Valson Thampu

I fear for Rahul, though I am not a camp follower of the Congress. I fear that he is going the Stan Swamy way. It is all right to grand-stand one’s commitment to truth and democracy in India. I am not prejudiced enough to suspect Rahul’s sincerity of purpose. But a question arises all the same: does his party care for what he cares?
Also, consider the general context. What pays in the post-truth politics that prevails today is anything but truth. Media debates and public discourses are conducted in order to obfuscate issues and to stymie the truth. The public, on its part, laps up this hell-broth with the compulsiveness of a hard-formed addiction. How can we overlook that the context in which Rahul affirms his idealism is one which is already uncertain as to whether Gandhi or Godse deserves to be the icon?
The Rahul episode is the demonetisation-moment, so to speak, of the Congress party. In November of 2016, the BJP put the mettle of India to test through demonetisation: a project of dubious merit for the country and terrible inconvenience for the people. If engaged with effectively, this would have sufficed to topple the government. The contrary happened. The BJP grew stronger. With that it tasted blood. If demonetisation could be spun to its advantage, not even the sky would be the limit for the Modi-Shah combine. BJP has not looked back since then.
I watched Rahul’s press conference on the 25th of March with deepening sadness. The tragic heroes in world literature flitted in and out of my mind. They came to grief, not only because they had tragic flaws, which they did. Their characteristic traits became their ‘flaws’ because of the mismatch between them and their contexts. Hamlet would not have been tragic in the world of Macbeth, and vice versa. I thought also of Uriah, the Hittite in the Bible. What cost him his life were his strengths: his uncompromising sense of duty as a soldier and his exemplary loyalty to King David. I do not expect from any ruler the ethical scrupulosity and humaneness that I do not find in King David, who was the beloved of God.
Am I being cynical? I would not have been as confident about what I have stated above, but for my experiences as the principal of St Stephen’s College.
The worst temptation for anyone who wants to bear witness to truth is the lure of expediency. Untruth is in the DNA of quick results and disproportionate gains. Rahul needs to make up his mind: does he want to be a witness to truth, or an election winner? His quip, ‘Why are all thieves Modis?’ suggests the latter. So, the first thing he has to do, if he is earnest about what he proposes, is to express regret at having erred, which he has. But has be incurred criminal defamation by his Kolar speech? Clearly, he hasn’t. Here‘s why I think so.
What did Rahul say? He named Nirav Modi, Lalit Modi and Narendra Modi. Then quipped: ‘How come all thieves have the same surname?’ He went on to ask, ‘Who knows how many more Modis here on?’ In this context, if you go by the discipline of understanding the English language in an unbiased manner, you will decipher the meaning of what he said as follows. Rahul first created what mathematicians call a set: the set comprising three Modis. He did not create a set of ‘all Modis’. The question as to why it is that ‘all thieves’ in this context can mean ONLY ‘all Modis in the set just mentioned’. This delimitation of the scope of the designated set is further reinforced by Rahul’s next question: how many more here on? Clearly that question excludes -absolutely excludes- Modis as a genus from the ambit of his reference. This reading is elementary. It is hard to believe that the honourable Surat judge did not have the linguistic wherewithal to read Rahul aright. But, I have to admit that when it comes to interpreting what a person says in the public domain, the boundary blurs between what one did say and what ‘he could have been saying’. So, the judge concluded that Rahul defamed all Modis. Having been in a similar predicament for a protracted spell of time, I have no difficulty in realizing that, once virulent negativity is made to prevail against a person, everything he says becomes strips of red cloth to the bulls of interpretation.
Be that as it may, there’s this little thing that Rahul needs to mind. Maturity involves judging the context before deciding what to say and how to say it. He achieved nothing by saying what he did in Kolar. Rhetorical flourishes don’t generate electoral dividends. People applaud, but the effect of one’s barbs and quips dies upon the instant. The headaches remain. It is a no-win enterprise.
Now on to the ticklish question: should, or shouldn’t, Rahul apologise? Why not? Especially if Rahul had no intention to defame ‘all Modis’? In olden days, parliamentary and assembly debates were not infrequently peppered with ‘un-parliamentary’ statements and epithets, immediately followed by habitual apologies, which allowed the speakers concerned to say what they wanted to, minus the opprobrium that went with it; like in the speech of Mark Antony.
With this disqualification crisis, the Congress has reached the proverbial crossroads. The mettle of the party will be proved by how and to what purpose it handles this situation. It is a truism to say that a crisis is also an opportunity. But it is not so, automatically. It takes ‘character’ to turn a crisis to one‘s advantage. It is in this regard that I have serious worries, based on what I have known of the grand old party as much from within as from without.