BJP will be dominant for 15-20 years, Rahul Gandhi should retire: Ramachandra Guha

Historian and writer Ramachandra Guha has predicted that the BJP will be the only dominant national party in Indian politics for the next 15 to 20 years and has said that Congress vice president Rahul Gandhi should retire. [caption id=“attachment_3020130” align=“alignleft” width=“380”] Representational image. Reuters[/caption] In an interview with The Economic Times, Guha said that BJP will be like the Congress of the 1960s and ’70s, during which Congress was the only dominant national political party while the Opposition parties only had relevance in some states. “For the next 15 or 20 years, I think, the BJP will be the hegemonic, determining force in Indian politics,” Guha said in the interview. Guha was extremely critical of the Congress for being a weak Opposition party. “Outside the Congress echo chamber, there is a sense that the Gandhi family is useless. Rahul Gandhi is an object of ridicule and contempt by people who would otherwise be attracted to a liberal Congress point of view,” he told The Economic Times. “Rahul Gandhi should retire from politics, get married and start a family. That will be good for him. That will be good for India also,” Guha added. The historian also warned that BJP’s dominance will have “uglier effects” than Congress’s hegemony because the RSS was “a bigoted reactionary political force”. He added that the fact that cow vigilantism was now becoming official policy in some states was “deeply troubling”. Guha also said that it was worrying that the Indian right wing did not have enough intellectuals in a democracy like India. He further said that a “credible right-wing intellectual tradition” could only come up “outside the RSS ecosystem”. Merely a day after Guha’s remarks on the BJP, RSS and his worries about cow vigilantism, IANS reported that a pregnant Dalit woman was attacked by some upper caste people who barged into her home after her family refused to clear animal carcasses from fields in Gujarat’s Banaskantha district. With inputs from IANS