Earlier last month, when Rahul Gandhi announced that he would launch a 150-day-long march from Kanyakumari to Kashmir, dubbed ‘Bharat Jodo Yatra’, propagandists masquerading as ‘neutral journalists’ fell over themselves to hail the move as the next big thing in the Indian politics.
Of course, it was more to do with their latent desire than the actual reality, especially after eight years of the Modi government at the helm and months before the all-important 2024 Lok Sabha elections that grant the prospect of Modi rule for another five years at least. So when Rahul Gandhi and Congress announced a mass mobilisation programme they intended to launch, instead of first evaluating the goals of the yatra, propaganda pushers made a beeline to mark their deference to the Gandhi scion and his moribund party, Indian National Congress.
Despite innumerable election defeats, including some of the embarrassing debacles such as the loss at Amethi, the decades-old pocket borough of the Congress party, the liberal intelligentsia continues to labour under the delusion that Rahul Gandhi is the only potent political leader who has the capability of stopping the Modi juggernaut.
But when one harbours pathological hatred against a person just because he refuses to subscribe to their ideology and repeatedly cocks a snook at them, it is not hard to imagine why they would continue to place their bets on a leader who is, arguably, more committed to ‘Congress Mukt Bharat’ than ‘Bharat Jodo Yatra’.
Therefore, when pictures of Rahul Gandhi addressing a public meeting in Mysuru amid rains surfaced online, desperate propagandists grasped at the straws and went into raptures about their leader, hoping that the container yatra as the ‘Bharat Jodo Yatra’ is popularly called, would usher the Congress into an era of electoral wins and arrest the party’s irreversible slide into political oblivion.
‘Neutral journalists’, ‘unbiased intellectuals’, and ‘liberals’ go gaga over Rahul Gandhi addressing a rally amid rains
A raft of ‘journalists’ sympathetic to the Congress party rushed to swoon over their ‘preferred’ political leader after images of Rahul Gandhi addressing a political rally amid rains emerged on social media. In no time, the so-called neutral journalists shared pictures of a drenched Rahul Gandhi, lavishing praises on him for carrying on with his political rally despite the rains.
“This pic will be remembered for long in Indian political landscape,” tweeted ‘journalist’ Prashant Kumar, whose deference to the Gandhi family is evident in his other tweets.
The Wire ‘journalist’ Arfa Khan Sherwani, who has a knack for defending Islamists with perverse rationales, also took to Twitter to hail Rahul Gandhi for addressing a rally during rains.
Punya Prasun Bajpai, another ‘journalist’ with a favourable bias toward the Congress party, also gushed over the pictures of drenched Rahul Gandhi addressing a crowd from the podium.
Similarly, Vinod Kapri, Swati Chaturvedi, Ranvijay Singh, and others joined in their exercise to adulate Rahul Gandhi.
sab ke 🤑 pahunch gaye pic.twitter.com/8udPDV9T1q
— Sameer (@BesuraTaansane) October 3, 2022
Actor Swara Bhasker, whose recent film ‘Jahaan Chaar Yaar’ failed miserably at the box office, also gushed over the picture of Rahul Gandhi addressing a public rally amid the rains. “More power to your purpose,” the actor tweeted.
How Rahul Gandhi fans exaggerate seemingly ordinary actions of their leader
However, this is not the first time that propagandists have queued up to hail run-of-the-mill deeds by Rahul Gandhi as acts of “unparalleled political brilliance”. It is another thing that such “political masterstrokes” have done little to revive the Congress party’s dying electoral fortunes. If anything, they have only accelerated the party’s descent into an abyss of irrelevance and insignificance.
But that has not deterred cheerleaders from fawning over the Gandhi scion. Every once in a while, they home in on an ordinary remark or act by Rahul Gandhi and trumpet it as if it had the potential of upending India’s political landscape. But then, a rude awakening hits them when Congress loses yet another election even as their supreme leader shows no sign of drawing learnings from his repeated failures.
The bar is set so low that a run-of-the-mill deed is passed off as an act of profound significance
Whether it is the Daro Mat campaign in 2017, where Rahul Gandhi tried to pass off ED action against him as politically motivated or the photo-op from his visit to Kerala in February 2021, when his dive into the sea with local fishermen had the ‘neutral journalists’ spellbound, or the image of an old lady hugging Rahul Gandhi, there have been countless incidents when the Congress sympathisers and dynasty loyalists took no time in aggrandising their leader and singing tributes to him. Every few months, Gandhi enthusiasts declare that Rahul Gandhi has finally “come of age” and is ready for the top job.
However, the admiration Rahul Gandhi receives from his ardent fans is profoundly amusing, given that they routinely deride their political opponents by calling them ‘Bhakts’ while themselves raising Rahul Gandhi on a high pedestal and losing no opportunity to pay obeisance to him, even on something as mundane as addressing a political rally amid rains.
And while the list of incidents when ‘neutral journalists’ and ‘unbiased intellectuals’ have showered unwarranted heaps of praises on Rahul Gandhi is quite long, it demonstrates that his fans cling on to anything that exalts their leader’s political stature because the list of his other gaffes, from winking in the parliament to giving biscuits to Pidi to “aalu daalo sona niklega” to “pichatees”, is so long that the moment he behaves reasonably normal, the propagandists fall over themselves to put him on the pedestal.
