Peter Navarro, Donald Trump’s trade enforcer, has suddenly moonlighted as an Indian sociologist. On Fox News, between explaining why Russian oil barrels are bad for democracy and why tariffs are good for Trump’s re-election, he declared that India’s Brahmin elite are ‘profiteering at the expense of the Indian people’. Next stop, I presume, his next Fox News appearance will feature him in saffron robes, railing against gotra-based capitalism.
Rahul, the trapeze artist
Meanwhile, Rahul Gandhi has been swinging from one polemic to another like a primate on Red Bull – from caste to Constitution, from Ambedkar to Adani, and now to the latest branch marked ‘vote chori’. The BJP, he laments, is stealing elections with the finesse of a street pickpocket. The problem is that when Rahul performs this act, the audience cannot help but remember the original circus.
When Congress stole the whole tent
Anand Ranganathan has kindly re-circulated a Shashi Tharoor interview where the wordsmith himself admitted Congress’ ‘grave mistake’ – the 1987 Jammu & Kashmir rigging extravaganza. This was not petty booth-level sleight of hand; this was industrial-scale chicanery that not only fixed results but lit the fuse of insurgency. Vote theft with a complimentary civil war – beat that, BJP.
History of selective amnesia
Of course, the Congress portfolio is full of such case studies: Bihar’s booth-capturing festivals, the Emergency’s curfew democracy, the Gujarat dismissals, the Assam manipulations. The Nehru-Gandhi dynasty practically wrote the copyright on electoral theft. Yet here is Rahul, heir to the great tradition, railing about missing votes with the earnestness of a burglar filing a police complaint.
The only nationalised industry
So Navarro can keep his Brahmin-bashing, Rahul can keep his branch-hopping, and Modi can keep his tariffs. But one lesson endures – in the great Indian democracy, hypocrisy is the only industry both parties have truly nationalised. After all, in India we do not just count votes – we count the ways they can be stolen.
