By Kumkum Chadha
“I remember when I was fighting the farm laws, Arun Jaitleyji was sent to me to threaten me. He told me ‘if you carry on opposing the government, fighting the farm laws, we will have to act against you…’ I looked at him and said, ‘I don’t think you have an idea who you are talking to. Because, we are Congress people, and we’re not cowards. We never bend; the British superpower couldn’t bend us and who the hell are you”.
—Congress scion Rahul Gandhi
“My father passed away in 2019, whereas the farm laws were introduced in 2020… This (Gandhi’s statement) isn’t just factually incorrect, but also highly irresponsible coming from someone who holds the position of Leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha.”
—Rohan Jaitley, Arun Jaitley’s son
Rohan has gone public to defend his father, Arun Jaitley. A former Union minister, Arun Jaitley was Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s go-to man. With his father gone, Rohan has stepped in to defend the legacy that Rahul Gandhi is trying to besmear.
So, is this between RG, Rahul Gandhi, and RJ, Rohan Jaitley? Or is it between the ruling party and the Opposition? Or is it targeting a man who died in 2019?
Irrespective, Rohan Jaitley has nailed a lie: a lie purported by none other than a leader who is the face of the Congress, and more importantly, Leader of the Opposition in the Lower House of Parliament. Between the Rahul-Rohan spat lies the truth: bitter for the Gandhi scion and “righting a wrong” as it were for Rohan.
For the record, the draft farm bills were brought to the Union cabinet on June 3, 2020, and laws were enacted in September 2020. Jaitley died a year earlier: on August 24, 2019.
Even as BJP’s Amit Malviya told the Congress, “not to rewrite timelines to suit narratives”, the beleaguered party defended Gandhi’s statement by saying that even though the laws were enacted a year after Jaitley died, it was a “culmination of a long, deliberate, anti-farmer agenda of the BJP government”. The import of the weak defence being that the Congress was agitating for the farmers before 2020. Were one to take that on face value, even then the timelines do not fit in. The party forgot, or perhaps chose to, that Jaitley was battling ill health months before his death.
For the uninitiated, Congress included, Jaitley had stepped down as Union finance minister. In the letter he wrote to Prime Minister Modi, he had stated that he had been facing a serious challenge for the past 18 months and needed to recuperate.
The letter was written in May 2019. By a simple calculation, 18 months before, takes us back to early 2018. Therefore, Congress’ defence of the agitation being a “culmination of a long battle” does not hold good.
Equally, it is true that the agitation started much before the Union government cleared the draft bills, but it certainly was not at the time when Jaitley was politically active. A messed-up timeline apart, Gandhi also faltered on Jaitley’s political style.
A political maverick, Jaitley was too suave to use the “threat mechanism”, so to speak. His style and method were different. Jaitley as the world knew, both in and outside politics, was not a goon who would summon someone and threaten him with consequences as Gandhi seems to imply. He was smart enough to have the message delivered rather than visibly taking up cudgels.
As for Rohan Jaitley, he hit the nail on the head vis-a-vis the responsibility that comes with the job of Leader of Opposition. That calls for maturity and gravitas rather than off the cuff, rash statements that Gandhi routinely makes. Having said that, were one to pitch this against Gandhi’s role as a street politician, he more than measures up.
Take for instance, his recent vote chori campaign that has gone viral. Gandhi recently launched a web page inviting people to register and demand accountability from Election Commission of India, against what it called “vote chori”.
He has geared up the Opposition parties to support his demand for digital voter rolls: “Our demand from the Election Commission is clear—show transparency and make the digital voter list public so that the public and political parties can audit it themselves,” he said.
Not only has this stirred the imagination of the common man, but also put a question mark on the credibility of the Election Commission. Add to this, the doubts being raised about its complicity with the powers that be.
Not the one to let go, Gandhi is exploiting the issue to the hilt: be it wearing T-shirts with Minta Devi’s name imprinted across or having tea with the dead.
For the uninitiated, first time voter, Minta Devi’s age, has been recorded as 124 years in the voters list. Opposition members, led by the Gandhi siblings, wore T-shirts bearing “Minta Devi, 124 not out” to highlight the error in electoral records. That Minta Devi has protested is another matter.
As for the dead, over half a dozen people, again from Bihar, told Gandhi that their names were removed from the electoral rolls. As per the Election Commission records, they were “declared dead”. Gandhi was seen sipping tea with them: “a unique experience to have tea with dead people”, he later tweeted.
The “vote chori” campaign has recharged the Opposition. At one level, it has brought together different factions of the INDIA alliance that had splintered away after the 2024 elections. But more important, it has touched a chord with the people who are now asking: Are we being short-changed? Is our right to vote being jeopardized?
Weave this narrative with the claims and counter claims about Operation Sindoor followed by a hasty ceasefire and the BJP has a lot to contend with. Prudent as the BJP spin masters, they are aware that this could be an issue as volatile as the Constitution spiel.
For the record, during the 2024 Lok Sabha elections, the INDIA alliance had campaigned to “safeguard the Constitution”. Their take: if the BJP is voted to power, it would alter the Constitution and take away the rights of the poor. This worked like nothing else did. Contrary to what the BJP might wish the people to believe, the fact remains that the INDIA alliance were only six seats short of the BJP’s: 234 against BJP’s 240. The saffron party that was riding high on a slogan of “abki baar chaar so paar”, this time above 400, failed to get the necessary numbers to form the government on its own.
Likewise, the vote chori campaign is a master stroke by the Congress-led Opposition. It is a time bomb that is planted to upset the BJP’s calculations in the forthcoming state elections in Bihar.
—The writer is an author, journalist and political commentator