPA, under Sonia Gandhi and her mostly Leftist National Advisory Council, lost their way. They began looking alien.


India was no longer willing to accept that degree of clinical, near-agnostic secularism. One of the lines spoken in those years by Manmohan Singh -- minorities have the first right on their country's resources -- continues to haunt the Congress even now.

The UPA vacated the Hindu-nationalist space fully for Narendra Damodardas Modi's BJP.

Rahul's shift probably fails the test of philosophical perfection, but it's interesting politics, displaying an unfamiliar risk-taking ability. He has deliberately stepped on an unfamiliar pitch. There are many in the BJP/RSS who think they've got him just where they wanted.

We had said earlier we would prefer another description for Rahul's move. So here it is. This is like walking into a political chakravyuha. He can now win or perish. He cannot retreat.

And if he plays the 'a-bit-of-this-and-a-bit-of-that' game, he knows where that landed his father by 1989.

https://www.rediff.com/news/column/rahuls-temple-run-is-smart-politics/20181214.htm

Senior Journalist Sekhar Gupta's analysis on change in the attitude of Congress leader Rahul Gandhi gives the correct reasons very well. It is good Congress took the corrective action to attract the majority community, that they have lost in phases due to false secularism adopted by them in the recent years.
Brahmanyan
Bangalore.
 
Senior Journalist Sekhar Gupta's analysis on change in the attitude of Congress leader Rahul Gandhi gives the correct reasons very well. It is good Congress took the corrective action to attract the majority community, that they have lost in phases due to false secularism adopted by them in the recent years.
Brahmanyan
Bangalore.

The situation is different. The Congress is not the same as it was during Indira and Rajiv Gandhi times. The present approach is against Hindus and pro minority. Kerala and Andhra are best examples.

Rahul actually supported separate religious status to Lingayats.

If the BJP’s status comes down, one can see a different approach altogether.
 
Rahul is clearly destiny child !!

Who would have thought that this govt would have messed up so badly??

I mean many many of us knew the expectations were crazy and that this govt will not be able to deliver as our bureaucracy is a total mess. Nothing ever gets delivered through them.

but to self inflict such damage that their chance of winning a almost certain 2019 is now highly doubtful. I feel there will be a complete rout and our Pappu will become the PM.

this is what happens when people spend a lifetime of hatred, communal tension and Killings, etc... Bad karma catches up eventually and strikes the blow.

my sincere advise to the Bakhts, please don't mess up your lives with such virulent hatred spouted by the right wing groups.

You can see this in the USA, where many people caught up in hatred are losing their jobs due to writing hateful words on Twitter and Facebook etc..
 
https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com...islam-tweet-in-dubai/articleshow/64572768.cms

DUBAI: Atul Kochhar, a popular Indian-origin chef in the United Arab Emirates, was on Wednesday sacked by a Dubai hotel after he courted controversy by posting an anti-Islam tweet that caused outrage on social media.



Kochhar, 48, the second Indian to receive a Michelin star, is well known for his Rang Mahal restaurant at the JW Marriott Marquis Hotel, Dubai. He caused a furore after taking a dig at Bollywood actor Priyanka Chopra over an episode in American television series 'Quantico' that purportedly portrayed Hindu nationalists as terrorists.
 

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