Author: Editorial
Publication: Mail Today
Dated: March 10, 2008
There is something incongruous about Rahul
Gandhi naming his latest campaign, as Discover India, though it is basically
a programme to mobilise the party structure all over the country in the
run-up to the Lok Sabha polls. Maybe the Harvard educated Gandhi family
scion has given his ignorance of the country away by the nomenclature, though
such indeed could not have been his intent. In any case, i when one considers
that his illustrious great-grandfather not just "discovered" India
for himself before Independence but helped countless others do so through
his masterpiece, it seems a little late in the day for the 38-year-old Amethi
MP to undertake an exercise of this kind.
The political gaffe is also revealing of a
cardinal problem that ails our politics today. It is a contradiction that
is perhaps behind the abysmal conditions prevailing in rural India. Many of
our politicians have reaped the benefits of good education' seen the
world and so have a broad idea about the direction in which the country"
should head. But more often than not, this group is divorced from the realities
of everyday life in India's villages, where most of its population resides.
So, such leaders need to undertake symbolic trips -like Rahul's in the present
case into the countryside, especially when polls appear close and the
party's prospects need shoring up. On the other hand, the leaders who do know
our villages have mostly not had the privilege of good education and
exposure that widens their horizons and lends them a vision and this sees
them perpetuate for the sake of votes the very ills
like caste that are rural India's bane.
Caught between the two kinds of politicians
are the unfortunate masses for whom life has changed little in decades, as
Rahul "discovered" in Kalahandi on Friday. It's time our leaders
realised that the hour for discovering India is past - after all they have
had six decades to achieve this end. Rather than embark on such trips, as
if the country were an exotic destination of the 1 kind nurtured in occidental
imagination, our leaders must take concrete steps for changing India, for
that is the pressing call of the hour.
