Rahul's 'panauti' jibe at Modi reflects a new, combative Congress

The jury is still out on whether former Congress president Rahul Gandhi has yielded electoral gains to the BJP with his “panauti” jibe at Prime Minister Narendra Modi during a poll rally in Rajasthan. However, Rahul’s latest swipe is instructive of a combative, no-holds-barred rhetoric that he and the Congress wish to set against Modi and the BJP as the current round of Assembly polls conclude and pave the way for the all-important battle of the Lok Sabha that’s due four months from now.

Addressing a poll rally in Rajasthan’s Jalore, on Tuesday (November 21), Rahul had referred to India’s shock defeat against Australia in the cricket World Cup final and said, “hamare ladke waha pe World Cup jeet jaate, par panauti... harwa diya (our boys would have won the World Cup, but the 'bad omen' made them lose)”; though without directly naming Modi. Rahul’s remark had come after the crowd gathered at the rally began shouting “panauti” – a colloquial slang widely used in the Hindi heartland to refer to a person as a bad omen – when he was speaking about Modi. Ever since, the Congress’s social media volunteers have flooded platforms such as X and Instagram with panauti memes and videos mocking Modi.

Using 'personal attacks' for electoral advantage

The BJP, which promptly moved the Election Commission dubbing the remark as “a symptom of the plummeting level of political discourse”, has been seething at Rahul. At a media briefing, senior BJP leader Ravi Shankar Prasad, with his usual flair for breathing fury at political rivals, had said that the slang’s use for the Prime Minister was “shameful, condemnable and disgraceful”.

Similar condemnations have also come in for Rahul from a section of journalists and political commentators, with some reminding the Congress that Modi is adept at using such “personal attacks” to his electoral advantage.

The Congress, however, has been unapologetic and has stridently defended Rahul. In a scathing attack at both the BJP and the media, the party’s media wing chief Pawan Khera said, “Ever since Rahul Gandhi used the word panauti, there’s been a lot of commotion... one can understand this commotion in the BJP because they know who the panauti is... several anchors have also said Rahul should have kept the discourse civil.”

Khera challenged these anchors to show “one tweet they posted condemning Nirmala Sitharaman’s Rahu-kaal remark, Modi’s ‘murkhon ka sardar’ comment (both purportedly aimed at Rahul) and numerous other comments by senior BJP leaders” and said, “when the PM uses such words, these anchors say the ‘PM takes a jibe’... if the PM can take a jibe, Rahul Gandhi can also take a jibe because one man’s jibe cannot be another man’s insult”.

This combative putdown of the Prime Minister, the BJP and even anchors in the mainstream media, Congress sources say, will not die down with the conclusion of the current round of Assembly polls. Instead, the party leaders told The Federal that it will only get shriller as the Lok Sabha polls draw near and could even manifest during the upcoming winter session of Parliament.

Rahul has never held his punches while criticising Modi. However, the panauti jibe coupled with his likening the Prime Minister at another rally to a jebkatra (pickpocket) suggests that the former Congress chief has finally shed his reticence to respond in the same vein that the BJP mascot has invariably adopted, over the years, to scorch the Nehru-Gandhis.

No muted response from Rahul's colleagues this time

More importantly, the fulsome endorsement Rahul’s panauti and jebkatra jabs at Modi have received from his party at an organisational level, Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge downwards, is a noticeable departure from the muted response that the Wayanad MP had received from his colleagues during the 2019 Lok Sabha polls when Rahul had pushed the ‘Chowkidaar Chor Hai’ narrative against Modi.

In fact, at the very first Congress Working Committee (CWC) meet convened soon after the party’s 2019 poll rout, Rahul had, before offering his resignation as party chief, lamented that no senior party leader had back him on the Chowkidaar Chor Hai attack at Modi. Subsequently, several party leaders have conceded, on the record and off it, that they were unsure of using the Chowkidaar diatribe against Modi for fear of voter backlash, particularly after the BJP used the swipe to its advantage with Modi prefixing his name on Twitter with Chowkidaar and almost the entire saffron leadership following suit.

It is a widely acknowledged fact that the Congress, particularly during the long years that Sonia Gandhi was at its helm, often shied away from responding in kind to any crude verbal attack launched at its top leadership by Modi or any other political rival. With specific regard to Modi, the Congress’s senior leaders and media managers would often justify this caginess by citing the Hindutva icon’s ability to draw public sympathy from any invective, even a mild one, hurled at him. A case in point that was often referred to in regard to such conversations within the party was how Modi had benefitted electorally in the 2007 Gujarat Assembly polls after Sonia, in her only instance of an unfettered verbal outburst, dubbed him “maut ka saudagar (merchant of death)”. A decade later, days before Rahul took over as Congress president, former Union minister Mani Shankar Aiyar was suspended from the party for calling Modi “neech (lowly)” in the midst of the 2017 Gujarat Assembly poll campaign.

Congress sources told The Federal that this response of the party distancing itself from any “unparliamentary” jibe made at Modi – or going on the defensive in face of predictable opprobrium – would have, perhaps, continued even now but for a crafty rebuttal that party general secretary Priyanka Gandhi came up with during the Karnataka Assembly poll campaign earlier this year. Addressing a poll rally in Karnataka, Priyanka had lambasted Modi for “being the only Prime Minister who repeatedly goes to the public crying that his rivals are abusing him”. She had mocked Modi for claiming at a rally that the Congress had “abused me 91 times” and had said, “at least the abuses you (Modi) claim to have been subjected to fit on a single sheet of paper, if we were to compile a list of the abuses you have hurled at my family, we would need to publish several books”.

Priyanka’s riposte triggered Congress’s media managers into an overdrive of listing out the many instances in which Modi had heaped vile invectives at Sonia – the Congress ki widhwa (Congress’s widow) jab being just one of many such repugnant remarks – and other party leaders. Yet, Rahul, still stewing in his peacemaker aura after the Bharat Jodo Yatra, had refrained at the time from adopting his sister’s fierce attacks at Modi.

However, with many in the Congress seeing its Karnataka victory and the buoyant electoral prospects of the party in the currently poll-bound states as a sign of a waning in Modi’s ability to benefit from being called names, Rahul, with his panauti and jebkatra taunts, appears to have joined the bandwagon of tongue lashers he once decried.

Congress ready for 'word-for-word response'

A senior Congress leader close to Rahul told The Federal that Modi and the BJP should, hereon, “brace for a befitting, word-for-word response” from the party’s current frontline troika of Kharge, Rahul and Priyanka. “While we will not stoop to using the filthy language that Modi and his colleagues use repeatedly for our leaders, we will not remain silent either. Words that Rahul has used for Modi are still very mild compared to what Modi has said about not just Rahul but even Sonia Gandhi in the past. For over a decade, the BJP used words like Pappu and we never countered it effectively because some of our leaders thought we should not start sounding like our rivals but look where that stand got us... that approach strengthened the propaganda BJP spread about Rahul while it giving the impression that we were too scared to take on Modi.”

The Congress leader added, “Priyanka shattered the myth of Modi being a strongman by convincingly telling the people that this is a Prime Minister who cares not for the public’s problem but of his own image and what his critics call him; Kharge ji has also repeatedly said that Modi should stop crying about what Congress leaders say about him and instead focus on the country’s problems and Rahul is using that same narrative... this belligerence was missing (in Congress) earlier even though ordinary people had started calling Modi’s bluff for some time; in fact, the word panauti had started trending for Modi much before Rahul used it and even at the (Jalore) rally, it first came organically from common people and not from Rahul”.

A senior Congress spokesperson told The Federal that as the 2024 Lok Sabha polls approach, the party will “give no quarter” to Modi and “will simply not take it lying down” when the Prime Minister or others from the BJP use phrases like “murkhon ka sardar” for Rahul. A sign of this is already visible with the Congress’s social media handles posting “jhooton ka sardar” memes targeting Modi.

As the Battle 2024 gains momentum, so would the trading of barbs between the Congress and the BJP. Civility in public discourse will have to wait for another time – or age.