Calling ordinance 'nonsense': Rahul right, mama wrong

“I’ll tell you what my opinion on the ordinance is. It’s complete nonsense. It should be torn up and thrown away. That is my personal opinion,” Rahul Gandhi had said at a press conference that he gate-crashed, speaking on the ordinance that the UPA government had sent to the president for his signature.

In minutes, the hounds were baying. Opposition parties, predictably, called his statement an insult to the prime minister and called for the PM to resign. Many others commented on what they viewed as Gandhi’s intemperate language. As the PM returned from his US trip and made it clear that he had no intention to quit as a result of Gandhi’s comments, the focus was on the use of words. As the buzz got louder, Gandhi felt the need to comment on the issue

“My mother told me the words you used were perhaps too strong, maybe in hindsight it is true, but the sentiment was honest,” Rahul said while addressing a rally in Gujarat, reported CNN-IBN .

That’s where mama gets it wrong. It was not just the sentiment that needed to be honest; the precise words mattered. Gandhi’s statement, “It’s complete nonsense. It should be torn up and thrown away,” made it explicitly clear to all that the ordinance was doomed. There was no shade of grey in this statement; it was absolute black and white.

The statement reverberated because, for the past few years now, such unequivocal statements have been virtually unheard in Indian politics. What is any party’s stand or any politician’s stand on any issue under the sun?

Politicians of all persuasion, insecure in the political environment we live in, cloak their opinions in fifty shades of grey to safeguard themselves against upsetting any possibly constituency. Have we forgotten how, during the Lokpal Bill discussions in parliament, members of parliament made rambling speeches on how they supported the bill, and yet, when it came to the crunch, they jointly scuttled it? Were we sure, at any time, that the bill would be passed? No, because the seeming assurances always left some wriggle room for the politicians to duck the issue.

Rahul Gandhi left himself no such room. How would we have interpreted a statement by Gandhi which went like this: “I have expressed to the prime minister my misgivings on the ordinance.”?

Would the nation have been so certain that the ordinance was dead? Would we have even thought that Lalu Yadav would certainly lose his status as Member of Parliament if found guilty (as he was) in the fodder case?

It was the statement by Gandhi that was completely shorn of any political-speak that sent a clear signal that the bill was as dead as a dodo. Any watered down statement, even if the sentiment was precisely the same, would not have had the same impact as the intemperate, possibly rude and ‘impetuous’ one.

I’d rather listen to rude, intemperate and impetuous, unambiguous and unequivocal statements on all matters than the self-serving, Machiavellian rubbish we are used to.