Why I.N.D.I.A is alien to India, Indians and will not make a PM out of Rahul Gandhi

I.N.D.I.A is not synonymous with India, at best it is a homonym, but the Opposition, especially Congress is gung-ho at the name of the newly-minted entity that is supposed to dethrone the BJP and put a spanner in the Modi-Shah juggernaut.

After long the Congress, more than other Opposition parties, seems to think that they have landed on a formula, err name, that they think might mislead the people of India, once more, to confuse the Congress with India.

For long the Congress, through its politics of nomenclature—everything in the country named after the Gandhi-Nehru family—successfully hegemonised the mental space of the Indian electorate and remained in power. Without saying in so many words, the Gandhi-Nehru family kept telling the people that they were India and India was all about them, leveraging the name of Mahatma Gandhi and the history of the Indian Freedom Movement against the British.

This I.N.D.I.A is yet another way of saying the same thing.

But, it will not fly with Indians anymore, for reasons that are steeped in the very same Indian National Movement led by Mahatma Gandhi. The very articulation of the name of this Opposition Unity entity is alien to the nature of the India electorate and would very sorely fail to rally the masses against the BJP.

Rahul Gandhi and his advisors, the more significant ones of whom are stationed outside India, say Chicago, must realise a few things. To move the masses one needs to talk in their language and idiom. While the Congress for long has tried to monopolise Mahatma Gandhi, his movements and the national movement as such for their narrow political gains, they have failed to understand the Mahatma’s ways of articulating Indian politics.

The first and foremost principle of Gandhi was to talk to the people he wanted to lead in their vocabulary. Gandhi never called his mass mobilisations by the name of, say, ‘Non-Cooperation Movement’ or ‘Civil Disobedience Movement’ etc. His idiom was what we call ‘desi’, Indian. He called people to action not by coining names, but exposing the British Raj for what it was. He articulated his way of mass mobilisation and captured its essence in such words as ‘satyagraha’ and ‘janandolan’.

But, the anglicised moorings of Rahul Gandhi and his Congress, the inbuilt elitism of their education and ways of life, have created an echo chamber in which they think they can communicate and have a dialogue with the masses of India by way of I.N.D.I.A and not in an idiom that would prefer ‘Bharat’, a word that every Indian—from farmers to rikshaw pullers to tea sellers—can connect with.

Let me remind Rahul Gandhi of another of Mahatma Gandhi’s ways of seeing Indian politics that actually moved the last Indian to stand against the British Imperialism—it was ‘Ram Rajya’.

Mahatma Gandhi, being the politician par excellence (and, yes, Mr Rahul Gandhi, Mahatma too was educated outside India) was well aware of the digits of actual politics. If you want to dismantle one form of governance, you need to put forth an alternative. People are rallied to a cause, if there is an outcome to be expected. This ‘Ram Rajya’ was what Mahatma Gandhi promised to deliver if and when the British Raj was to be drubbed.

Moreover, while Mahatma Gandhi was accused of being pro-Hindu and a pseudo-secular by the left and communists for articulating the Indian reality as ‘Ram Rajya’, Mahatma Gandhi deliberately did so since Ram Rajya was the only governance that majority of Indians had imagined as a people and since it also carried the moral weight of Ram and, hence, the highest standard of public morality.

I.N.D.I.A has practically lost the match even before it has begun since it doesn’t rhyme with the tongue of the common Indian. All the more, since this I.N.D.I.A alliance is also imbued with Nehruvian atheism and terms such as Ram Rajya etc are both alien to its imagination and consciously an anathema.

In fact, despite all the expectations of arriving at a common formula for fielding candidates in the 2024 Lok Sabha polls against the BJP and NDA, the alliance will only confuse voters who would, otherwise, have voted for the regional parties that still communicate with the people of the region and state in the local idiom. In all, the alliance and its alien nomenclature is only going to be counterproductive, especially in the Hindi-speaking states, which invariably account for the maximum number of seats in the Lower House.

Figure this: Will not a Samajwadi Party voter get confused if Akhilesh Yadav were to ask for votes in the name of I.N.D.I.A and not for late Netaji?

On another thought, let’s put Rahul Gandhi’s ‘Bharat Jodo Yatra’ with the I.N.D.I.A alliance. They seem to be a poor attempt at recasting Rahul Gandhi as Mahatma Gandhi, in the image of a saint who has nothing to do with power, but is just roaming India for its well-being, for uniting it. I mean, all other gaffe’s apart, Rahul Gandhi’s T-Shirt price was just about enough to sap the effort of all significance. Social media memes, of course, notwithstanding!

To be a Mahatma Gandhi, it takes more than just a surname. To be a Mahatma takes more than just a yatra. To be Gandhi the politician, it takes more than fashionable names of alliance and parties. Politics is not an exercise in linguistic jugglery, it is an exercise in deconstruction and reconstruction of structures of power, the understanding of which is a far cry when one considers the glee at having found I.N.D.I.A as the name of a political house on fire.

The author is News Editor, Firstpost. He tweets from @SiddharthaRai2. Views expressed are personal.