India Insulted

When Rahul Gandhi travels abroad, one can be certain of two things: he will avoid wishing Indians on their festivals, and he will revel in trashing his own country. His most recent stop at a Colombian university followed the same tired script. He told students there that the RSS-BJP ideology was rooted in cowardice, and that India’s institutions were under siege. His audience clapped politely. Back home, 140 crore Indians saw a politician gleefully dragging his nation through the mud on foreign soil.

This bashing India abroad has become the Congress scion’s trademark political style. The playbook is to denigrate India overseas, flatter himself as a truth-teller and the shining upholder of ‘secularist’ values - which usually means denigrating Hinduism to appease the Congress’ minority votebank - and bask in applause from left-liberal echo chambers. In Bogotá, as earlier in London and Washington, he repeated the hackneyed story of how Indian democracy is collapsing and its minorities are under threat. It is an old trick to seek validation abroad when none is forthcoming at home.

The BJP’s branding of Gandhi as “Leader of Propaganda” hits the mark. What Gandhi supplies to hostile lobbies abroad is not constructive criticism, but soundbites designed to weaken India’s global standing. He could have greeted his countrymen on Vijayadashami, a day marking the triumph of good over evil. Instead, he chose to play the villain, presenting India as a broken state to foreign audiences who neither know nor care about the country’s democratic vibrancy.

The irony is breathtaking. The Gandhi dynasty presided over some of India’s darkest chapters. If democracy ever faced real danger, it was under Indira Gandhi’s Emergency, when citizens were jailed, the press silenced, and the Constitution shredded. If institutions were weakened, it was under decades of Congress patronage politics, cronyism and dynastic arrogance. Yet Rahul Gandhi, the heir of that legacy, now postures as the defender of democracy.

The truth is more banal. Rahul Gandhi cannot stomach India’s rise. While the world hails India as a $4-trillion economy and a rising power, he sulks. While Narendra Modi is courted in Washington, Paris and Tokyo, he lectures in Bogotá about India’s supposed decay.

Even foreign voices are losing patience. Raymond Vickery, a former US official, advised Indian politicians to speak in favour of their country’s values overseas. Gandhi does the opposite. He feeds a narrative useful to India’s adversaries - that the country is unstable, undemocratic, and divided. He has become not Leader of the Opposition, but Leader of Opposing Bharat.

In his sojourns abroad, Gandhi offers a caricature: India as dictatorship, Indians as dupes and himself as saviour.

Posterity will not remember Rahul Gandhi as a constructive leader who did his bit for strengthening Indian democracy. It will remember a platinum-spooned dynast who, every time India surged ahead, went abroad to sneer at his motherland and get a few claps from foreign audiences.