Aerocasteics of Rahul Gandhi

To say Rahul Gandhi is great may be an axiom, for all Gandhis are great in India. After all, when Babasaheb Ambedkar was crowned the 20th century’s greatest in a ludicrous media pageant, Gandhi’s place at the apex of the greatness pyramid was kept reserved. Ambedkar was the greatest only after Gandhi. Anyway, an inscription of greatness might not even be liked by Rahul who always went an extra mile to mix with the downtrodden of this land. In 2008, while on a tour of Vidarbha, he met with one Kalawati, a widow of Parshuram Bandurkar of Jalka village in Yavatmal district. Bandurkar had committed suicide in 2005, becoming one in a series of over 2,00,000 farmers’ suicides. Rahul made Kalawati a household name through his 2009 speech in Parliament. On 16 January of the same year, he made news by spending a night, along with the British Foreign Secretary David Miliband, in a dalit hut in Simra village of Uttar Pradesh and, to the annoyance of the police, repeated the feat once more. On 24 September 2009, he took everybody by surprise, landing up unannounced at Lucknow and then escaping to spend the night in Cheddi Pasi’s hut in Rampur-Deogan village in Shravasti district. In the morning he bathed in the open by drawing water himself from a handpump. Such episodes of his dalitophilia are legion. Does it not remind us of the senior Gandhi, I mean Mohandas Karamchand?

Indeed, Rahul Gandhi is different. Just last month, he created a stir when he expressed common sentiment against an ordinance seeking to annul the Supreme Court verdict against criminal politicians. Uncaring of parliamentary etiquette, he called it complete nonsense, worth tearing and throwing away. His recent speech, while addressing a function at a National Awareness Camp for Scheduled Castes Empowerment at Vigyan Bhavan, likewise, provoked varied reactions. He freaked out with the use of an astronomical metaphor – “escape velocity” – when he said: