India may have become a fully-functioning democracy in 1947, but vestiges of a feudal mindset remains, even to this day. Vestiges of the sense of entitlement, of power concentrated in the hands of a few. A resurrection of dynasties and an associated dynastic politics. The moniker “Pappu”, used for Mr. Rahul Gandhi by a fair few, evokes much mirth today and somewhat represents a modern-day rendition of a “Yuvraaj”, an heir-apparent, in democratic India. The word “Yuvraaj” connotes a right, if not by entitlement, then by usurpation. Usurpers invariably progress to abrogate laws, institutions and freedoms to annihilate dissent. As India lumbers towards the 2019 election it may be a useful reminder to study this trait of India’s first “dynasty” which seems to perpetuate like a mutating virus that this author firmly believes is responsible for the interminable disease of corruption that seems to pervade every pore of the country despite the best efforts made to exorcise and eradicate it!
The youth of this country, especially those born in this century and who are going to vote for the first time in 2019, may perhaps want a moment of reflection to compare their lives or that of their parents’ with those of the entitled few, the “Naam-daars” of India, so to say. As one looks back over the history of contemporary India, one is led to the remember the emergence of the original crown prince- Yuvraaj Sanjay Gandhi, heir-apparent to former Prime Minister of India Indira Gandhi. This is particularly interesting for comparisons with the present one- Yuvraaj Rahul Gandhi. Laid out in the following from both memory of the author and internet sources, with a few memorable headlines to stimulate an initiation of research interest, are the lives and careers of the family matriarch (read: Indira Gandhi) and her Yuvraaj from the earlier century.
1942. Marriage of Indira Gandhi to Feroze Gandhi
1946. Birth of “Yuvraaj” Sanjay Gandhi (14 December, to be exact)
1955. Sanjay Gandhi joined Congress. Should have passed school in 1964, but not recorded as an alumnus of Doon School (Rajiv Gandhi listed as alumnus in 1962). The Quint records that he was unable to complete school:
https://www.thequint.com/explainers/sanjay-gandhi-indira-india-crown-prince-explainer
1959. Indira Gandhi is appointed Congress President.
1964. Jawaharlal Nehru dies, and Indira Gandhi joins the Rajya Sabha and appointed Minister for I&B
1966. Indira Gandhi is appointed PM upon Lal Bahadur Shastry’s death
1968. Sanjay Gandhi applies for License to manufacture a people’s car “Maruti” and is allowed to pursue this, in a classic example of favoritism, in 1970 (the licence was awarded on 30 September 1970).
1969. Bank Nationalization under the slogan “Garibi Hatao”.
1971. Indira Gandhi leads India to Victory over East Pakistan/ creation of Bangladesh
1974. First Pokhran explosion and India’s demonstration of nuclear capability.
1975. Allahabad High Court order nullifies her 1971 election due to abuse of government office during re-election. On 25th June 1975, Indira Gandhi advised President Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed to notify Declaration of Emergency, suspension of parliamentary debates and Rule By decree. There is an era of abuse perpetuated by Sanjay Gandhi:
- Forced Sterilizations:
- Turkman Gate Massacre: https://postcard.news/never-was-such-a-great-human-tragedy-caused-in-any-part-of-the-world-the-unknown-story-of-turkman-gate-massacre-perpetrated-by-sanjay-gandhi/
The Emergency is withdrawn in 1977, followed soon after by a resounding electoral loss of the Congress against the Janata Party, which forms the national government under Morarji Desai.
1977-1980. Implosion of Janata Party and interim leaders such as Chandrashekhar and Charan Singh become Prime Minister when Indira Gandhi pulled the plug. Sanjay Gandhi dies on 23rd June 1980 in an air crash near the Delhi Flying Club while trying a dangerous aerial maneuver.
1980. Re-election of Indira Gandhi and a public pact with Shahi Imam for calling Muslims to support Congress.
1980-1984. The Khalistan Years of Congress mis-governance.
1984. Assassination of Indira Gandhi
Indira Gandhi, who was later showered with adjectives of praise such as “Durga” or India’s “Iron Lady” started her political career (appointed of-course, not through struggle!) under the label of “Goongi Gudiya”, or the mute doll. Infact, much like the impotent Congress members today who outdo each other in sycophancy, but cannot command crowds bigger than a few thousands at most (that too only because of the promise of dole, rather than leadership!), Congress members in the late 1960s thought they could further their careers under Nehru’s daughter whom they called “Goongi Gudiya”. However, readers will note from my timeline that Goongi Gudiya was quite adept in managing her son’s career through abuse of government machinery. Apart from strengthening her political fortunes, we also find that corruption did not take time at all in permeating her governance. The ideation, formation and dissolution of the original Maruti under Sanjay Gandhi is a text book example of dynastic corruption. The original Maruti was ultimately closed under the Janata Party government. The present Maruti organization was formed under an agreement between Govt Of India with Suzuki of Japan when Indira Gandhi invited them to set up and run the company in memory of her darling son.
“Yuvraaj” Sanjay Gandhi was of course not content with merely being the CEO of an automotive firm. Having run it aground in 4 years after formation, during the turbulent days of 1975, at the tender age of 29 he acquired the power and trappings of a dictator without any responsibilities at all. When political leaders’ talk of emergency, one should not nurse any illusion of life in those circumstances. People talking about Fascism should take a pause to think of an appropriate word for the Turkman Gate massacre and forced sterilization of unmarried men and women carried out by the then “Yuvraaj” Sanjay Gandhi. Youth who derived much amusement to this referral of Shri Rahul Gandhi by Shri Narendra Modi do not know the pain of the leaders incarcerated during Emergency by Mrs. Indira Gandhi and the original “Yuvraaj” Sanjay Gandhi. The brutal instances of forcible sterilizations of unmarried youth and slum clearance techniques prompted at a whim during an era without 24 hour news channels, are too dark for memory even though it has been faithfully recorded in detail. None of the emergency like situations, which media are quite prompt in crying about these days, can ever be quite like emergency when the President of India- Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed was advised to notify “Rule by Decree” by Indira Gandhi. “Goongi Gudia”, her “Yuvraaj” and their “Hitler Youth”- the Storm Troopers of Youth congress had unleashed what a dangerous form of what I see as true “Fascism” in India.
Governance in India is littered with Congress misrule. The Nehru Gandhi family had usurped the entire Congress party in India initially by the shameless sidelining of patriots such as Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose, Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel to name a couple. Later, the treatment of patriots like Shyama Prosad Mukherjee, Ram Manohar Lohia and Jayaprakash Narayan was no less shocking. Wilful negligence during the incarceration of SP Mukherjee, can be even considered as murder. In the midst of wiping out national leaders, the Congress discovered the winning formula laying claim on minority votes though with no great love for the minorities, but much like a mafia overlords, carefully crafted Quasi-Protection policy. To this effect despite secularism being enshrined in spirit in the original Indian Constitution drafted by Baba Ambedkar, and Hindu philosophy, Indira Gandhi brought the infamous 48th amendment in the dark days of the Emergency in 1976, by introducing the word now jokingly referred to as Sickular-ism in the Preamble.
While The Gandhi Dynasty incorporated secularism in the preamble, for them it was just an appeasement tool, with all manner of exemptions to Muslim organizations but nothing for the Hindus even in states where they were in a minority such as J&K and the North East. The Congress’s love for secularism and minorities was in display in the ghastly riots and pogroms against the Sikhs in 1984. The Sikhs have a glorious status in India. Initially formed as a reformist faith within Hinduism, and composed of the sword arm of the Hindu Society, defending the unprotected against the oppression of Islamic rule specifically under the Mughals, they were well represented in society in all professions notably the military. Inflamed by the assassination of Indira Gandhi, the Congress let loose a pogrom and genocide against the Sikh community driving a wedge into society that is only coming to heal now. This author has been personally witness to the horror unleashed in Dhanbad and Bokaro Steel City during these pogroms, during student life. The following paragraph outlines this personal memory:
The year 1984 saw the assassination of Indira Gandhi and our director and a couple of professors (of
Indian School of Mines) were Sikhs and the campus was under threat. I had the personal experience
of watching an armed mob enter the campus and let loose destruction in the Director’s bungalow.
A friend of mine, and I quickly made our way to New Hostel and raised alarm. Remarkably as
soon as the students rallied and came to the rescue the mob fled. Our Director and his wife were
saved physical harm as they had locked themselves in the kitchen, however all their furniture and
car was completely shattered and destroyed. One of the visiting Coal India executives, had been
pulled out from the Guest House and hammered by a Lathi wielding rioter, until one of the
students put a stop to it, by counter-attacking him with his own weapon. Later we had to put in
teams that kept round the clock vigil to prevent attacks in the campus by rioters. In those days, my
parents used to stay in Bokaro which is approximately 2 hours by bus from Dhanbad. While
returning home on the following weekend after the incident, I could see that the Gurudwara at
Chas had been burnt and the Gurkha Regiment was encamped in it. Later I learnt from my parents
that over 50 Sikh families including women had been killed, pillaged and raped in Bokaro Steel City
and that it had a body count next highest in the country after Delhi.
Interestingly, not one incident had been reported from nearby Kolkata where the infamous CPIM government of Marichjhapi massacre and Kasba Flyover- Ananda Margi monk lynching fame, had kept a strong lid on violence. It was during the Congress supported National Conference government in Kashmir in 1989-1990 that minority Hindus called Pandits were ejected from the valley through a campaign of murder, rape and intimidation and made Refugees in their own country. So much for fascism!
Congress’s attention to re-writing history of India’s freedom movement is rather interesting. While the absence of the heroic exploits of India’s freedom movement like the Chittagong armoury raid or the INA victories in Burma and Andamans are visibly absent from school textbooks, what takes the cake are attempts at demolishing the Land Bridge between India and Sri Lanka at Rameswaram by advocating the Sethu Samudram project, widely considered by all Hindus as Lord Ram’s bridge. Congress sponsored historian Romila Thapar conveniently adopted the colonial description of the Mahabharata and Ramayana as mythologies rather than their actual description as “Itihas” in Indian culture. “Itihas” or Congress’s mythologies thus find no description in school history and only those of us fortunate to have listened these tales at their grandparents’ laps, or having watched it in Star TV, have knowledge of these epics. It is only now after NASA’s confirmation of it being a man made structure, through satellite imagery and evidence have the JNU tribe of fake historians receded.
The Congress and its paid historians of the socialist hue inhabiting institutions such as JNU, have been merrily distorting history whether immediate or past. After the 1962 debacle an embarrassed Nehru introduced and perpetuated the lie that it was China that invaded India, blithely ignoring the provocations he had instructed the Army to carry out, all the while keeping them ill equipped with .303 Lee Enfield whereas the Chinese Army battle hardened in the Korean War were equipped with Automatic Self-Loading Rifles. The Socialist, Communist tribe, happily participated in this cover up as they had collaborated with China, their ideological masters, during the 1962 war. The Henderson Brookes-Bhagat report which documented the causes of the 1962 debacle was not released by Nehru. The Congress did not let it be de-classified until in 2012 it was leaked by an Australian journalist named Maxwell.
One must also not forget how Nehru had with pain in his heart announced the abandonment of Assam in the face of advancing Chinese army. Assam has particular reason to be sore with the Nehru Gandhi who willfully allowed the state and its culture be swamped by immigrants from Bangladesh. Both East and West Pakistan (despite the pronunciations of the Qaid E Azam of the state having no business with matters of faith) literally booted out 3-7 million Hindus initially in 1947 and then in the run up to 1971 through systematic practice of genocide in East Pakistan. It is a particularly strange predicament that while India was divided on the grounds of religion and Islamists got their own nations, a steady stream of Muslim illegals continued pouring into Assam and Bengal even after 1971 causing widespread social unrest, demographic change and crime.
The ascendancy of the National Democratic Alliance government in 2014 was a tectonic shift in the
politics of India. The result exposed the rotten state of the mal-governance perpetuated by the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty for over 60 years, punctuated with only brief interludes of governance by national leaderssuch as Lal Bahadur Shastri, Morarji Desai, Charan Singh, Chandrashekhar, Deve Gowda, PV Narasimha Rao and BJP’s AB Vajpayee. For those who want to interject the name of Manmohan Singh, everyone knows how this erstwhile diligent but servile bureaucrat’s efforts were trampled by Sonia Gandhi to whom the nation’s files were ferried to, and how the Yuvraaj who (thankfully) perpetrated the pompous spectacle of ripping to shreds his own governments rather infamous attempt to amend the law to let a now convicted politician reinstate himself in national politics. Ever since the formation of the NDA government with a people’s majority, the beneficiaries of the Congress’s License, Loot and appeasement raj have railed against the government if not conniving in secret with foreign powers for engineering riots, incursions and possibly assassinations all the while baiting governance with unlawful acts of massacre of cows and calves, rapes and Love Jihad.
The Congress, its band of sponsored intellectuals and the English media have always branded the BJP
as a communal party for as long as one can remember. Shri Narendra Modi Chief was portrayed as a Merchant of Death (Maut Ka Saudagar), who at best has been alleged to have been deficient in his Sovereign Duty (Raj-Dharma) in controlling the Gujarat riots and at worst to have connived with other blood thirsty members of the state government in planning a pogrom against Muslims in Ahmedabad. This portrayal had been so successfully executed by Congress sponsored media, that this elected Chief Minister had not only been denied a Visa to visit much of the Western world, but subject to whispers of arrest through state orchestrated lobbying of what in essence was a public character assassination in an international scale! The same was also carried out against a serving Military Intelligence Officer Lt.Col Prashant Purohit, who was accused to have passed on RDX to trigger blasts in Malegaon and held without charge from 2008-2018 with charges only being framed in 2018. While the Military was constrained to silence by the Official Secrets Act, his saving grace was that the Military kept him in service.
BJP has always been a party which has railed against Minority (Muslim) Appeasement becoming
entrenched in the governance structure of India. It has been a party that has been most vocal about the creeping dynastic rule that has become a national character in India. It has always pointed out Under the Congress systematic creation of Black Money and Tax avoidance was institutionalized. Cronyism and corruption had been allowed to flourish unfettered leading to the showpiece theft of national resources exemplified by the CWG, 2G and Captive Coal Mines allocation scam. Rajiv Gandhi, (of Bofors fame) connived in the cover up of the biggest industrial disaster of the world in Bhopal, where blatant disregard of the “Duty of Care” by one of the largest industrial corporations was allowed. This has perpetuated this attitude in most forms of enterprise in India, while the world has forged ahead with progressively high and stringent standards of safety and environmental impact. The Congress perpetuated meekness, in the face of unabated terrorism propagated by Pakistan purely because of its religious hatred for India and its Hindu civilization which it considers as weak, unworthy and constituted of unbelievers (Kaffirs) who are perfect game to be executed such as in the middle ages in Hindu-Kush. Intuitively it follows therefore that all destroyed temples from the Islamic period must never be re-built how-much-so-ever their importance and erstwhile sanctity.
The Congress’s unpardonable meekness during the 2008 invasion of Mumbai and massacre of
hundreds of innocents left the world gaping with horror notwithstanding the gratuitous praise of our “Tolerance” that came from the USA. In fact, no difference can be starker than the responses to the world scale events of 9/11 and 26/11. Not only that, but the citizens had to grin and bear the sight of a film producer being escorted by the ruling Congress Chief Minister to the sites of the Massacre, so that he could get first hand feel and perhaps file shots of a national tragedy! The Congress and its allies advocate the unabated influx of Bangladeshis and now Rohingyas for vote bank politics with scant regard for security of India. They are critical of every effort of the Prime Minister to improve governance through introduction of transparency. Being utterly feckless and shameless, they continue to raise allegations of corruption even in the face of international acclaim for the quality of governance under the NDA.
Ultimately the elections are about the perception of the masses, who need to decide whether they would like to have a “Pappu” or “Yuvraaj” who appears to be quite affable despite any attributes or skill worth speaking of; or the present Prime Minister of “Demonetization” fame. The point is to illustrate that it is quite dangerous to dismiss politicians by awarding them a funny monikers such as Pappu, Lallu and so on, as the evidence from the lives of “Goongi Gudiya”- Indira Gandhi and “Yuvraaj” Sanjay Gandhi have to show. Whatever the choice, it needs to be exercised with care, and 2019 is going to be a decisive year for India. The next Emergency can be for more than 2 years and many more fake charges can be brought about and scores settled. Professional Congress Liars such as Sanjay Jha has already issued one against Arnab Goswami, for being appointed to the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library as a trustee!