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Rahul Gandhi: The Perennial Shirker

It was only last month that the Grand Old Party (GOP) of India, the Congress was decimated from the Indian Parliament in an unprecedented way winning just 44 seats out of 543. Such was the precarious situation that 179 candidates of the party lost their deposits, most in Tamil Nadu where 38 out of 39 lost their deposits. Everyone thought that there will be some electric changes in the party. But it is the same old story again and again. The campaign in which the Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi was the centre-piece had flopped badly and the party instead of doing some retrospection is again at the same position as before i.e. defeat is not due to Rahul, but due to communal polarisation done by the prime-ministerial candidate of the opposing party. Even though Rahul had offered to resign, but the question was whom was he resigning to?? He was resigning to the same central committee whose members are appointed by his mother and matriarch of the party Mrs. Sonia Gandhi. It is obvious how can the sycophants accept the resignation of “yuvraj” and “raj-mata”.

I had this hope that this debacle will see Rahul take some responsibility and will be the leader of his party in the Parliament ( and not that of the opposition due to the debacle), but that hope has been dashed again. The party has appointed a party veteran from Karnataka, Mallikarjun Kharge as their leader in the Lok Sabha instead of the future leader and the vice-president of the party, Rahul Gandhi. The reasoning that the party has given is that he will work on the party’s reorganization and work with the people in the field. This reasoning is highly questionable. First question is that now there are not much Parliamentary proceedings as we have seen that the Parliament sitting time has been reducing sharply with each Lok Sabha, though the 16th Lok Sabha may see more sittings due to ruling coalition’s overwhelming majority. But we have already seen that Rahul in the last Lok Sabha which was, by the way, the worst-performing Lok Sabha of all time had attended a bare 43 percent of the total sittings and a mere 14 percent of the standing committee, he was a member of and to top it all, he hadn’t asked a single question ever in the Lok Sabha due to which he was one of the worst performing MPs and was in the bottom 30 MPs in the Parliament.

Rahul has always given importance to party organisation and to make it more transparent and make it more appealing to the youth. He started some new initiatives like polls for organisational posts and US-style primaries for elections, but both proved to be a farce. In the former, there was a lot of violence during the elections and so the step was rescinded back and in the latter the party had changed the candidate who won by primary in Vadodra as it thought a “weak candidate” had won and he won’t challenge Mr. Modi. This step was a really bad one as it bursts the bubble of confidence of common party worker who dreams of contesting elections and thinks that no one except a sycophant can contest elections.

We already know that the Congress party can’t function without the dynasty as the erstwhile PM Mrs. Indira Gandhi had made the party a one-woman party in her time which is too dependent on the “family” and Mr. Modi is emulating now in the BJP. So, Rahul needs to take the mantle of his organisation in the Parliament by taking the position of the leader of his party in Lok Sabha. By participating in debates and question-hour, he should show what are his plans/suggestions for the govt and provide some concrete ones as Mr. Modi has done. Also he needs to show that it is a robust opposition and not a decimated one and this he owes to his party workers and to the 19.3 percent people who have voted for the party.

But by shirking responsibility again, he doesn’t inspire confidence in himself and in the people that why should they vote for him. I have asked this question to myself ever since his first term as MP. But by being a shirker again, he is just eroding the little credibility which is left of hm and is just letting down his party and giving a message that Congress is not going to be a serious/credible opposition.

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