Riddles and Ribbing: Rahul Gandhi’s High-Voltage Speech Sparks Uproar

New Delhi: Leader of the Opposition Rahul Gandhi yet again rattled the treasury benches with a cocktail of metaphors and adjectives and a few choice remarks that were promptly expunged for being “unparliamentary”. Amid the verbal sparring, Gandhi also injected a few lighter moments into the proceedings.

Reflecting on the importance of a wife in a man’s life, he quipped that neither he nor Prime Minister Narendra Modi had the “privilege of knowing that” — a line that sent the House into rare, bipartisan laughter. Not done yet, he added another zinger: “Yesterday, my sister (Priyanka Gandhi Vadra) made home minister Amit Shah smile… I have never been able to do so in my entire political career.” Later, amidst uproar, Gandhi went into mystery mode. Referring to the Prime Minister’s April 16 speech, he described him as “broken” and “unable to connect”, before tossing a riddle into the mix: “The answer lies in the number 16. If you can solve it, reach out to me.”

Gandhi lashed out at the government’s attempts to bring in the legislation by branding it a “shameful act”, and “Manuvad over Samvidhan” (Brahmanical order over the Constitution). He also described this as an attempt to “change the electoral map of the country”. He said that if the government brought back the 2023 Women’s Reservation Act for implementation, the “Opposition will help the government to pass it immediately”.

Referring to the contentious legislation, he asserted: “We won’t allow you to do it. The entire Opposition will defeat this attempt. I want to assure the southern, northeastern and smaller states that we will not allow the government to touch your representation in the Union of India.”

Gandhi started his speech by talking about his childhood and his fear of darkness. He said: “I remember that when I was a little boy, I was afraid of the dark. We had a huge dog that would often attack my sister and me.” He then recalled how his grandmother, Indira Gandhi, made him get rid of the fear by making him stay in their “dark garden” completely alone for a few minutes.

“I watched her walk away, and I didn’t have the courage to tell her that I didn’t want to stay there. For me, those few minutes felt like two or three hours. I imagined snakes, dogs — everything that could scare me,” he narrated.

Indira Gandhi returned after a few minutes and left with a lesson he would carry for life. “You should not be afraid of the dark, because the truth most often lies in the darkness… If you do not have the courage to face your fears or the darkness, you will never be able to understand or fight for the truth,” she told him, Gandhi said.

After this, there was chaos as Gandhi’s attempts to return to another childhood anecdote involving tricks and magic met with loud resistance from the ruling benches. Even Speaker Om Birla repeatedly intervened, calling the references “inconsistent with the dignity” of the House.

Joining in, Defence Minister Rajnath Singh took strong exception to Gandhi’s metaphors reportedly directed at the Prime Minister. He demanded an apology from Gandhi and asserted that “insulting the Prime Minister is insulting the people of the country, who voted for him”.

Somewhat unfazed by the attempts to shout him down, Gandhi accused the government of avoiding giving power and representation to OBCs and claimed this was the “real agenda”. He said that the government was also trying to ensure that the caste census “was not carried out for the next 15 years”.

Amid the uproar, Gandhi told the House that the BJP was trying to “rejig the Indian political map” because it was “scared of the erosion of its strength”. For Gandhi, what the government was doing “is nothing short of an anti-national act”.

Responding to the shouts from the treasury benches over his apparent reference to the Prime Minister in connection with the Balakot strike, demonetisation and Operation Sindoor, Gandhi hit back, saying: “The BJP thinks they are the people of India; they also think that they are the armed forces. You are not the people of India, you are not the armed forces, so you should not hide behind the people and the armed forces.”