- Rahul Gandhi, My, Oh My. How He Stole The Advantage
Swati Chaturvedi writes in her column for NDTV that Rahul Gandhi, Congress President, did two unusual things in parliament yesterday. Gandhi’s savage speech which counted the “jumla strikes” made by the Narendra Modi government was a sharp indictment of Modi complete with references to “suited booted” billionaire cronies. Surprisingly it was a better speech than the long rambling one delivered by the “master orator” Modi.
Gandhi did not seem deterred. When he referred to Amit Shah in his speech, the uproar and howls of rage in the treasury benches forced the adjournment of the House. Neither the angry shouts nor the scripted laughter when Gandhi made his trademark fumbles in Hindi stopped his speech.
Also damaging for the BJP: its fractious ally Shiv Sena, which had agreed to back the government after Amit Shah’s outreach over a phone call, at the last minute decided to walk out. Like the hug, this probably left Shah seething.
That said, it will take a lot more than a jhappi for Gandhi to win away voters from Modi. But for now, this was his moment. No taking that away.
- Modi ambushed and aghast
In his column for The Telegraph, Sankarshan Thakur says that this one had all the elements of a surgical strike and more. It had surprise. It had stealth. It had precision. It had transparency too – a strike carried out in full view of whoever cared to watch, a strike mentally pre-meditated, a strike dealt with easy deliberation. A smiling assassin’s strike.
When Congress president Rahul Gandhi closed what must rank as his finest hour in Parliament on Friday afternoon, it had struck few he wasn’t done yet, that he planned to put a seal on his performance with an act that would become the indelible emboss and image of the day.
Modi had been taken by the Rahul strike. Smothered. Defenceless. Aghast too a bit on who had come to drop on him. Stills from the moment would reveal to you a man rendered helpless and stricken, for once not a man who commanded the cameras but had been shown up by them.
- When a hug makes headlines
Priya Ramani, in an article for The Mint says that Bharatiya Janata Party minister Ananth Kumar called it a ghatna (incident), a television anchor declared it was completely against the spirit of parliamentary democracy, and some political analysts tweeted this was a defining moment for Congress president Rahul Gandhi. They were all reacting to the hug Gandhi gave Prime Minister Narendra Modi during a no-confidence motion in the Lok Sabha.
It’s not the first time in recent weeks that a hug has elicited divided reactions.
I’m not a big fan of workplace hugs (except if it’s a sports field and you just scored a goal or won Wimbledon), even if your hugs have Oprah Winfrey’s capacity to “end wars, solve world peace”, as actor Reese Witherspoon put it earlier this year. But I understand the importance of this rainbow-coloured activity—I’m bringing up my daughter as a hugger.
But the hug that holds the most value for me is the one when words fail. When someone—friend, family, acquaintance or stranger—who has lost a child or a parent or a partner looks at you, foggy with grief, and you know that the only way to pause their pain for a few seconds is to give them a long, tight hug.
- A Memorable Hug in Indian Politics
The image of Rahul Gandhi hugging Narendra Modi reminded us that even the most bitter political confrontation can have scope for an unexpected manoeuvre, writes Manash Firaq Bhattacharjee in his column for The Wire.
Rahul’s Gandhian politics of touchability may have played a masterstroke if it works: By hugging Modi, he broke the logic that equates ideological distance with physical distance. The gesture of physical proximity, overcoming the political barrier, is a unique one. It upsets the normalcy of ideological distance, and creates a tension that I can only call democratic.
Rahul moved, while Modi was seated. Rahul bent, while Modi did not budge: It symbolised the gesture of movability versus the gesture of immovability, which can be extended to mean the difference between the politics of flexibility and the politics of inflexibility.
Rahul, by his gesture, made the valuable point that he is doing pure politics, not war. Indian democracy breathed a sigh of relief at that gesture.
- Hurricane Huggie (Oh yes, govt wins 325-126)
Hug crushes 56-inch chest that responds with anger and hate, writes Manini Chatterjee in her column for The Telegraph. She says that in a stunning act of real life Gandhigiri that left the entire Lok Sabha and a nationwide television audience dumbstruck, Congress president Rahul Gandhi on Friday walked across the aisle and hugged Prime Minister Narendra Modi to underline he felt “not an iota of anger, not an iota of hatred” towards his adversary and that the Congress stood for love and brotherhood, the very essence of India.
With its numerical majority, the government defeated the no-confidence motion with ease, 325 to 126. But even members of the treasury benches would privately concede that Rahul scored a much bigger victory – not just for his trenchant critique of the Modi government’s broken promises and questionable deals, such as the Rafale fighter aircraft purchase from France, but for the manner in which he succinctly delineated the battle between the forces of hate and love being waged in the country.
Many expected Modi to rise to the occasion and depart from his prepared script, to soar above the bar set by Rahul’s unprecedented gesture and be statesman-like in his response.
The Prime Minister, looking initially rattled, soon slipped into familiar mode, delivering a speech that lasted an hour and a half but said not a single thing the nation has not heard many, many times before.