A number of afflicted half-intellectuals and failed leaders abound in India today. And Congress vice president Rahul Gandhi is foremost among them. His shallowness outshines all others

Congress vice president Rahul Gandhi, during one of those periods when he is afflicted with a compelling urge to churn out some fundamental thought and observations and engage in some deeply reflective navel gazing recently tweeted, “The emperor is completely naked but nobody around him has the courage to tell him.”

After a long hiatus Rahul Gandhi has finally made some sense in what he said, and for the discerning and the close observer of his non-politics, the words were loaded with truth and frankness. Many within Rahul Gandhi’s own party and in other parties, Rahul Gandhi’s and his mother’s acolyte media-persons and their coterie intellectuals, were all surprised at the frankness with which Rahul Gandhi described his own state of being when he tweeted those words.

The Congress vice president is in fact the actual emperor who is completely naked, presiding over a crumbling empire, held together by a dowager empress, who is yearning to let go off the reins but is unable to do so because the heir apparent is still on a quest for the discovery of maturity, is confused, fumbling, frothing with no vision or urge to salvage his empire. Yet nobody around Rahul Gandhi has the courage to tell him of his state of stark nakedness, they fear lest their frank talk would offend the emperor and they become the victims of vendetta and marginalisation.

They fear that they may meet the same fate as that of many others, in the past, who were politically decimated by Rahul Gandhi’s grandmother because they had dared to speak to her, especially during the period when she, possessed by Hitler’s un-exorcised spirit, was diligently working to turn India into one large concentration camp, a large prison where dignity of life and of living was daily trampled upon, where sterilisation and imprisonment were the only public service projects that the then Government of India under her ‘revolutionary’ leadership had initiated and where dubious ‘godmen’, cronyism and street politicians ruled the roost and controlled the destiny of the vast multitudes.

Both Rahul Gandhi and Martin Luther King III and the likes of Amartya Sen, were then quite callow or so engrossed in making a career out of selling India’s poverty in the West — like Sen did — that they may not have taken note of this dark phase in our democratic history. Martin Luther King III, for example, recently flew down to India, to sermonise a democratic Government with the largest ever mandate in three decades, on the essence of democracy and on how to handle liberties. Perhaps his audiences back home is shrinking, either because people have no time for empty rhetoric and platitudes or are perhaps plain-simple fed up with gaseous sermons and wish to get along with life.

Martin Luther King III — a poor and stunted replica of his illustrious father — again displayed his mental and intellectual nakedness when he sat next to the naked emperor and tried to interpret India and the Indian psyche without an iota of real knowledge or understanding. His only circuit in this country has been limited to some agenda peddling counterfeit Gandhians, some select five star activists and the self-styled conscience keepers of India who continue to make a career in the Congress by selling the ‘India in danger’ syllabus. What Martin Luther King III and his host, Rahul Gandhi displayed in Bengaluru last weekend was the utter depravity and the utter nakedness of their own minds.

When Rahul Gandhi’s grandmother was passing through her Hitlerian phase, and had transmogrified herself into a human rights gobbling ogre, Martin Luther King III, then just 20, must have still been struggling to create and evolve a world view, so acute must have been that struggle that he scarcely remembers that one with whom he shared the stage in the Bengaluru false quest for equity conference was the one whose grandmother had transformed India into a gulag between 1975 and 1977.

The pressures on Martin Luther King III have always been so heavy that he has spent half a lifetime trying to outgrow and outdo his illustrious father, whom we have always revered.

It is this constant self-induced pressure to outdo and out-grow his father that seems to have gradually taken a toll on Martin Luther King III, it has clouded his sense of judgment, it has blurred his understanding of India, it has made him pander to a false political philosophy and to spite and spit at those who have truly worked and are working in this country for the empowerment of the marginalised. That he had no business coming to India as a guest and to publicly castigate Prime Minister Narendra Modi and deliver empty sermons is something I am not taking into account, after all can one really expect propriety, sobriety and statesmanship from those beholden to the Rahul and Sonia Gandhi family?

In fact it is these very attributes that one has to sacrifice in order to ingratiate oneself with the Congress’s first family. A number of family loyalists are living examples of this as are some global public intellectuals, some of whom often fly down to India, every winter and early spring and dive into television studios and deliver some garbled public lectures in which their sole belaboured argument is that India under Modi is falling into evil days — foremost among such flying in and flying out intellectuals, with no commitment or contribution to India, is Sen.

Sen too has long given up any pretensions of being a man of free judgement and thinking, over the years he has ingratiated himself to the Congress’s first family but being, as they say clever by half, he has successfully camouflaged that state of mind and of being with verbose and empty academic theory and talk.

He too has repeatedly displayed his intellectual nakedness, especially when, the other day, he refused to condemn the Basirhat violence and instead turned the occasion to train his guns on the Narendra Modi dispensation, saying that such conflagrations were being deliberately instigated.

Sen has served many masters, while he continues to serve his Western benefactors, he has served his Marxist benefactors in the past, he has and continues to staunchly serve his Congress benefactors and now in Bengal he is serving the lumpenist Mamata Banerjee dispensation. Sen will serve any dispensation or conglomerate as long as he can spite Prime Minister Modi and in doing that keep himself in circulation in some quarters.

A number of such nakedness-afflicted half intellectuals and failed leaders abound in India today, Rahul Gandhi, however, is foremost among them, his nakedness outshines all others!