Whenever , Gopalkrishna Gandhi picks up a pen to write , he somehow manages to produce articles that are filled with hypocrisy. Throughout his life, he has failed to call out the fraud of Jawaharlal Nehru and his daughter , who fooled the country by using his ancestor’s surname. When his political masters are in power, he enjoys their patronage. When his political masters are out of office, he indulges in blatant propaganda. If the Mahatma was alive today, he would have truly admonished, junior Gandhi’s behavior.
There are three important reasons why we must call out so called pseudo-secular intellectuals like Gopalkrishna Gandhi. Firstly, they fail to criticize the Congress party for corruption during their tenure in office. Secondly, they shamelessly collude with the Congress party of the day, which is morally, ethically and ideologically bankrupt. Lastly, intellectuals like Mr Gopalkrishna Gandhi lack vision and original ideas about the future of India. They always piggy-back on the quotes of Mahatma Gandhi and Tagore or memories of independence movement to further their own political propaganda.
In the editorial of The Hindu titled On another New Year’s Day: Mahatma Gandhi’s ‘khorak’ a 100 years ago, he quotes a part of the speech given by M.K. Gandhi on 1st January 1918, in Ahmedabad:
It was about securing three basic necessities which he spelt out as: “Air, water and grains.” He spoke in Gujarati and his key sentence was: Hava pani ane anaj e khorakna mukhya tattvo chhe (air, water and grains are essential to human nourishment). If Swaraj, he said, means self-rule, then securing these three khorak means securing Swaraj. Explaining himself with typical concision, Gandhi said: “Air is free to all but if it is polluted it harms our health… Next comes water… From now on we must take up the effort to secure water. Councillors are servants of the people and we have a right to question them.”
Mr Gandhi goes on to write about climate change, water crisis and hunger in India. He gives credit to some of his activist-friends for their pro-farmer activism. And then, he plunges into his regular propaganda of intolerance, majoritarianism and polarization with these lines:
While these three essential khorak essential for India to ‘simply live’, as Mr. Sainath has put it, struggling for breath, what are we getting instead, and on a priority? Three other khorak: the hava of intolerance, the pani of polarisation and the anaj of uniformity. And why? Because these distract, they divert attention from the real life-and-death crises. Intolerance, blowing strong since 2014, is likely to blow stronger in 2018. Polarisation, tried and tested in the 2014 election, then fielded formally in Assembly elections in Uttar Pradesh and Gujarat, is likely to be tried with greater impunity in the elections due in 2018. And as for uniformity, the India of many-grained people, all secure in their plurality, is now being dispossessed by an India which believes in codes being uniform rather than civil.
Real life and death crises were existing even when Manmohan Singh was in office. They were there even when Gopalkrishna Gandhi was governor of West Bengal. As per 2011 census, income of 21.9% of the population was below the poverty line [pdf]. In 2014, 18,452 villages did not have access to electricity. As per 2011 census, 53.1% of the households in India do not have a toilet in their homes. Life and death issues are not new people under the present day BJP government. For a change, some good work is being done to address them.
Polarization was, and has been the favorite tool of INC. Sonia Gandhi’s famous phrase ‘maut ke saudagar’ was nothing but blatant polarization. Intolerance for organisations like RSS is deeply rooted among Congress leaders. Mr Gandhi’s attempt to stamp these traits as features of the BJP alone are a mockery of facts and logic.
Apart from the hollowness of Mr Gandhi’s analysis it is absolutely essential to assess the three khoraks on which Mr Gopalkrishna Gandhi and his pseudo-secular bandwagon survive on.
The Gandhi scion must have forgotten that he and his masters in the Congress party survive on the hava of dynasty. Without it, they would have failed to make it to the second page of any local newspaper. This hava of Nehru-Gandhi dynasty is kept alive by servants of the durbar in media houses like NDTV. If not for these loyal journalists, nobody in their right minds would consider a person of Rahul Gandhi’s caliber as Prime Minister- material.
Mr Gopalkrishna Gandhi’s political masters in political establishment survive on the pani of pseudo-secularism. How else could a secular government get into perverse schemes like Haj subsidy. Which sane government would have reversed the Shah Bano judgement? Who has created vote banks in the name of BJP -scaremongering ? Which party’s MP argued in Supreme court in favour of the practice of Triple Talaq? The answers are well known. Mr Gandhi’s political masters have held on to power in the country using the policy of divide and rule, which was originally devised by the British.
The secular bandwagon to which Mr Gandhi belongs, survives on the anaj of corruption and crony capitalism. Otherwise , how could they survive for so long in office ? Who sold out national resources like 2G spectrum and coal blocks? Who got kickbacks in Bofors scam and Agusta Westland episode ? Who is out on bail in the National Herald case ? The politicians whom Mr Gopalkrishna Gandhi serves have sowed the seeds of corruption deep into the political system of this country.
So, on the very first day of this year, I would like to say, no thanks to the advice and lectures of self-proclaimed left-liberal intellectuals screaming against intolerance, majoritarianism and polarisation in this country. No thanks, Mr Gopalakrishna Gandhi. This country can do without yet another hypocrite like you.
