Think of your childhood and tell me what your mother would have done if you had brought your friend’s remote control car to your home without asking him. Stopped you, right? That’s the rule. This is exactly what has happened with the Congress leader Rahul Gandhi. Gandhi wanted to break a rule of the Parliament by reading a part from an ‘unpublished’ book. However, the Speaker of Lok Sabha, who has the duty of ensuring the smooth conduct of debates, stopped him from doing so.
The rule that Gandhi didn’t try to consider was Rule No 349 of the ‘Rules of Procedure and Conduct of Business in Lok Sabha’. Part (i) of this rule says whilst the House is sitting, a member ‘shall not read any book, newspaper or letter except in connection with the business of the House’. And on February 2, neither the list of business nor the revised list of business had anything listed from Gandhi, including the 20 questions asked.
It was the Motion of Thanks on the President’s Address that was being presented when Gandhi stood up and started speaking. He wanted to read something from an essay by the left-wing magazine The Caravan. He even read a line or two from it, but then was stopped by the Speaker for trying to read something against the business of the House for that day. Defence Minister Rajnath Singh and Union Minister of Parliamentary Affairs Kiren Rijiju also joined in support of the Speaker.
The Speaker spoke the rule. Singh and Rijiju echoed the ruling.
Let me say this: Mr Gandhi, the Parliament is not your private property, and the Speaker is not your servant. If you want to put your point across the table, learn to read and obey the rules.
The book titled ‘Four Stars of Destiny’ is an autobiography of the former Chief of Army Staff General Manoj Mukund Naravane. In it, as per The Caravan, Naravane writes about an incident from August 2020, when he was informed at ‘8:15 pm’ that four Chinese tanks had started moving towards India’s Rechin La in eastern Ladakh, and he was waiting for the orders from the very top on what his response should be.
To be clear, all this was happening after the June 2020 Galwan clash, in which 42 Chinese soldiers were killed, while 20 Indian soldiers attained veergati.
The timing of the first call made by Naravane to Singh to inform him about the movement of the Chinese tanks hasn’t been mentioned in the essay. But, it states that Naravane called Singh again at ‘9:25 pm’, asking for ‘clear directions’. And it was only at ‘10:30 pm’ that Singh called back Naravane, and told him he had spoken to PM Modi, and his instruction is of a single sentence: ‘Jo uchit samjho, woh karo’—do whatever you deem appropriate.
Holding onto this one sentence, Gandhi is saying that PM Modi ‘did not fulfill his responsibility’ and if PM Modi said this, then this means ‘he could not decide’ what to do, and so he told Naravane to decide on his own. In addition, the Prime Minister took a ‘long time’ to reply is what Gandhi is claiming. That’s it. These two are the only points that Gandhi is making.
I ask you a simple question: when the sitting Prime Minister of a nation is clearly saying that do whatever you deem fit. What does your common sense say: Modi couldn’t decide or Modi placed his faith in the Army Chief? If you have common sense, you’ll agree with the latter. If the former interests you, you have lost the plot.
That the long time taken to reply: 1 hour and 5 minutes is not long. After all, Naravane, Singh and Modi weren’t in some WhatsApp group. There is a certain hierarchy. When the Prime Minister was briefed, he took the decision on the spot.
Why do all this theatre then? The goal is simple – manipulate.
Before this unpublished book thing was made an issue on a fractured base. Congress said it was a matter of ‘national shame’ because a human trafficker, Jeffrey Epstein, wrote in some email to some person named Jabor Y that PM Modi ‘took advice and danced and sang in Israel for the benefit of the US President.’ The Ministry of External Affairs called these allegations ‘trashy ruminations by a convicted criminal’ and no video was available to prove the claim.
But Congress was all out with AI videos to prove that the Prime Minister danced. The impact? The Left latched onto this claim, trusted it, and even started mocking the PM. I remember watching a reel by that kid who mocked Lord Ram, Ashwamit Gautam. He made a video with Madri Kakoti in which he can be heard of insisting Kakoti to dance like Modi.
Then, there were more reels propagating the same proofless claim that flooded the social media.
In one, using an unpublished book, and in the other, an evidenceless claim, shows how factually corrupt the opposition has become. If Mr Gandhi wants the nation to trust him, the opposition and his politically dead party, he should first start being factual. But then it doesn’t seem to be a possibility, too, as he is someone who couldn’t even learn that the August 2020 event was of Rechin La, not Doklam, and mentioned the latter while reading whatever part he could on February 2. There I say: Mr Gandhi is dumb.
S Shiva is an independent journalist based in Delhi.