How Modi is taking credit for Congress, Rahul Gandhi's work

I can’t agree more with Congress spokesperson CR Kesavan when he says that the Modi government has been copying Congress policies, doing some minor changes and tomtomming them as his own. While we are impressed by the swift, sweeping decisions Mr Modi has taken in the last four months, we mustn’t fail to notice that he is harvesting what was sown by Manmohan Singh, the Race Course Road’s resident robot remotely controlled by Sonia Gandhi. Hence, we can safely credit the people-oriented policies of the last government to Rahul Gandhi, widely reported to be the brain behind Sonia’s populist programmes.

For example, the Swachh Bharat Abhiyan. It was Jairam Ramesh who brought Vidya Balan to talk about toilets. He called it Nirmal Bharat. Which is a positive word that begins with a negative. It means crapless India, which is the same as Clean India. Apart from having a different perspective and everyone-invites-nine viral-ability built-in, it’s just the Jairam Ramesh idea repackaged and branded as Modi idea. The Aadhaar card was a foolish idea before the elections. Nandan Nilekani’s hard work got him a Congress ticket but he couldn’t reach Delhi. Those who did are tweaking it, plugging the loopholes and making it their own.

Another big example is Modi’s pet project, Congress-Mukt Bharat. It was Rahul Gandhi’s idea that Modi is taking forward and claiming credit for. If you remember the Lok Sabha election debacle, you have not forgotten the accentuated dimple on Rahul’s face as he smiled to the media. He promised stuff that people couldn’t even imagine. Because he was working at the grassroots level.

If you try to stop a bush from growing by pruning it, you will get a bushier bush. If you want to rid your lawn of the bush, you got to work at the root level like Rahul Gandhi. The Congress bush now reduced to a shrub is shrinking in many states. Take Delhi. The Congress was in power in Delhi last year. This year, it is not even in the contest. Is it the single-handed achievement of the Modi-Shah duo? They have the habit of claiming credit for anything good that happens. These individualist egoists don’t believe in team work. Can Modi hog all the limelight and appropriate all the credit? Success has many fathers and Rahul is unwed. So is Modi, for all practical purposes.

We don’t need to talk about how the Modi government is now embracing NREGA and other mind-boggling policies of the UPA government. The food subsidy, the rural electrification and other salient policies have changed only in the name. The Nehru/Gandhis are out and Deen Dayal Upadhyaya is in. Patel is now a BJP icon. Nehru will soon be. Indira will never be and Sonia/Rahul are opponents.

The BJP sees no merit in appropriating the deified Indira Gandhi, so Modi ignored her on her death anniversary. But Nehru, the tall statesman, will get special treatment from the government and there will certainly be an attempt to distance Nehru from Congress. Which in fact is true because Nehru, Patel and Gandhi were from the Indian National Congress. Indira formed her own Congress and the current Indian National Congress was born to Indira Gandhi’s Congress not Mahatma Gandhi’s Congress.

Mahatma Gandhi was from Gujarat, the state both Modi and Shah belong to. True to the Gujarati tradition, these two have been experimenting with their own truths. More power to them but can they now stop experimenting with Rahul Gandhi’s truth? Because we need Rahul Gandhi to experiment with some truths. In ways, we can’t even imagine.