Decoding Rahul Gandhi’s US trip: Why is India’s LoP giving ammo to Khalistanis, meeting Ilhan Omar?

Rahul Gandhi has gone to the United States and whipped up a storm back home. Two days have passed in his three-day trip, and already he has given BJP a bagful of ammunition to target him. During an interview with Edward Luce, the Washington DC-based Financial Times columnist and a Modi baiter whose unabashed fawning perhaps made even Rahul cringe in discomfort, India’s Leader of the Opposition made a series of controversial remarks that are unmoored from facts and represent rank distortion of reality. But that’s not the only occasion where he made such comments.

Rahul’s itinerary also included a diaspora event in Virgina, addressing students at University of Texas in Dallas and meeting American lawmakers, members of think tanks and media persons in Washington DC. The programme was drawn up by Sam Pitroda, chairman of the Indian Overseas Congress. These foreign jaunts are meant to serve a very specific purpose for Rahul.

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Long at the receiving end of a sustained campaign from the BJP about the lack of his intellectual acumen, Rahul and his advisors have figured out a way to combat the pejorative image of a simpleton. The idea is that India being a post-colonial society, these foreign trips and hobnobbing with western intellectuals and members of academia will somehow elevate Rahul’s image back home and project him as a ‘thinker’. Sam certainly believes so.

Problem is, despite extensive tutorials on possible talking points, Rahul frequently exceeds his brief and conflates foreign platforms with domestic campaign trail. Discrediting Indian democracy while abroad, castigating India’s electoral process, belittling Indian institutions, projecting India as a deeply unequal society or mocking the prime minister before students at a foreign university may generate a few claps among the audience and headlines back home, but the behaviour is not only unbecoming of a senior politician who aspires for the top job, but immature and improper for the holder of a statutory post such as the LoP.

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This isn’t, of course, to say that India is without its share of problems. Levelling unhinged allegations and projecting domestic political rivalries on foreign soil, however, doesn’t solve India’s problems, make India look strong or a mature democracy. It makes us look weak, divisive, and provides a handle to India’s adversaries, unless that is the plan.

India’s democracy and electoral system is dynamic, robust and thriving. We are an oasis of democracy in a tough neighbourhood. India’s institutions, despite myriad challenges, are performing better than many of its western counterparts. In America, where Rahul was busy denigrating India, a former president was the target of an elaborate lawfare by political rivals to stop him from running for office. The Democrats weaponised the judiciary and dragged Trump through lower courts via trumped up charges before the plan was busted by the US Supreme Court.

Rahul should introspect. His party ran an insidious, relentless campaign against the reliability of India’s EVM system ahead of the 2024 general elections but miraculously all charges evaporated into thin air when it emerged that Congress has improved its tally. There is a limit to chicanery.

While in America, Rahul cast aspersions on the sanctity of India’s electoral process, without providing any proof, and sought to undermine India’s autonomous institutions such as the Election Commission and even the judiciary. It was a torrent of misinformation and half-truths from the Leader of the Opposition.

He claimed that the BJP has “captured all institutions”, which seemed more of a self-projection from the leader of a party that made it a standard operating procedure to fill every institution with party loyalists, cronies and apparatchiks in its six-decade reign since the Independence and developed an intricate patronage-based network to run the administrative system.

While speaking to Luce, Rahul alleged that the BJP is out to “destroy the Constitution”. It was ironic coming from the leader of a party that inflicted Emergency on India, the only time since Independence that India’s democratic credentials have taken a hit.

And it was more than a little paradoxical to hear Rahul wax eloquent on Indian Constitution, since it was he as the Congress boss who tore to shreds at a press conference in 2013 an ordinance passed painstakingly by the Manmohan Singh government in Parliament on convicted legislators, undermining the prime minister’s authority in full public glare and embarrassing Singh just hours before he was scheduled to meet then American president Barack Obama in Washington DC.

A man of priviledge since birth, Rahul of late has fashioned himself as a social justice warrior. His fixation on caste has reached such epic proportions that he even wants reservations in Miss India competitions. He reckons that Congress’s good show during the general elections was owing to his personal charisma, and seems to believe that Congress managed 98 seats from almost a wipeout in 2019 due to his relentless focus on caste divisions.

The Congress strategy is to challenge the consolidation of Hindu votes through an overwhelming focus on caste divisions, and Rahul has been harping on caste inequalities and calling for a caste census to double down on that strategy. The Congress leader no doubt has hit a chord with a section of Indian populace who have been hard done by the K-shaped recovery post Covid, but highlighting India’s social inequalities on American soil is absurd.

As former foreign secretary Kanwal Sibal points out, “In the US out of 759 billionaires only 9 are black. In aerospace engineering and general engineering at NASA less than 6% are blacks. Black Americans hold less than 1% of executive positions in Silicon Valley’s leading companies. As of February 2024, eight Black CEOs led companies on the Fortune 500 list, which is 1.6% of the total. According to the 2023 Faculty Development and Diversity report, out of the 581 total tenured faculty members in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences in US universities only 6 percent of them identify as Black or African-American.”

Social justice is an ongoing project for egalitarian societies, and little is to be gained from political posturing on foreign soil except conveying a sense that “everything in India is bad.” And in fact, Rahul ends up remarking that he doesn’t want to live in an India “where 90% of people lack access to opportunities”. It is an unfortunate thing to say for an Indian politician, and an assertion unattached to facts, delivered sans data.

One may think that for a man aspiring to be the prime minister, such baseless denigration of the country on foreign soil may bring electoral consequences. That is not the case.

This is a zero-risk venture for Rahul. The only ones outraged by the Congress leader’s comments at the moment are the urban middle class who already don’t vote overwhelmingly for the Congress. The votebank that he pursues with his unhinged caste rhetoric couldn’t care less about what Rahul says in America to an American audience. If the Modi government goes after him for doing this, that will give Rahul the opportunity to play victim and consolidate his base. He may even earn some new middle-class voters. It is a ‘win-win’ strategy.

While Rahul is treating his America trip as an extension of domestic political campaign, there are some pitfalls to his strategy. One isn’t sure who briefs Rahul before these foreign trips, but his preparation shows glaring gaps and lack of information. Rahul claimed that China does not suffer from unemployment issues unlike India, or even the US. This is plain wrong. The Biden administration has delivered excellent job growth and Kamala Harris is running on that platform. And while India does suffer from that problem, China is no better.

China last year suspended youth jobless data in August 2023 after record high readings. It migrated to a new system last December when it tinkered with the record-keeping process and excluded those pursuing higher education, but still its youth unemployment rate soared to 17 per cent in July, the highest since the new system came into effect. Not knowing such basic facts makes Rahul look incompetent.

Rahul also made outrageous claims at the diaspora event in Virginia that Sikhs in India are not going to be allowed to wear turban, sport a kada or go to Gurdwaras. The outlandish nature of the claim apart, such insidious narratives give Khalistanis a lifeline to validate their propaganda against India, and the Khalistanis didn’t waste any time.

Canada and US-based Gurpatwant Singh Pannun, the chief of banned Khalistani terror group SFJ (Sikhs for Justice), immediately came out with a statement, claiming that Rahul had “justified SFJ’s global Khalistan Referendum campaign when he stated: ‘Fight in India is whether a Sikh will be allowed to wear turban and kada, go to gurudwara’” and called the Congress leader’s comments on “existential threat to Sikhs in India” “not only bold and pioneering but is also firmly grounded in the factual history… and also corroborates SFJ’s stance on the justification for Punjab Independence Referendum to establish Sikh homeland Khalistan.”

This is unfortunate. An American think tank, Pew Research Center, in a widely cited survey in 2021 found that 95% of Sikhs are “very proud to be Indian” and “a vast majority of 70% say a person who disrespects India cannot be a Sikh.”

So why did Rahul make such a delusional claim? The charitable explanation is he was talking through his hat (though an LoP should know better) but Rahul’s comments assume darker proportions when we know, ironically through the statement put out by Pannun, that during his diaspora address many pro-Khalistan Sikhs were in attendance.

Imagine a Khalistani operative who openly calls for dismemberment of India, endorsing India’s Leader of Opposition’s statement! An even more worrying aspect is that India’s LoP delivered an address where Khalistani operatives were in attendance. This is a risk to national security, and it shows Rahul and the organizers in poor light.

But Rahul didn’t stop there. He met a bunch of American lawmakers on Tuesday including Ilhan Omar. For the de facto leader of India’s grand old party to be even in the same frame as Omar is problematic. The Congresswoman from Minnesota is a bona fide Islamist radical. She was ousted last year from US House Foreign Affairs Committee for making antisemitic remarks against Israel.

Omar has a chequered history when it comes to India. She has introduced multiple anti-India and Hinduphobic resolutions, visited Pakistan-occupied-Kashmir in 2022 in a trip sponsored by Pakistan, has castigated India on the Hardeep Singh Nijjar issue and has generally been an anti-India busybody with a deeply antagonistic attitude towards Hindus. Rahul must have known that meeting such a lawmaker, whose visit to PoK triggered an acerbic response from the ministry of external affairs, would invite criticism at home.

What emerges from Rahul’s pattern of behaviour is that he is hitting at every faultline of this nation, taking a go at widening every fissure that challenges national integration and is pandering to every anti-India front in an attempt to keep the Modi government on backfoot. Rahul and his advisors hope that if Modi is kept busy in a perpetual firefight – caste unrest, Khalistani insurgency, terrorism in Kashmir – it could then be easier for Congress to show Modi as incompetent and facilitate Rahul’s road to power.

In doing so, however, the Congress dynast forgets that these ‘small fires’ may not remain small, and if unrest spreads on these fault lines, it may harm India’s India’s territorial integrity, impact national security and make it a crown of thorn for him.