Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi is currently in the United States and is amassing headlines with his well-crafted extempore even as he addressed the students at the University of California at Berkeley.
The Gandhi scion, who is on a two-week visit to the United States, will interact with global thinkers, political leaders, and NRIs.
Speaking on ‘India at 70: Reflections on the Path Forward’, Rahul spoke about the contemporary India and its way forward as the world’s largest democracy. But what caught everybody’s eye is a minor, but hopefully unintentional, gaffe.
While answering a question, he got the number of seats in the Lok Sabha wrong.
Rahul said the number of seats in the Lower House was 546, not 545.
While a Legislative House cannot have an even number of seats, what’s more unceremonic, in this incident, is that the Gandhi scion cannot go through an event without making innocent gaffes.
The “mispronounced” number had the Twitterati have a field-day.
Another blooper is that the statement given by Rahul Gandhi on India and dynasty politics in the country.
He stated that ‘most of India runs on dynasty politics’. He even cited some ‘examples’ like Akhilesh Yadav, MK Stalin, Anurag Thakur, Abhishek Bachchan and Ambani too. Rahul Gandhi said, “Most of the country runs like this, so don’t go after me, Akhilesh Yadav a dynast, Mr. Stalin a dynast, Mr. Dhumal’s son a dynast.”. Rahul added that even Abhishek Bachchan is a dynast, also Ambani, ‘that’s how the entire country is running’.
For this, the Congress Vice President is being mocked and even blasted by social media users, more.
Another instance that added to Rahul’s woes was when a woman (probably) asked a question not-to-the-liking of the Congress leader and had her shut up.
But she wasn’t someone to have been silenced without much retaliation. She retorted, “How is this free speech if you are controlling what is being asked?”
Rahul’s acceptance of “arrogance” in the Congress camp came as a welcome confession. This is something recently pointed out by senior party leader Jairam Ramesh as well. But Rahul and the Congress have tough tasks ahead. The Congress vice-president should be wary of what he says. As he himself considers Modi as a “much better” communicator than him. Both Modi and BJP would now try to milk everything out of Rahul’s speech in coming months.
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