The Congress will be History Soon

The Indian National Congress (INC) is on the way out. An English civil servant, Allan Octavian Hume (1829 – 1912), founded the party in December 1885. As it happens, Hume is also known as “the father of Indian ornithology”. Not just that, he was a theosophist. Go read his brief wiki bio. He was an impressive man. Anyway, now nearly 130 years old, the Congress is in terminal decline. A foreigner — an accomplished Englishman — gave birth to it and another foreigner — an almost uneducated Italian woman — is presiding over it as it takes it final gasps. The Congress’s most celebrated leader is undoubtedly Shri M K Gandhi, aka “Mahatma Gandhi”, a Gujarati; and it is another Gujarati who is instrumental in putting the dying Congress out of its misery. The parentheses that enclose the Congress are ironic. And now for a bit from an IndiaFacts Nov 2013 article by Gautam Sen, below the fold.

The sight of a sombre Manish Tiwari denouncing Narendra Modi in hushed tones of angst, for suggesting the ailing imported empress abdicate in favour of her befuddled son, illustrated poignantly the ignominy to which the GOP has descended. The party that fought for Indian independence is now in the thrall of an uneducated and greedy foreigner of no noticeable merit. The Congress party is a mere appendage to her utterly vacuous imperious airs that hint at innate supremacy. The bevy of nauseous courtiers like Tiwari, Khurshid and Ramesh and others, less versed in the Queen’s English, but perfectly capable of shocking obsequiousness in Hindi, have sunk to the lowest possible depths. Modi is having a lot of fun puncturing the inflated egos of these degraded court jesters and their absurd leaderene, while precipitating delighted mirth in his vast audiences.

You would imagine that she might have the nous to identify competent speechwriters who would get basic facts right. But her recent piqued Chhattishgarh litany, in wooden Hindi, recited otherwise from the Latin scriptis; something was profoundly amiss. It seems their only qualification is shameless obeisance and unctuous obedience, hence the serial hilarity the speeches of mother and son invariably provoke. Rahul Gandhi may have been awarded the M.Phil. Degree by Trinity, Cambridge, tutored by an earnest Bangladeshi economist and, no doubt, monitored solicitously by the family’s own Nobel laureate, its President at the time. But his autistic patter reveals he gained little from it. Either the degree had become worthless by the time he had supposedly studied for it and evidently passed three of its four component papers, or there is something profoundly amiss. It is unlikely the truth will ever be known.

The Congress is really no longer a political party at all. It is entirely a vehicle for the perpetuation of a clapped out dynasty that has outsourced itself socially and culturally from India. It supreme leader and her family party abroad, enjoy healthcare in elite foreign hospitals and spend like owners of Pharaonic wealth, while hypocritically feigning concern for India’s poor. Their wasteful programmes for alleged upliftment are a form of double jeopardy. It robs India of painfully accumulated savings, in shameless attempts to bribe the electorate, while the political incumbents loot simultaneously without respite. It is a disgrace bereft of moral limits, cynically bolstered by a corrupt, anti-national media and a retinue of politicians who behave no better than domestics. Their plunder would have made Nadir Shah blanch and its intolerable brazenness prompts rage in anyone with a modicum of honesty and insight!

Go read it all — The Congress Loses its Marbles, Nov 25th 2013. By Gautam Sen.

Author: Atanu Dey

Economist. View all posts by Atanu Dey