Tavleen Singh, a leading Columnist associated with The Indian Express. Find all Columns from Tavleen Singh here.
Fifth column: Paper aeroplanes
The Congress president then went on to hold a press conference to declare that the Prime Minister had run away from the debate. I am ready to debate him, he announced grandly, but he is too scared to face the House.
The debate on the Rafale deal in Parliament has been disgraceful. The lowest moment came when Congress MPs started throwing paper aeroplanes at the treasury benches while the Finance Minister was speaking. The Speaker, in the tones of a schoolteacher, stood up and said, “Did you not fly enough paper planes when you were children? Are you not adults now?” She should have been less indulgent and ordered them removed physically from the House for reducing debate in the Lok Sabha to the level of a ridiculous farce.
The Congress president then went on to hold a press conference to declare that the Prime Minister had run away from the debate. I am ready to debate him, he announced grandly, but he is too scared to face the House. It is the Prime Minister’s prerogative to decide which debate he wishes to participate in. It is certainly not the place of a man to order the prime minister around who has so few seats in the Lok Sabha. He is not even officially leader of the Opposition. But, ever since Rahul Gandhi managed to win three vital Hindi heartland states last month, he has begun to fly high without noticing that he is on a paper aeroplane.
There is no sign yet that he is going to become India’s prime minister this year. The media has fooled him with a false narrative. He has been on the cover of important political magazines as Modi’s ‘only challenger’. Eminent political commentators have started writing paeans of praise to his ‘great family and his great heritage’. It is contemptible political analysis but there is something about our Imperial Dynasty that makes fine journalists reduce themselves to fawning sycophants.
So the Congress president, drunk with the exhilaration of flying high for the first time in his political career, insulted a woman journalist who got the first interview that the Prime Minister has given this year. Smita Prakash asked Narendra Modi some very difficult questions, but in the eyes of Rahul Gandhi, she was ‘pliable’.
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