Now that Rahul Gandhi is the Leader of the Opposition, because of his party winning 99 seats in the Lok Sabha elections, it was expected that he would have understood the gravitas of his position. Being LoP comes with a degree of responsibility, where the least that the leader concerned can do is not run down one’s own country in a manner that a question mark comes on its institutions, its democracy and its society. It is not expected that the LoP will make statements that will be picked up by terrorists to portray him as endorsing their cause of breaking India. It is also not expected that he would speak of the end of democracy in India when his own party has nearly doubled the seat tally in the Lok Sabha and the ruling BJP has not been able to get a majority on its own. If there was truly no democracy and the electoral process was compromised, what stopped the BJP from ensuring that it comfortably crossed the majority mark on its own? Didn’t it occur to the LoP that no political leader from responsible democracies badmouth their opponents when abroad? Such statements are made by only those who seek foreign help to get strictures passed against the incumbent government in their own country.
But then this is Rahul Gandhi and sadly, listening to his rhetoric during his ongoing visit to the US, it’s difficult to associate the word “responsible” with him. Like his every visit abroad, he has scattered too many pearls of wisdom this time as well, but perhaps the strangest of the lot was the comment on the Sikh community not being allowed to follow their religion in an India ruled by the BJP.
“Fight in India is whether a Sikh will be allowed to wear turban and kada, go to gurdwara,” he said. Given that there is not even anecdotal evidence to support such a claim, perhaps the LoP was referring to the time when a pogrom of the Sikh community was committed—allegedly by Congress leaders—just because they were Sikhs, post the assassination of his grandmother by her bodyguards. Then came the Pannun bombshell, where proscribed terrorist Gurpatwant Singh Pannun took Rahul’s statement as an endorsement of the Khalistan cause. “Rahul’s statement on ‘existential threat to Sikhs in India’ is not only bold and pioneering but is also firmly grounded in the factual history of what Sikhs have been facing under successive regimes in India since 1947 and also corroborates SFJ’s stance on the justification for Punjab Independence Referendum to establish Sikh homeland Khalistan.” Pannun also claimed that when Rahul made his comment at a Washington, DC gathering, several “pro Khalistan Sikhs were in attendance”, which is quite a revelation, if true. Surely, Rahul would not have been aware of the presence of these anti India elements in his programme. But his opponents are bound to pick up this claim to allege that Rahul was playing to the gallery when making the outrageous claim of Sikhs being persecuted in India. It appears that no one in Rahul’s team had thought through the consequences of making such statements. No one had taken into consideration the possibility of Rahul playing straight into the hands of anti-India elements with his comments.
Equally baffling is the meeting with US Congresswoman Ilhan Omar. An India-baiter, Ilhan Omar is a known proxy of Pakistan. She had travelled to Pakistan where she was briefed by the Pakistanis against India. She has been lobbying with the US government about labelling India as a country of particular concern on the fake charge of violating minority rights. She has been pushing for Kashmir’s self-determination. Even otherwise, Omar is extremely controversial and has been thrown out of the House Foreign Affairs Committee for her anti-Semitic comments. She is a polarizing and divisive figure even among her co-religionists, many of whom find her views to be too extreme. In fact, she has deep connections with the likes of the radical Muslim Brotherhood. Hence, it’s baffling that the man who wants to be India’s Prime Minister, will meet someone so controversial.
Surely Rahul Gandhi wouldn’t have been trying to change Ilhan Omar’s mind about India, given that he seems to think alike about the so-called minority oppression in India. In fact he had done something similar during one of his UK trips in May 2022, when he met the then Labour party leader, Jeremy Corbyn, who was openly anti India and had a long and virulent record of taking an ant-India stance. Two years later, it was thought that Rahul would have acquired enough sense by now, so as not to meet those who are vehemently opposed to everything India and Indians—if not for anything else but to prevent his critics from cornering him. But it seems Rahul Gandhi has got into the habit of throwing caution to the wind. And now if his rivals attack him politically and accuse him of hurting India’s interests—a serious charge—he only has himself to blame. It is time Rahul Gandhi understood the importance of being LoP. He needs to realise that having measured conversations when abroad—instead of hurling outlandish charges—will help Indians feel more confident about him.