"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."