Here’s a small story: There was a conman in a village who realized the potential of occult and planned to use it for hoodwinking gullible people. So he bought a hen, killed it and stuffed a frog inside its belly, after cleaning it. He called it the ‘flying dead hen’ predictions and began exhibiting it to people. When he brought anything hot to the left of it, it would fly towards right and vice versa too. He used this to make predictions about various things. But the people did not know that it was the frog who jumped as it was hidden. He continued conning people until, the day he got caught.
There was a recent article in The Print India titled “Rahul Gandhi is back. Now with two economists, a migrant aid pack and an ethical hacker”. Here is the link to it, added solely for the reader’s convenience. So this article talks about the ‘comeback’ of Rahul Gandhi for the ‘N’th time. So the 3 main points raised here about his discussions with two economists, the migrant workers’ issues and that of an ‘ethical hacker’. This is just one of the recent come-back and ‘returns’ articles. They are written as usual every year like it was a life changing event. A simple google search with ‘Rahul Gandhi returns’ can show those. Now, let’s analyse each of these points, all of which had some external ‘heat’ to make those resurrectional statements.
First was the discussion he had Raghuram Rajan, the former RBI governor. That had been badly exposed as a scripted and heavily edited video where a clock betrayed the timings. Not that it’s wrong to edit or shoot a scripted interview – which most journalists do but, the amount of external ‘heat’ to make him ‘fly’ was so superficial and choreographed. If an alien landed on Earth at that moment, it would have believed he was the world’s greatest economist. But even that fell flat after a while. The wall clock betrayed him. After all, frogs cannot fly. They can only jump. Then the next attempt was his talk with the Nobel laureate Abhijit Bannerjee. Nothing much changed in it except that the traitor clock was banished and he tried hard to put words in Bannerjee’s mouth.
When it came to the case of the poor migrants, as usual he stuck to the modified version of NYAY, which the people had rejected during the 2019 polls. Next came the generous offer to fund the travel of poor migrant labourers. In Kerala, Congress proposed to pay Rs. 10 lakhs from each district committee but, they ‘could not’ as the local administration refused especially, in Alappuzha. The District Collector there refused to accept the cheque as there were no legal provisions for it. However nothing stopped Congress from donating to the Kerala CMDRF (not mentioning PMCARES here, as they will never donate to a transparently working trust). The biggest shocker was when the video clip of Congress MLA Amarinder Raja came. He was seen telling the people at Bhatinda railway station that Sonia Gandhi paid for their travel and he distributed pamphlets. Well, Congress is adept at playing such dirty tricks while evoking little to no reaction from the fourth estate of today.
Rahul Gandhi’s ethical hacking avatar was the next comedy. He had been conspicuously silent about the controversies surrounding the Sprinklr deal of the Kerala government though it had come up before the High Court of Kerala. The Leader of opposition in the Assembly, who is from Congress had also played a role in bringing up this matter to the HC. Anyway, it’s unfair to blame Rahul Gandhi’s silence on it as he may not know much about Sprinklr and the fixed match in Kerala. The frog does not jump without any heat and it when it does, it does only to a place where it’s directed. It was around this time he raised false alarms about the privacy of the Aarogya Setu app which was developed by the Government of India to fight COVID 19.
“The Aarogya Setu app, is a sophisticated surveillance system, outsourced to a pvt operator, with no institutional oversight – raising serious data security & privacy concerns. Technology can help keep us safe; but fear must not be leveraged to track citizens without their consent” was his tweet. However he never mentioned who the private operator was as he was sure there would be no scrutiny from his pliant media. The hen never gets questioned even when the frog refuses to respond to the heat. All he intended to do was put the Government in trouble and confuse the citizens, thereby derailing India’s efforts to fight COVID 19. Shortly after that a self proclaimed ‘French Hacker’ came out saying Rahul Gandhi was right. Though the Arogya Setu team released a statement about the ‘valuable findings’ of that hacker, he went on to write a long article to further defend Gandhi. There was nothing in it to substantiate Rahul Gandhi’s claims of the ‘private operator’, ‘surveillance’ or ‘lack of consent’. By the end of the day, the pliant media forgot about what Rahul Gandhi said and what the so called hacker tried to prove. There were instances where the village conman got so engrossed in conning people that he forgot about the frog inside.
Every time the Lutyens media tried to resurrect the image of Rahul Gandhi, it always fell flat precisely because he was never what they really showed. They have been trying hard to save him from taking the responsibility of losing so many elections consecutively that they forgot it was leading to the collapse of India’s grand old party and ultimately their ecosystem. We can see more such articles in future where a whole PR team tries to heat up the surroundings and make the hen fly.