Rahul Gandhi, the fledgling and burgeoning politician, has been misinformed—yet again—by his advisors that revolution is what India needs, and being projected as a revolutionary will purvey himself to be an alternative to Narendra Modi. After the vai de bet:election manifesto launch by the Indian National Congress, Rahul, in his public addresses, started harping on the terms “revolutionary” and “wealth distributionꦯ”, terms that are seemingly and e🍌tymologically Maoist.
In a public engagement in Hyderabad, a day after the manifesto launch, he observed, “We will conduct a financial and institutional survey to find out who holds the country’s wealth, what section holds it, and then we will undertake revolutionary work. Whatever your right, we will work on giving you the same.” This was bound to allure untoward, undue and unwarranted reactions from political quarters, but none could fathom that this would give a fertile pitch and snowball into one of the main polling planks for the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), entailing a frontal assault from PM Modi leading the offensive.ALSO READ: Opinion | Modi’s Mangalsutra Missile Hits Opposition’s Politics of Caste and Religion
PM Modi said during a rally in Banswara, “Earlier, when their (Congress) government was in power, they said that Muslims had the first right to the country’s assets. This means to whom will this property be distributed? It will be distributed among those who have more children. It will be distributed to the infiltrators. This is urban Naxal thinking, and mothers and sisters, they will not even spare your Mangalsutra. They will stoop to this level” thus suggesting that the Congress mandates to vai de bet:redistribute public wealth to Muslims.
Before the Opposition or the Congress could comprehend the polity, the emotion, and the defacement that this shift in the PM’s priorities had caused, the offensive continued the following day in yet another public engagement, where Modi added, “The Prince (alluding to Rahul Gandhi) says if his government comes, they will investigate who earns how much and how much property they have. Not only this, but he further says the government will take over the property and redistribute it. This is what their election manifesto is saying.”Let us delve deeper into the chain of events hitherto, the political speeches and the newly released Congress manifesto, for this necessitates a closer examination of the documented facts and contexts rather than merely tangential rhetorical social media retorts offered by interested parties or allied trolls. It is noteworthy for an objective and rational critique that we understand the basic premise that an election manifesto is a letter of intent, and vision and intents are unquantifiable. A manifesto does not underscore the execution or implementation part.In his 1969 book, ‘Muslim vai de bet:Politics in Secular India’, Muslim scholar Hamid Dalwai critiqued appeasement politics as the furtherance of Jinnah’s separatist mindset. He observed that the real problem was Muslim obscurantism—that Indian Muslims had shunned their doors and, in a way, evaded public scrutiny. In a way, they are secluding themselves from the rest of the country’s majority, i.e., the Hindus. He also observed that Indian Muslims are more likely to blame H♍indus than to reflect. This “obscurantism and medievalism” needs to be confronted instead of evading it using political chicanery and the charade of “minority protection” or “secularism”.
Last but not least, Sam Pitroda, the Chairman of the Indian Overseas Congress, publicly advocated for the implementation of an inheritance tax law in India, wherein if an individual with substantial wealth passed away, only a portion of their assets can be transferred to their children and the government claims a significant share. “In America, there is an inheritance tax. If one has 100 million USD worth of wealth and when he dies he can only transfer probably 45 per cent to his children, 55 per cent is grabbed by the government. That’s an interesting law. It says you in your generation made wealth and you are leaving now, you must leave your wealth for the public, not all of it, half of it, which to me sounds fair,” Pitroda said.It is another instance where the Congress put its foot in the mouth while peddling falsehood brazenly as there is no such federal inheritance tax in the US which applies nationwide. This is a classic case of the pot calling the kettle black, where the Congress is tilting to an extreme form of communism that even the Marxists and Maoists shy outside closed walls.Rolling back to Marxism, for all we have seen in this world, phoney secularists and rabid Islamists make for strange bedfellows. This is the very commune that has taken over the reins of the Congress party, the very cabal pandering to the Muslims by means of appeasement but keeping them confined in ghettos and then mobilising these ghettos as vandals against the wealth creators and law-abiding citizens.Modi is breaking the shackles by extricating the downtrodden, irrespective of their religious identities. He might sound direct, blunt and antagonistic to many, but remember, him assuming the responsibility of “140 crore ka rakhwala” and for all practical purposes, he desires the vikas of Muslims and his performance and the stats of his government are a living testimony to the claim that he has worked 🌸in an unprecedented and staggering way for the Muslims unlike any of t𒁃he prime ministers in living memory.
Yuvraj Pokharna is an independent journalist and columnist. He tweets with @iyuvrajpokharna. Here’s the link to Yuvraj’s official WhatsApp channel: //whatsapp.com/channel/0029VaBKt038vd1QvwLPp515. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely that of the author. They do not necessarily reflect News18’s views.