In LS, a fiery Rahul throws down the Hinduism gauntlet again at BJP

In what is now becoming a regular fixture with his interventions both inside and outside Parliament, Congress leader Rahul Gandhi marshalled various tropes from Hinduism to slam the BJP and the Union Budget in the Lok Sabha,on Monday (July 29).

Coaxed by his party members into participating in the discussion on the Union Budget, the Leader of Opposition in the Lok Sabha invoked the Hindu iconography of Chakravyuh, Shiv ki Baraat and the oft-mentioned Abhaya Mudra to slam the Union Budget presented by Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman on July 23.

Rahul, who had picked over a dozen of his party colleagues from different states to speak on the Budget while taking a backseat in the discussion himself, may not have dissected the Budget with the acuity and precision of a P. Chidambaram. However, what he clearly succeeded with was in rattling the Treasury Benches as well as Lok Sabha Speaker Om Birla with his political jabs at Narendra Modi and the Prime Minister’s perceived patronage to a handful of capitalists.

If his debut address as the LoP during the 18^th Lok Sabha’s inaugural session last month was all about Lord Shiva’s Abhaya Mudra and its “Daro Mat, Darao Mat” (don’t be scared, don’t scare anyone) message, Rahul’s intervention on Monday borrowed inferences from the Mahabharata and the myths around Lord Shiva.

The Chakravyuh analogy

The Rae Bareli MP began by invoking the Chakravyuh (a battle formation devised by Dronacharya, the guru of Kauravas, in which Arjuna’s son Abhimanyu gets trapped and killed) and stating that a synonym for such a formation was padmavyuh (lotus formation). “Abhimanyu was trapped and killed by six people in the padmavyuh”, Rahul said and then went on to claim that the BJP, whose election symbol is the lotus flower, had today similarly tried to trap various sections of the Indian population in its “lotus formation”.

Amid heated exchanges between the Treasury Benches and Congress MPs, Rahul said just as six people – Dronacharya, Kripacharya, Shakuni, Kritavarma, Ashvatthama and Karna – had killed Abhimanyu in the Chakravyuh, there are six people – Prime Minister Modi, Home Minister Amit Shah, RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat, National Security Advisor Ajit Doval, Adani and Ambani – who are trying to trap and target Indian youth, women, farmers, the MSME sector, Agniveers and so on.

With the Speaker repeatedly reminding Rahul that the Lok Sabha’s rules of procedure do not allow MPs to cast aspersions on individuals who are not members of the House, the LoP retorted that he would withdraw the names of Bhagwat and Doval but he needed instructions from the Chair on “how to address the other two (Gautam Adani and Mukesh Ambani)”.

Rahul claimed that there were “three forces” that were running the Prime Minister’s government – the idea of monopoly capitalists and concentration of financial power, compromised constitutional institutions and agencies and the political executive. “If you won’t allow me to take names of those two (Adani and Ambani), then tell me how to speak about them... should I say A1 and A2,” Rahul told Birla, adding that “not talking about them in Parliament is not acceptable to us (in the Opposition)”.

Rahul skips Bihar, AP packages

The LoP made only brief mentions of the actual contents of Sitharaman’s budget, linking each of them to his analogy of Indians “trapped in the BJP’s lotus formation”. Interestingly, unlike most other Opposition MPs, including those from the Congress, Rahul refrained entirely from criticising the fiscal statement for the disproportionally high largesse it bestowed on Bihar and Andhra Pradesh, states ruled by crucial BJP allies, the JD (U) and the TDP, respectively.

The LoP slammed the Centre for its “tax terrorism” that he claimed had crippled mass employment generators such as the MSME sector. He dubbed the newly announced schemes for employment-linked incentives and internships poorly conceived and asserted that the Indian youth was trapped between “recurring exam paper leaks on one side and growing unemployment on the other”. Rahul slammed Sitharaman for the budgetary cuts in allocations for various sectors, particularly education, which he said was now the lowest in two decades.

The LoP reiterated his demands for giving farmers a legal guarantee for MSP, scrapping the Agniveer scheme and conducting a caste-based census; repeatedly asserting that the INDIA bloc would ensure that each of these are implemented by Parliament as promised to the voters by the INDIA constituents during the Lok Sabha poll campaign.

'Stabbed middle class'

Rahul also took as swipe at Modi for Sitharaman’s budget announcement of increasing taxation on both long term and short term capital gain and “cancellation of indexation”. “The middle class of the this country supported Narendra Modi wholeheartedly... but you have stabbed them twice in this budget; once in the back and then in the chest... the cancellation of indexation is a stab in the back and the increase in capital gain tax is a stab in the chest,” Rahul told the finance minister.

In defiance of House rules, the Congress leader also repeatedly waved a photograph of the finance minister distributing halwa, a customary ceremony linked with the budget-drafting exercise. “Budget ka halwa but raha hai par Dalit, adivasi aur backward class ko kuch nahi mil raha (the budget’s halwa is being distributed but Dalits, tribals and backward classes aren’t getting a share),” Rahul alleged, claiming that the 20 people, including the finance minister and officials of her ministry, who draft the Union Budget include only one person from a religious minority and one from the backward classes. The LoP claimed that the budget excluded 90 percent of India’s population and that “even in the photograph (of the halwa ceremony) you did not allow those two people (the officials from OBC and minority community)”.

Caste census must, says Rahul

Rahul asserted that it is to correct such anomaly in the distribution of financial power and resources that a caste census is “absolutely necessary” but he was disappointed that the Union Budget did not allocate “even a paisa for caste census”. With the finance minister seen smiling at the LoP’s interventions, Rahul scorched Sitharaman by claiming, “the finance minister is smiling... this is not a laughing matter, Madame... this is a caste census, it can change the country (sic)”.

The Congress leader then liked the Union Budget to “another Chakravyuh, lotus formation made by the BJP” to trap Indians and went on to invoke another Hindu idea, that of the Shiv ki Baraat (a procession of Lord Shiva that features all manner of people and creatures, symbolising inclusivity). Jabbing the BJP by asserting that “these people behind the lotus formation do not understand the nature of India,” Rahul said, “do you know what is the opposite of a Chakravyuh in Hinduism... it is Shiv ki Baraat; anyone can participate in it, dance in it, sing in it, dream in it.”

Rahul pitched the ideological battle between the BJP and the wider Opposition as a “fight between Chakravyuh and Shiv ki Baraat”. The BJP “believes in creating several small chakravyuhs for everyone... we believe in breaking the chakravyuh,” Rahul said, adding that Congress and UPA-era measures of the past such as the MNREGA, the Green revolution and even India’s freedom struggle and drafting of the Indian Constitution were “all ways of breaking the chakravyuh to usher in happiness, end fear and nurture confidence”.

He then slammed the BJP-dominated Treasury Benches with his favourite barb – “you call yourselves Hindu but you don’t understand Hinduism”. As the Treasury Benches shouted in protest claiming that he was insulting Hindus, Rahul asserted that he had “not insulted anyone”.

It may be difficult to predict how Rahul’s combative crusade of wresting from the BJP the proprietary rights on Hinduism that the saffron party has bestowed upon itself will go down with the vast numbers of Congress and INDIA bloc voters who, perhaps, voted for the Opposition in the hope of breaking the cycle of a politics driven by religion. What Monday’s discussion makes amply clear though is that Rahul is determined to push the gauntlet of Hinduism against the BJP’s Hindutva and that his strategy is visibly infuriating the diminished bench strength of the Modi government.