Rahul Gandhi

"The fact that he chose to belittle the Prime Minister is not surprising, in fact expected... After failing to connect with the people of India, Mr Gandhi chooses a platform of convenience for beating his political opponents.... Indian democracy gives opportunity to merit and is not beholden to dynasty... A failed dynast today chose to speak about his failed political journey."

"When a man is touching 50 and has never had any productive job in his life, he cannot elicit respect from me as an individual... If you stand in the capital of India and say you support “Bharat ke tukde honge” (India will be broken into pieces), I don’t have an iota of respect for such individuals."

"Tradition dictates you should first win from Raebareli before challenging for top!"

"I have spent more than 32 years in the Congress and when the Ram Mandir decision came, after getting advice from his wellwisher in America, Rahul Gandhi in a meeting with his close aides said that after the Congress government is formed, they will form a superpower commission and will overturn the Ram Mandir decision just like Rajiv Gandhi overturned the Shah Bano decision."

"The Shehzada of the Congress said recently that our Rajas and Maharajas back in the day were ruthless. They snatched or took away the humble assets of the poor at their whim. The Shehzada insulted the revered Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj and Rani Chennamma, whose good governance and patriotism still fill us with national pride and honour. Does he not have any knowledge of the contribution of the royal family of Mysuru who we all regard very highly and are proud of? ... The Shehzada’s was carefully calibrated, on purpose, to appease a certain vote bank. He did not utter a single word on the atrocities committed by the Nawabs, Nizams, Sultans, and Badhshahs (on their peasants). The Congress seems to have forgotten the grave excesses perpetrated by (Mughal emperor) Aurangzeb, who destroyed thousands of our temples... The Benaras Hindu University (BHU) could not have been established without the help of the king, who ruled the city back in the day. Maharaja Gaekwad of Baroda had helped Baba Saheb Ambedkar pursue his higher studies abroad. The Congress’ Shehzada knows nothing about this and is making public statements that are aimed at advancing the party’s vote bank politics. The Congress is in an alliance with parties that glorify Aurangzeb. They don’t talk about kings who destroyed our pilgrimage sites, looted them, killed our people while also slaughtering livestock... Since the Congress came to power in Karnataka, the law and order situation in the state has been on a free-fall. The incident in Hubballi (the daylight murder of a sitting Congress corporator’s daughter) shook the country’s conscience. When the bereaved family sought action, the ruling Congress, yet again, preferred appeasement over justice. They do not value the lives of our daughters like Neha (Hiremath). All they care about is their vote bank."

"Singh and I had developed a warm and productive relationship. While he could be cautious in foreign policy, unwilling to get out too far ahead of an Indian bureaucracy that was historically suspicious of U.S. intentions, our time together confirmed my initial impression of him as a man of uncommon wisdom and decency…. What I couldn’t tell was whether Singh’s rise to power represented the future of India’s democracy or merely an aberration.... In fact, he owed his position to Sonia Gandhi…more than one political observer believed that she’d chosen Singh precisely because as an elderly Sikh with no national political base, he posed no threat to her forty-year-old son, Rahul, whom she was grooming to take over the Congress Party... He feared that rising anti-Muslim sentiment had strengthened the influence of India’s main opposition party, the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)... In the dim light, he (Singh) looked frail, older than his seventy-eight years, and as we drove off I wondered what would happen when he left office. Would the baton be successfully passed to Rahul, fulfilling the destiny laid out by his mother and preserving the Congress Party’s dominance over the ‘divisive nationalism’ touted by the BJP?"

"Rahul Gandhi has a nervous, unformed quality about him, as if he were a student who’d done the coursework and was eager to impress the teacher but deep down lacked either the aptitude or the passion to master the subject."

"It took this election campaign for ordinary Indians to notice what was going on. They noticed because Modi told voters that they were choosing between a ‘kaamdaar’ and a ‘naamdaar’. A working man and a prince. It did not help that the ‘naamdaar’ then mocked Modi and made fun of everything about him. Modi’s ‘hugplomacy’, ‘Gabbar Singh Tax’, demonetisation. Modi’s demonetisation, he said, was done to steal their money and give it to his rich friends. The country’s Chowkidar, he said too many times, was a ‘chor’. He forgot that he was demeaning not just a political opponent but the Prime Minister of India. Ordinary voters were appalled that the heir to India’s most powerful political dynasty should talk this way. He sounded arrogant, entitled and insulting and reminded them that there were too many political heirs in Indian politics"

"In the sycophancy department she surpassed her own high standards when she began to recount Rahul Gandhi’s virtues. Even I, who knew her eternal need to be counted in Delhi’s highest echelons of political power, nearly fell off my chair when she said, ‘Do you know I believe that Rahul Gandhi has the best of Rajiv in him and the best of Sanjay?’ I recount this remark here to draw attention to how much support dynastic democracy has in the drawing rooms of Lutyens’ Delhi. And it is not just socialites who endorse this distorted form of democracy but bureaucrats, journalists and men and women who like to think of themselves as public intellectuals."

"The interview was an unmitigated disaster. The first problem was that he chose to give his first formal interview in English and not in Hindi. This strengthened the impression that he represented the privileged denizens of Delhi more than the people of India. The second problem was that of all of Indian television’s English anchors Arnab had been chosen. Arnab has made belligerence the defining characteristic of his anchoring style, and once he gets a victim into his studio rarely lets him get away with vague answers. Nobody seemed to have prepared him for the kind of questions he would be asked. So he spent most of his answers talking in abstractions. Democracy is about processes, he said, and Rahul Gandhi is sitting here because he wants to empower the people. And most puzzling of all was his repeated assertion that ‘the system’ had destroyed his grandmother and his father and would probably destroy him. As Arnab’s questions became tougher and more direct Rahul’s answers became more abstract. When I finished watching the interview I watched it again on YouTube and found myself marvelling at how many times he repeated that ‘the system’ was what he was in politics to change. It was as if nobody had told him that ‘the system’ for ten years had been a government that was controlled by his mother with an iron hand. And that ‘the system’ had been created by his great-grandfather and perpetuated by his grandmother and father after that. By the time I finished watching this interview for the second time I was certain that the Congress would lose the election with or without a Modi wave."

"Responding to the Ambassador's query about Lashkar-e-Taiba's activities in the region and immediate threat to India, Gandhi said there was evidence of some support for the group among certain elements in India's indigenous Muslim community. However, Gandhi warned, the bigger threat may be the growth of radicalized Hindu groups, which create religious tensions and political confrontations with the Muslim community."