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Taking on Sushma: Rahul, Congress may have lost more than it gained in Lalitgate debate
Sonia Gandhi and Rahul Gandhi can take some time off to ponder on whether their decision in getting Congress to punch above its weight on the Lalitgate issue, that too without adequate homework, will hurt the party.
On conclusion of the long awaited debate on the subject, the Congress, which moved the adjournment motion with the objective of censuring the government and forcing the External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj to resign, was ironically the one that emerged badly bruised and even worse, friendless.
Parliament hadn’t seen anything like this for a long time, at least in the last few decades. The leader who till the other day was in the dock and whose alleged “criminality” was used as pretext to stall Parliament for three weeks, emerged stronger and re-established her position as an excellent orator and parliamentarian. Swaraj can afford to laugh at Congress’s cost, at least for now.
Swaraj not only held her ground, albeit with more rhetoric than logic, but also unleashed a volley of punches that could hurt Sonia Gandhi the most. She recalled alleged favours from Rajiv Gandhi to Quattrocchi, Warren Anderson and Adil Shahryar that allowed them to escape from clutches of law enforcing agencies.
Taking on Sushma Rahul, Congress may have lost more than it gained in Lalitgate debate
She then taunted Rahul by saying he should go on another undisclosed foreign trip and study the family history in solitude and on return ask Sonia: Mamma, Quattrocchi ke case mein humne kitna paisa liya tha.(How much much money did we take in the Quattrocchi case?)”
“Mamma 1500 logon ke hatyare Anderson ko daddy ne kyon chudwaya, aur Anderson ko chod kar, Sharyar ko laa kar unhone yeh quid pro quo kyon kiya(Why did daddy release the killer of 1500 people Anderson and indulge in a quid pro quo by getting back Sharyar),” she said, stressing on quid pro quo.
From her speech it was evident the External Affairs Minister had been nursing her wounds since the time Rahul Gandhi leveled charges of criminality and thieving against her. She used the debate in Parliament as an opportunity to counter to the best of her ability. She was particularly harsh on former finance minister P Chidambaram on the issue of ‘conflict of interest’, and how he acted on his own, without taking his colleagues in the then Manmohan Singh government into confidence on Lalit Modi issue.
In the first part of her speech she pleaded her innocence and said her help was extended to Lalit Modi’s wife on humanitarian grounds. But the political punches in the second half of her speech will perhaps be remembered more. All leaders use Parliamentary debates to score a political point over rivals. On Wednesday Sushma excelled in her endeavour.
By the time Rahul Gandhi intervened to make some rhetorical points over the Modi government, Swaraj had decisively clinched the debating points in her favour.
Finance Minister Arun Jaitley, who officially responded from the government to conclude the debate on the issue, picked up from where his colleague Sushma had left off. He went into the technicalities of case against Lalit Modi and how the Congress had let him go with a lackadaisical FEMA probe and then struck at Rahul Gandhi’s credentials as a leader and painted him out to be a dynast who had thrived thanks to his surname.
“The difficulty with Rahul Gandhi is that he is an expert without knowledge …Which was the legally sustainable action that your Government took… You are very fond of saying that there were three monkeys but do not make a monkey out of this country. Without an issue which is an arguable issue, you hold up Parliament, you waste the whole Session and the real reason is that you ran a failed Government. You ran a corrupt government. Therefore, when things are beginning to look up in India and there is a new confidence, you somehow want to sabotage the Indian growth story. In order to sabotage the Indian growth story, their best chance was: let me go back on what I had promised – the Goods and Services Tax,” Jaitley said.
“It is very easy to say that your (Sushma) family members appeared in a case. She has clarified that her daughter appeared with her senior. There were nine other juniors. She was one of that crowd. She has not been paid. She went along with her senior to the court. Is this the big scandal?
“There are still many honest people in this country whose children have to work for a living. The generations of a family which has dominated this country’s politics have not worked for a living. They have learnt the art of living comfortably without working; some of us have not. So, if I had said that it was a commercial transaction between two people, when a son-in-law (Robert Vadra) of a family (Gandhi) got an advance from a real estate company which became a national issue, my predecessor Chidambaram had also said it was a commercial transaction….Is the Congress Party and their spokesman an appellate authority over a civil court which has decided that the palace belongs to Dushyant Singh?” Jaitley said.
During the debate Rahul Gandhi said that the IPL was a den of black money, conveniently omitting the fact that his party man and former minister Rajiv Shukla was Lalit Modi’s successor to the post of IPL chairman.
As the monsoon session concludes today, it is apparent that Sonia and Rahul Gandhi made a series of mistakes in formulating their strategy. The Congress couldn’t achieve any of its objectives:`no discussion without resignations’ of three top BJP leaders, Prime Minister Narendra Modi responding to their charges and uniting the opposition under the leadership of Sonia and Rahul within and outside of Parliament.
Though it received some support from parties in the opposition when the Speaker had ordered a five-day suspension of 25 of its MPs, in the end its rigidity in continuing to disrupt both Houses of Parliament has isolated it, and it only has support from the Left. SP chief Mulayam Singh Yadav and Biju Janata Dal leader B Mahatab, on the other hand, were unsparing in their criticism of the Congress.
It was for the first time that Sonia and Rahul Gandhi had exposed themselves far more than the Congress party ever let them. So far all failures or misadventures were blamed either on advisers or party workers. It was also for the first time that a member of the Gandhi-Nehru family came to Parliament to stage protests for days and indulged in slogan shouting.
It was the first time that the President and Vice President of the Congress entered the well of the Lok Sabha and prodded their MPs to create a ruckus inside the House. In fact, on Wednesday afternoon, Sonia Gandhi was the first to walk into the well and vent her ire at the Speaker.
Unfortunately, she couldn’t much from it since the Chair and official record had not taken cognizance of jibe of a BJP leader in which he called her sister a “corrupt Mausi” over allegations levelled by Lalit Modi.
It was also perhaps for the first time that the principal leader of the main opposition party rushed to the media on conclusion of a debate to give a soundbite, hoping that the media would still play his charges up. Rahul Gandhi’s eagerness to repeat his speech for news channels speaks volumes of his own perception of how he and Malikarjun Khadge scored vis-à-vis a seasoned Swaraj and Jaitley.
The Congress will hope that Thursday, the last day of the session, will be a better day.
