Manmohan Singh gets aggressive over Narendra Modi's night watchman comment
Manmohan Singh gets aggressive over Narendra Modi's night watchman comment In a week that saw Narendra Modi compare the Congress to "termites" and Rahul Gandhi declare his reluctance to do anything — marry or be prime minister — who would have expected prime minister Manmohan Singh to have the last word.
A Manmohan Singh speech is usually a delight of certainties, of India taking its place in the "comity of nations" and the often quoted Victor Hugo ("No power on earth can stop an idea whose time has come"). His references to Roman philosophy in the past have been restricted to a defensive recall of Shakespeare — two years ago when allegations were flying thick and fast that the government was at the core of a number of corruption scandals, Singh implored that the PM should, like Caesar's wife, be above suspicion.
That he had become a reluctant orator came to the fore when he ended an eagerly awaited statement an entire week after the Delhi gang rape in December 2012 with a compliant "theek hai?" to the television crew doing the recording.
Then, suddenly, the PM woke up, not once but twice over the past three days. He first took the battle to the opposition in Parliament on Wednesday with liberal use of provocative Urdu couplets — "Jo garajte hain, woh baraste nahi" (Thunder clouds do not bring showers). And two days later he took recourse to a Roman historian born in 56 AD when chiding the opposition for "being full of envy, and disparaging everything, whether good or bad".
No Pushover
So who set the alarm? According to Sanjaya Baru, former media adviser to Singh, while offence may not be his usual mein, the PM is no pushover. "If you take a look at his speeches between 2004 and 2008, he has given many aggressive, strong speeches. This is not the first time he has taken on the opposition," he says. He does concede though that there may have been a gap of around three years from his last "aggressive speech".
"But in his speeches on inflation, tainted ministers, the Indo-US nuclear deal and on the 1984 anti-Sikh riots, his aggression is plain," says Baru. The last time Singh was this belligerent was during a debate on rising prices just after UPA II returned to power. Then, he didn't spare leader of the opposition in the Lok SabhaSushma Swaraj the blushes by quoting an Urdu couplet: "Maana ke tere deed ke kaabil nahin hoon main, par mera shauq toh dekh, mera intezaar toh dekh [I realise I am not worthy of you but look at my intention and my patience]."
It's Not Cricket
While at that time, the opposition's attack on the prime minister in the 2G scam case was fresh on his mind, this time, Baru says, the trigger for his onslaught was Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi referring to Singh as a "night watchman."
"The tipping point is probably the night watchman comment. He feels quite prickly about that," says Baru. "The repeated attacks on him were not being ignored," he said.
Modi had, in his speech to the BJP's national council last weekend, referred to Singh as a night watchman — a lower-order batsman who comes up the order towards the end of day's play so that the star batsman is protected. The star batsman who Modi alluded to is, of course, Rahul Gandhi. "They appointed a night watchman by naming Manmohan Singh as prime minister...the prime minister is nothing but a puppet of the Gandhi family," Modi had said in his speech.
Singh evidently has his own ideas. "The prime minister wanted to make the point that he is the third longest-serving PM in Indian history, serving longer even than Atal Bihari Vajpayee," said a source in the PMO who did not want to be named.
The opposition, while taken aback by this suddenly aggressive PM, was also quick to respond. Seshadri Chari, BJP leader and former editor of the RSS mouthpiece The Organiser, said the PM's aggression flowed from other sources than just reaching the end of his tether. "Manmohan Singh seems to have found his voice after Rahul Gandhi confirmed he is not in the race to be prime minister," he said with a chuckle.
"What eight years of Parliamentary set-up couldn't do — unveiling an aggressive streak in Manmohan Singh — has been done by two men, Rahul Gandhi and Narendra Modi," he added.
Unmarried politicians: Can Narendra Modi, Rahul Gandhi achieve anything from virtues of singlehood?
The real Indian difference though on this issue could be that politicians here don't just shrug off their unmarried status, but assert it as a positive virtue. If Rahul Gandhi and Narendra Modi face off at the next general election it will make for an abstruse bit of election trivia. It will be one of very few times where two single leaders have fought for leadership of a major democracy. The only other comparable case might be from Canada back in 1930 when Conservative leader RB Bennett defeated the Liberal PM William Lyon Mackenzie King, and then five years later fought King again, but lost.
Neither man ever married and some of their quirks may have stemmed from this. Bennett cultivated a tough, unfeeling public image, but was said to stay up at night reading appeals for help from the many Canadians suffering from the Great Depression, and sending them small sums of his own money (he was one of Canada's richest men). King, who became Canada's longest-serving prime minister (in all, 22 years), regularly consulted occult mediums, seeking to contact spirits including his mother, his first predecessor as prime minister and his many dogs over the years.
Both of them benefited from the last trails of a trend. In The Age of the Bachelor, an engaging study of unmarried men at the start of the 20th century, Howard Chudacoff links them to the sophisticated urban culture of the West from the 1880s, which created support systems of clubs, restaurants and serviced apartments that enabled many men to live alone. Sherlock Holmeswas a fictional example of this trend. It perfectly suited a certain kind of ambitious personality like Bennett and King, and Arthur Balfour, who was PM in the UK, who were able quite literally to wed themselves to their work.
Shades of Singlehood
Yet a reaction set in after World War I. Ambitious male politicians like these, disconnected from the daily concerns of most people, were held partly responsible for the carnage, and the entry of women into politics further made single men suspect. Chudacoff writes that "so despised had bachelors become that by the 1930s, historian Mary Beard could assert that dangerous leaders and power-hungry political groups like Adolf Hitler and the German Nazi Party had arisen from a society that harboured excesses of unmarried men".
Being married, at least at some point, became almost imperative for Western politicians even if, due to reasons of divorce or earlier death of their spouse, some were actually single at the time they took the top post. The rare ones, who never married, like Edward Heath in the UK, always had distinctly mixed reputations. Voters seemed to be instinctively suspicious of such solitary souls, or perhaps bought into the notion of the nation as a family, which required a suitably parental couple at its head.
But India seems to be an exception. Apart from Rahul and Modi, there are several high-profile and powerful single politicians like Jayalalithaa, Mamata Banerjee, Mayawati and Naveen Patnaik. The circumstances of their singlehood vary. Rahul has that Spanish girlfriend in his past and there is the strange, sad story floating around of a woman who may be Modi's wife, but is now confined to a small village in Gujarat. Both these women, if they exist, have been firmly discarded and now cannot dent the unmarried aura.
The stories of the women politicians differ a bit, reflecting a current trend for women in top positions to be single. An earlier generation of women politicians, like Margaret Thatcher, frantically balanced lives as wives and mothers with the demands of their job, perhaps to counter the criticism that the jobs would diminish them as women. But a new generation sees no reason to keep up such pretenses, and many women politicians like Dilma Rousseff of Brazil (twice divorced) and Park Guen-hye of South Korea (never married) have opted to remain without the complications of a First Husband.
The Issue of First Spouse
It is true that many of these women, in India and abroad, have had male mentors to give them an initial boost, but it is still remarkable how they have managed to build on this and maintain their positions in fairly patriarchal societies which place a high premium on marriage. But in India the job was made easier by the fact that our top leaders have never had to flaunt their marriages in the way of the West — the unintended consequence perhaps of our having a widower PM for our first 14 years as a country, to be soon followed in the same post by his widowed daughter. It is actually surprising to note that it was only 37 years after Independence that we got a First Spouse to draw much attention, with Sonia Gandhi in 1984.
Before her Lalita Shastri was known a little, but few would remember the names of the wives of Morarji Desaiand Charan Singh (Gajaraben Desai and Gayatri Singh respectively). And after Sonia again, most prime ministerial wives hardly registered — you will not get much name recognition for Rani Sita Kumari (VP Singh), Duja Devi (Chandra Sekhar) and Chenamma (Deve Gowda). PV Narasimha Rao was another widower PM, andAtal Bihari Vajpayee was famously a bachelor.
Apart from Sonia, only Sheila Gujral and Gursharan Kaur have made some impression as First Spouses of India, which is really not much over 66 years. This lack of scrutiny clearly benefits bachelor politicians in India. Everyone loves gossiping about "close female assistants", but nothing is ever investigated or written about, and so effectively does not exist.
This also means that one big reason for single politicians to get married in the West doesn't apply here. WhenWilliam Hague was rising in the Conservative Party in the UK, there was much talk about his possible homosexuality and perhaps it was just coincidence, but the year he became party leader he also got married — inside the parliament no less. (Perhaps it is also coincidence that Hague has written a biography of William Pitt the Younger, the most notable unmarried British PM, in which he makes light of rumours of Pitt's homosexuality).
Image of reluctant inheritor risky for Rahul Gandhi
To display disinterest in the top job when Modi has barely disguised his desire for it could make for an interesting contrast, but it could prove to be a risky strategy. NEW DELHI: Rahul Gandhi's utterances underlining his apparent disdain for the PM's job may be fraught with risks. While earlier Gandhi was fighting an unclear rival, that rival has now acquired the shape of Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi.
To display disinterest in the top job when Modi has barely disguised his desire for it could make for an interesting contrast, but it could prove to be a risky strategy with elections just a year away. One school of thought says by becoming the vice-president of Congress, Gandhi has willy-nilly thrown his hat into the ring and to disdain the prize altogether like the way he has done could backfire.
But sociologist Shiv Vishwanathan says that Gandhi's remarks on Tuesday about dismantling the high command in the party and avoiding marriage to not become a 'status quoist' dynast shows that he understands the paradox of power. "This renunciation streak as contrasted with Modi's undisguised challenge is not going to harm Rahul Gandhi," said Vishwanathan, adding that Gandhi's mother, Congress president Sonia Gandhi, had gained from refusing to become PM. But not everyone agrees with Vishwanathan's views. According to brand guru Harish Bijoor, Gandhi's 'renunciation streak' has the potential to do more politically harm than good. "India is a young country today. The younger the person, the more impatient he/she is. Renunciation is a '60s idea. For the youth today, the message should be either you are in or out," said Bijoor, adding that Modi, with his articulated ambition, may catch that drift.
Senior leaders in Congress, however, see no problems in Gandhi's latest utterances. These leaders say for Gandhi, being 'in' is equal to taking over organisational matters of the party and not necessarily the top post in the country. "This is not something new, he has always spoken about democratising the party organisation," said external affairs minister Salman Khurshid.
Gandhi's actions, however, have shown that he is conscious of the contrast being drawn between him and Modi. An invitation to speak at the same Wharton event as Narendra Modi was issued to Gandhi as well, but was not accepted because it was felt that it would draw unnecessary comparisons.
As the 2014 elections builds more and more as a Gandhi versus Modi contest or a fight between the reluctant inheritor and an ambitious interloper in Delhi, Gandhi may have to recalibrate his thinking.
Manmohan Singh gets aggressive over Narendra Modi's night watchman comment
A Manmohan Singh speech is usually a delight of certainties, of India taking its place in the "comity of nations" and the often quoted Victor Hugo ("No power on earth can stop an idea whose time has come"). His references to Roman philosophy in the past have been restricted to a defensive recall of Shakespeare — two years ago when allegations were flying thick and fast that the government was at the core of a number of corruption scandals, Singh implored that the PM should, like Caesar's wife, be above suspicion.
That he had become a reluctant orator came to the fore when he ended an eagerly awaited statement an entire week after the Delhi gang rape in December 2012 with a compliant "theek hai?" to the television crew doing the recording.
Then, suddenly, the PM woke up, not once but twice over the past three days. He first took the battle to the opposition in Parliament on Wednesday with liberal use of provocative Urdu couplets — "Jo garajte hain, woh baraste nahi" (Thunder clouds do not bring showers). And two days later he took recourse to a Roman historian born in 56 AD when chiding the opposition for "being full of envy, and disparaging everything, whether good or bad".
No Pushover
So who set the alarm? According to Sanjaya Baru, former media adviser to Singh, while offence may not be his usual mein, the PM is no pushover. "If you take a look at his speeches between 2004 and 2008, he has given many aggressive, strong speeches. This is not the first time he has taken on the opposition," he says. He does concede though that there may have been a gap of around three years from his last "aggressive speech".
"But in his speeches on inflation, tainted ministers, the Indo-US nuclear deal and on the 1984 anti-Sikh riots, his aggression is plain," says Baru. The last time Singh was this belligerent was during a debate on rising prices just after UPA II returned to power. Then, he didn't spare leader of the opposition in the Lok SabhaSushma Swaraj the blushes by quoting an Urdu couplet: "Maana ke tere deed ke kaabil nahin hoon main, par mera shauq toh dekh, mera intezaar toh dekh [I realise I am not worthy of you but look at my intention and my patience]."
It's Not Cricket
While at that time, the opposition's attack on the prime minister in the 2G scam case was fresh on his mind, this time, Baru says, the trigger for his onslaught was Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi referring to Singh as a "night watchman."
"The tipping point is probably the night watchman comment. He feels quite prickly about that," says Baru. "The repeated attacks on him were not being ignored," he said.
Modi had, in his speech to the BJP's national council last weekend, referred to Singh as a night watchman — a lower-order batsman who comes up the order towards the end of day's play so that the star batsman is protected. The star batsman who Modi alluded to is, of course, Rahul Gandhi. "They appointed a night watchman by naming Manmohan Singh as prime minister...the prime minister is nothing but a puppet of the Gandhi family," Modi had said in his speech.
Singh evidently has his own ideas. "The prime minister wanted to make the point that he is the third longest-serving PM in Indian history, serving longer even than Atal Bihari Vajpayee," said a source in the PMO who did not want to be named.
The opposition, while taken aback by this suddenly aggressive PM, was also quick to respond. Seshadri Chari, BJP leader and former editor of the RSS mouthpiece The Organiser, said the PM's aggression flowed from other sources than just reaching the end of his tether. "Manmohan Singh seems to have found his voice after Rahul Gandhi confirmed he is not in the race to be prime minister," he said with a chuckle.
"What eight years of Parliamentary set-up couldn't do — unveiling an aggressive streak in Manmohan Singh — has been done by two men, Rahul Gandhi and Narendra Modi," he added.
Unmarried politicians: Can Narendra Modi, Rahul Gandhi achieve anything from virtues of singlehood?
The real Indian difference though on this issue could be that politicians here don't just shrug off their unmarried status, but assert it as a positive virtue. If Rahul Gandhi and Narendra Modi face off at the next general election it will make for an abstruse bit of election trivia. It will be one of very few times where two single leaders have fought for leadership of a major democracy. The only other comparable case might be from Canada back in 1930 when Conservative leader RB Bennett defeated the Liberal PM William Lyon Mackenzie King, and then five years later fought King again, but lost.
Neither man ever married and some of their quirks may have stemmed from this. Bennett cultivated a tough, unfeeling public image, but was said to stay up at night reading appeals for help from the many Canadians suffering from the Great Depression, and sending them small sums of his own money (he was one of Canada's richest men). King, who became Canada's longest-serving prime minister (in all, 22 years), regularly consulted occult mediums, seeking to contact spirits including his mother, his first predecessor as prime minister and his many dogs over the years.
Both of them benefited from the last trails of a trend. In The Age of the Bachelor, an engaging study of unmarried men at the start of the 20th century, Howard Chudacoff links them to the sophisticated urban culture of the West from the 1880s, which created support systems of clubs, restaurants and serviced apartments that enabled many men to live alone. Sherlock Holmeswas a fictional example of this trend. It perfectly suited a certain kind of ambitious personality like Bennett and King, and Arthur Balfour, who was PM in the UK, who were able quite literally to wed themselves to their work.
Shades of Singlehood
Yet a reaction set in after World War I. Ambitious male politicians like these, disconnected from the daily concerns of most people, were held partly responsible for the carnage, and the entry of women into politics further made single men suspect. Chudacoff writes that "so despised had bachelors become that by the 1930s, historian Mary Beard could assert that dangerous leaders and power-hungry political groups like Adolf Hitler and the German Nazi Party had arisen from a society that harboured excesses of unmarried men".
Being married, at least at some point, became almost imperative for Western politicians even if, due to reasons of divorce or earlier death of their spouse, some were actually single at the time they took the top post. The rare ones, who never married, like Edward Heath in the UK, always had distinctly mixed reputations. Voters seemed to be instinctively suspicious of such solitary souls, or perhaps bought into the notion of the nation as a family, which required a suitably parental couple at its head.
But India seems to be an exception. Apart from Rahul and Modi, there are several high-profile and powerful single politicians like Jayalalithaa, Mamata Banerjee, Mayawati and Naveen Patnaik. The circumstances of their singlehood vary. Rahul has that Spanish girlfriend in his past and there is the strange, sad story floating around of a woman who may be Modi's wife, but is now confined to a small village in Gujarat. Both these women, if they exist, have been firmly discarded and now cannot dent the unmarried aura.
The stories of the women politicians differ a bit, reflecting a current trend for women in top positions to be single. An earlier generation of women politicians, like Margaret Thatcher, frantically balanced lives as wives and mothers with the demands of their job, perhaps to counter the criticism that the jobs would diminish them as women. But a new generation sees no reason to keep up such pretenses, and many women politicians like Dilma Rousseff of Brazil (twice divorced) and Park Guen-hye of South Korea (never married) have opted to remain without the complications of a First Husband.
The Issue of First Spouse
It is true that many of these women, in India and abroad, have had male mentors to give them an initial boost, but it is still remarkable how they have managed to build on this and maintain their positions in fairly patriarchal societies which place a high premium on marriage. But in India the job was made easier by the fact that our top leaders have never had to flaunt their marriages in the way of the West — the unintended consequence perhaps of our having a widower PM for our first 14 years as a country, to be soon followed in the same post by his widowed daughter. It is actually surprising to note that it was only 37 years after Independence that we got a First Spouse to draw much attention, with Sonia Gandhi in 1984.
Before her Lalita Shastri was known a little, but few would remember the names of the wives of Morarji Desaiand Charan Singh (Gajaraben Desai and Gayatri Singh respectively). And after Sonia again, most prime ministerial wives hardly registered — you will not get much name recognition for Rani Sita Kumari (VP Singh), Duja Devi (Chandra Sekhar) and Chenamma (Deve Gowda). PV Narasimha Rao was another widower PM, andAtal Bihari Vajpayee was famously a bachelor.
Apart from Sonia, only Sheila Gujral and Gursharan Kaur have made some impression as First Spouses of India, which is really not much over 66 years. This lack of scrutiny clearly benefits bachelor politicians in India. Everyone loves gossiping about "close female assistants", but nothing is ever investigated or written about, and so effectively does not exist.
This also means that one big reason for single politicians to get married in the West doesn't apply here. WhenWilliam Hague was rising in the Conservative Party in the UK, there was much talk about his possible homosexuality and perhaps it was just coincidence, but the year he became party leader he also got married — inside the parliament no less. (Perhaps it is also coincidence that Hague has written a biography of William Pitt the Younger, the most notable unmarried British PM, in which he makes light of rumours of Pitt's homosexuality).
Image of reluctant inheritor risky for Rahul Gandhi
To display disinterest in the top job when Modi has barely disguised his desire for it could make for an interesting contrast, but it could prove to be a risky strategy. NEW DELHI: Rahul Gandhi's utterances underlining his apparent disdain for the PM's job may be fraught with risks. While earlier Gandhi was fighting an unclear rival, that rival has now acquired the shape of Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi.
To display disinterest in the top job when Modi has barely disguised his desire for it could make for an interesting contrast, but it could prove to be a risky strategy with elections just a year away. One school of thought says by becoming the vice-president of Congress, Gandhi has willy-nilly thrown his hat into the ring and to disdain the prize altogether like the way he has done could backfire.
But sociologist Shiv Vishwanathan says that Gandhi's remarks on Tuesday about dismantling the high command in the party and avoiding marriage to not become a 'status quoist' dynast shows that he understands the paradox of power. "This renunciation streak as contrasted with Modi's undisguised challenge is not going to harm Rahul Gandhi," said Vishwanathan, adding that Gandhi's mother, Congress president Sonia Gandhi, had gained from refusing to become PM. But not everyone agrees with Vishwanathan's views. According to brand guru Harish Bijoor, Gandhi's 'renunciation streak' has the potential to do more politically harm than good. "India is a young country today. The younger the person, the more impatient he/she is. Renunciation is a '60s idea. For the youth today, the message should be either you are in or out," said Bijoor, adding that Modi, with his articulated ambition, may catch that drift.
Senior leaders in Congress, however, see no problems in Gandhi's latest utterances. These leaders say for Gandhi, being 'in' is equal to taking over organisational matters of the party and not necessarily the top post in the country. "This is not something new, he has always spoken about democratising the party organisation," said external affairs minister Salman Khurshid.
Gandhi's actions, however, have shown that he is conscious of the contrast being drawn between him and Modi. An invitation to speak at the same Wharton event as Narendra Modi was issued to Gandhi as well, but was not accepted because it was felt that it would draw unnecessary comparisons.
As the 2014 elections builds more and more as a Gandhi versus Modi contest or a fight between the reluctant inheritor and an ambitious interloper in Delhi, Gandhi may have to recalibrate his thinking.
The real Indian difference though on this issue could be that politicians here don't just shrug off their unmarried status, but assert it as a positive virtue.
Neither man ever married and some of their quirks may have stemmed from this. Bennett cultivated a tough, unfeeling public image, but was said to stay up at night reading appeals for help from the many Canadians suffering from the Great Depression, and sending them small sums of his own money (he was one of Canada's richest men). King, who became Canada's longest-serving prime minister (in all, 22 years), regularly consulted occult mediums, seeking to contact spirits including his mother, his first predecessor as prime minister and his many dogs over the years.
Both of them benefited from the last trails of a trend. In The Age of the Bachelor, an engaging study of unmarried men at the start of the 20th century, Howard Chudacoff links them to the sophisticated urban culture of the West from the 1880s, which created support systems of clubs, restaurants and serviced apartments that enabled many men to live alone. Sherlock Holmeswas a fictional example of this trend. It perfectly suited a certain kind of ambitious personality like Bennett and King, and Arthur Balfour, who was PM in the UK, who were able quite literally to wed themselves to their work.
Shades of Singlehood
Yet a reaction set in after World War I. Ambitious male politicians like these, disconnected from the daily concerns of most people, were held partly responsible for the carnage, and the entry of women into politics further made single men suspect. Chudacoff writes that "so despised had bachelors become that by the 1930s, historian Mary Beard could assert that dangerous leaders and power-hungry political groups like Adolf Hitler and the German Nazi Party had arisen from a society that harboured excesses of unmarried men".
Being married, at least at some point, became almost imperative for Western politicians even if, due to reasons of divorce or earlier death of their spouse, some were actually single at the time they took the top post. The rare ones, who never married, like Edward Heath in the UK, always had distinctly mixed reputations. Voters seemed to be instinctively suspicious of such solitary souls, or perhaps bought into the notion of the nation as a family, which required a suitably parental couple at its head.
But India seems to be an exception. Apart from Rahul and Modi, there are several high-profile and powerful single politicians like Jayalalithaa, Mamata Banerjee, Mayawati and Naveen Patnaik. The circumstances of their singlehood vary. Rahul has that Spanish girlfriend in his past and there is the strange, sad story floating around of a woman who may be Modi's wife, but is now confined to a small village in Gujarat. Both these women, if they exist, have been firmly discarded and now cannot dent the unmarried aura.
The stories of the women politicians differ a bit, reflecting a current trend for women in top positions to be single. An earlier generation of women politicians, like Margaret Thatcher, frantically balanced lives as wives and mothers with the demands of their job, perhaps to counter the criticism that the jobs would diminish them as women. But a new generation sees no reason to keep up such pretenses, and many women politicians like Dilma Rousseff of Brazil (twice divorced) and Park Guen-hye of South Korea (never married) have opted to remain without the complications of a First Husband.
The Issue of First Spouse
It is true that many of these women, in India and abroad, have had male mentors to give them an initial boost, but it is still remarkable how they have managed to build on this and maintain their positions in fairly patriarchal societies which place a high premium on marriage. But in India the job was made easier by the fact that our top leaders have never had to flaunt their marriages in the way of the West — the unintended consequence perhaps of our having a widower PM for our first 14 years as a country, to be soon followed in the same post by his widowed daughter. It is actually surprising to note that it was only 37 years after Independence that we got a First Spouse to draw much attention, with Sonia Gandhi in 1984.
Before her Lalita Shastri was known a little, but few would remember the names of the wives of Morarji Desaiand Charan Singh (Gajaraben Desai and Gayatri Singh respectively). And after Sonia again, most prime ministerial wives hardly registered — you will not get much name recognition for Rani Sita Kumari (VP Singh), Duja Devi (Chandra Sekhar) and Chenamma (Deve Gowda). PV Narasimha Rao was another widower PM, andAtal Bihari Vajpayee was famously a bachelor.
Apart from Sonia, only Sheila Gujral and Gursharan Kaur have made some impression as First Spouses of India, which is really not much over 66 years. This lack of scrutiny clearly benefits bachelor politicians in India. Everyone loves gossiping about "close female assistants", but nothing is ever investigated or written about, and so effectively does not exist.
This also means that one big reason for single politicians to get married in the West doesn't apply here. WhenWilliam Hague was rising in the Conservative Party in the UK, there was much talk about his possible homosexuality and perhaps it was just coincidence, but the year he became party leader he also got married — inside the parliament no less. (Perhaps it is also coincidence that Hague has written a biography of William Pitt the Younger, the most notable unmarried British PM, in which he makes light of rumours of Pitt's homosexuality).
Image of reluctant inheritor risky for Rahul Gandhi
To display disinterest in the top job when Modi has barely disguised his desire for it could make for an interesting contrast, but it could prove to be a risky strategy. NEW DELHI: Rahul Gandhi's utterances underlining his apparent disdain for the PM's job may be fraught with risks. While earlier Gandhi was fighting an unclear rival, that rival has now acquired the shape of Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi.
To display disinterest in the top job when Modi has barely disguised his desire for it could make for an interesting contrast, but it could prove to be a risky strategy with elections just a year away. One school of thought says by becoming the vice-president of Congress, Gandhi has willy-nilly thrown his hat into the ring and to disdain the prize altogether like the way he has done could backfire.
But sociologist Shiv Vishwanathan says that Gandhi's remarks on Tuesday about dismantling the high command in the party and avoiding marriage to not become a 'status quoist' dynast shows that he understands the paradox of power. "This renunciation streak as contrasted with Modi's undisguised challenge is not going to harm Rahul Gandhi," said Vishwanathan, adding that Gandhi's mother, Congress president Sonia Gandhi, had gained from refusing to become PM. But not everyone agrees with Vishwanathan's views. According to brand guru Harish Bijoor, Gandhi's 'renunciation streak' has the potential to do more politically harm than good. "India is a young country today. The younger the person, the more impatient he/she is. Renunciation is a '60s idea. For the youth today, the message should be either you are in or out," said Bijoor, adding that Modi, with his articulated ambition, may catch that drift.
Senior leaders in Congress, however, see no problems in Gandhi's latest utterances. These leaders say for Gandhi, being 'in' is equal to taking over organisational matters of the party and not necessarily the top post in the country. "This is not something new, he has always spoken about democratising the party organisation," said external affairs minister Salman Khurshid.
Gandhi's actions, however, have shown that he is conscious of the contrast being drawn between him and Modi. An invitation to speak at the same Wharton event as Narendra Modi was issued to Gandhi as well, but was not accepted because it was felt that it would draw unnecessary comparisons.
As the 2014 elections builds more and more as a Gandhi versus Modi contest or a fight between the reluctant inheritor and an ambitious interloper in Delhi, Gandhi may have to recalibrate his thinking.
To display disinterest in the top job when Modi has barely disguised his desire for it could make for an interesting contrast, but it could prove to be a risky strategy.
To display disinterest in the top job when Modi has barely disguised his desire for it could make for an interesting contrast, but it could prove to be a risky strategy with elections just a year away. One school of thought says by becoming the vice-president of Congress, Gandhi has willy-nilly thrown his hat into the ring and to disdain the prize altogether like the way he has done could backfire.
But sociologist Shiv Vishwanathan says that Gandhi's remarks on Tuesday about dismantling the high command in the party and avoiding marriage to not become a 'status quoist' dynast shows that he understands the paradox of power. "This renunciation streak as contrasted with Modi's undisguised challenge is not going to harm Rahul Gandhi," said Vishwanathan, adding that Gandhi's mother, Congress president Sonia Gandhi, had gained from refusing to become PM. But not everyone agrees with Vishwanathan's views. According to brand guru Harish Bijoor, Gandhi's 'renunciation streak' has the potential to do more politically harm than good. "India is a young country today. The younger the person, the more impatient he/she is. Renunciation is a '60s idea. For the youth today, the message should be either you are in or out," said Bijoor, adding that Modi, with his articulated ambition, may catch that drift.
Senior leaders in Congress, however, see no problems in Gandhi's latest utterances. These leaders say for Gandhi, being 'in' is equal to taking over organisational matters of the party and not necessarily the top post in the country. "This is not something new, he has always spoken about democratising the party organisation," said external affairs minister Salman Khurshid.
Gandhi's actions, however, have shown that he is conscious of the contrast being drawn between him and Modi. An invitation to speak at the same Wharton event as Narendra Modi was issued to Gandhi as well, but was not accepted because it was felt that it would draw unnecessary comparisons.
As the 2014 elections builds more and more as a Gandhi versus Modi contest or a fight between the reluctant inheritor and an ambitious interloper in Delhi, Gandhi may have to recalibrate his thinking.
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