JOURNALISTS from the 1970s can recall that Kamla, a victim of the slave trade, was ‘sold’ to a fellow scribe for less than the price of a head of cattle.

Ashwini Sarin was the Delhi-based Indian Express reporter who ‘bought’ her at a market place in Dholpur to make a social statement — a woman could be bought and sold in an Indian bazaar. Having made headlines with his story Ashwini had Kamla sent to ‘Nari Niketan’, a destitute women’s home. Nothing more was heard of her.

Ashwini became the envy of many of his peers in the media. There were reports that journalists of better-paying papers such as The Times of India and Hindustan Times wished they could work for the Express. Then there was another intrepid reporter — C.Y. Gopinath of the Junior Statesman — who would disguise himself, say as a barman or a shoeshine person, to produce first-rate stories from his experiences of the day.

It seems history, like a journalist’s story, repeats itself — sometimes as a tragedy, often as a farce. Rahul Gandhi’s speech in parliament, in which he canvassed support for Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s beleaguered government, had elements of both.

Pleading for a divisive nuclear deal with the United States, he said it would help bring electricity to the darkened home of Kalawati Bandurkar, a mother of nine who lives in penury in Maharashtra’s suicide-prone Vidarbha region. Her husband had killed himself, as had thousands of other fellow farmers, to escape poverty or to dodge the debt trap.

The media latched on to Rahul Gandhi’s meeting with Kalawati and his impassioned juxtaposition, during the Lok Sabha debate, of a widow’s plight with the nuclear deal which he claimed would help cure her poverty. Newspapers reported last week that an NGO was so moved by Kalawati’s meeting with the man who could be India’s next prime minister that it announced financial support that senior government officials dream of. Kalawati would get a monthly stipend of Rs25,000, equal to $580, for the next 20 years.

Kalawati’s fortunes have brightened suddenly and she has no one except the Gandhi scion to thank for it. But will that solve the problems of tens of thousands of farmers’ families who have taken their lives to escape poverty and debt? As the Vidarbha region has been in the grip of prolonged drought, Kalawati, like many others, did not find the output from her land enough to take care of her family.

Two or three things can be said about Rahul Gandhi’s dramatic performance in parliament. First, for the sheer fact that it put focus on the grinding rural poverty straddling India, it was a good departure from his other public utterances. I can recall two forgettable ones. In May 2004, soon after the elections installed the current government, he described the opposition BJP as a “joke”, all because its leaders were constantly being nasty to the Gandhi family. Lost in this uncalled for personalisation of an otherwise sound critique was the palpable threat the BJP’s communal ideology posed to the country and not to the Gandhi family alone.

Then last year, during the election campaign in Uttar Pradesh, he made another pointless intervention, which left many of his supporters baffled. In the course of a speech during a whistle-stop tour of the state in the baking heat of May, for no apparent reason, Rahul Gandhi decided to recall how his grandmother, the late Indira Gandhi, had split Pakistan into two.

Had the statement won him a single extra vote from the Hindu chauvinist constituency, which could be the only valid reason for that pointlessly pugnacious comment, Rahul Gandhi would have been justified in saying what he said. My hunch is that he may have in fact lost a few liberal votes and gained none from the right-wing nationalist corner for saying something that is usually associated with the BJP and the Shiv Sena brand of politics.

Similarly we know that Kalawati Bandurkar’s fight against poverty has in all probability been greatly boosted by the munificence of Rahul Gandhi’s admirers, but was that the objective of the young politician’s intervention in parliament? The impact of the nuclear deal on Kalawati’s other impoverished neighbours is still in the future and there’s no reason to dispute a hypothesis.

Empirical evidence, however, suggests that nuclear energy, like any other source of energy, would follow the market rules prescribed stringently by the neoliberal economics advocated by the prime minister. It is unlikely, unless we are talking of a miracle that affordable energy is going to be available any time soon to the 70 per cent of India that is outside the country’s 300 million strong market.

Moreover, there has been no explanation from Rahul Gandhi or anyone else about why the $3bn Enron-Dhabol power unit showcased amid fanfare by Dr Singh in 1993 when he was finance minister is collecting rust even today. The ill-conceived project is a classical example of corruption, avarice and failed promises. And the Congress, under Dr Singh’s supervision, inaugurated it just as obsessively.

There is nothing wrong in populism the way it was reflected in Rahul Gandhi’s speech. If nothing else it at least sets higher benchmarks and brings more expectations for the masses to test their leaders with. Indira Gandhi’s ghareebi hatao or Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s roti, kapra aur makan are at least a good yardstick to measure the failures of both the charismatic leaders. What Rahul Gandhi did achieve, however, was closer to Ashwini Sarin’s quest. Both put a sharp focus on important issues of the day but neither seemed to know how the story would progress from there on.

I am sure Rahul Gandhi has read the landmark speech his father, the late Rajiv Gandhi, delivered 23 years ago in Bombay. There was something about that speech which may have a bearing on the recent Lok Sabha debate. “Millions of ordinary Congress workers throughout the country are full of enthusiasm for the Congress policies and programmes,” Rajiv Gandhi had said in 1985. “But they are handicapped, for on their backs ride the brokers of power and influence, who dispense patronage to convert a mass movement into a feudal oligarchy.” Everything about the way his party went about winning that controversial trust vote was a negation of the resolve it had made on the Congress Party’s centenary year.

Rajiv had also quoted Mahatma Gandhi’s famous talisman in that speech. “Recall the face of the poorest and the weakest man [woman] whom you may have seen, and ask yourself, if the step you contemplate is going to be of any use to him [her].” Rahul Gandhi can discard the talisman, if he ever embraced it. That’s because Gandhi and the neoliberal economics his party pursues cannot walk together.

The writer is Dawn’s correspondent in Delhi.

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