Sooner or later Hitler had to come in

Rahul Gandhi

In the heat and dust of ‘Election 2014’, allegations and counter-allegations have been dominating primetime in news studios, headlines in newspapers and posts on social networking sites. Leaders, cutting across party lines, have been trying to satiate the enormous political appetite of the electorate, often with half-truths and white lies. Allegations, even personal attacks, on political rivals have become a part of discourse in Indian politics. While it is often the old guard that has been involved in name-calling, the younger leaders have shown more restraint. Of course, there are exceptions.
And this is why Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi’s veiled attack on BJP’s prime ministerial candidate Narendra Modi while comparing leadership styles comes as a surprise. Gandhi, while speaking at a rally at Balasinor, in central Gujarat on Tuesday, said there were two types of leaders: One, who meets the people, understands them and their problems and is humble and not arrogant. The other type is like Hitler who believed that they do not have anything to learn from the people. While the Congress scion might not have used Modi’s name, the inference, given the context and that he was speaking in Gujarat, is hard to miss.
Gandhi has made the political equivalent of an Internet truism — Godwin’s Law, which states that ‘if an online discussion (regardless of topic or scope) goes on long enough, sooner or later someone will compare someone or something to Hitler or Nazism’. The campaign for the 16th Lok Sabha has been on for a long time but that’s not an excuse. However, political niceties and courtesy are not something one expects from our netas.

Vladimir Putin (left) with Hillary Clinton in 2012

With his ‘Hitler’ comment, Gandhi is in the esteemed company of former US secretary of state Hillary Clinton and the state media in North Korea. Clinton, last week, pointed out the similarities between Nazi Germany’s actions in the 1930s in Czechoslovakia and Poland to Russia’s actions in Crimea. Never mind that she later tried to clarify her comment saying that she wanted everyone to have a ‘little historic perspective’ and that she was not making a ‘comparison’. The North Korean news agency KCNA in an editorial in February compared Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe to Hitler for his plans to revise Tokyo’s pacifist constitution opening the frontiers of the military.

Salman Khurshid (left) and Mani Shankar Aiyar

In attacking Modi, Gandhi joins party colleagues Mani Shankar Aiyar and Salman Khurshid, among the many others who have done it in the past. If Aiyar called the Gujarat chief minister a ‘chaiwalla’, Khurshid, while addressing people in his constituency Farrukhabad in Uttar Pradesh, referred to Modi as a “napunsak” for not protecting the people of Godhra. Gandhi had disapproved of both Aiyar’s and Khurshid’s comments.
Gandhi’s ‘Reductio ad Hitlerum’ or ‘playing the Nazi card’ can be interpreted in many ways. There were a lot of issues that could expose the much-talked-about ‘Gujarat Model’ — as was done by AAP leader Arvind Kejriwal a few days ago. Gandhi, in his speech, focused on the plight of the farmers; that Gujarat was shining only for a few people; accused the state government of taking credit for the Amul story and for appropriating the legacy of Sardar Patel.
Then why would Rahul Gandhi, who is otherwise careful in choosing his words, use the ‘H’ word? The answer to this, perhaps, lies in a 2007 article that appeared in The Economist. While discussing citizenship policies in Estonia and looking at the tone of discussion on the Internet in Russia, The Economist had said that ‘A good rule in most discussions is that the first person to call the other a Nazi automatically loses the argument’. Now that’s some food for thought.
(This appeared in the Hindustan Times on March 13, 2013)

Teflon Bill takes a call

It is said that history repeats itself and it could not be more true in the case of the United States when former Democratic President Bill Clinton chose to travel more than 6,800 miles to meet America’s bête noire North Korean premier Kim Jong-Il in a meeting that the White House described as ‘solely a private mission’ to give a diplomatic hint to the release of two American journalists who were held, tried and punished in a manner that would pale banana republics elsewhere in the world.

Fifteen years ago, around the same time, Clinton, then president, had sent former president Jimmy Carter to North Korea to speak with the ‘Great Leader’. At both times Pyongyang’s used its nuclear programme as the carrot to lure the US.

The successful mission should be viewed as a personal and political triumph for Bill Clinton. From being increasingly seen as the husband of the secretary of state, though Hillary is yet to make a mark of her own in an Obama Administration full of influential White House aides, to a former president who has a diplomatic panache and international presence that cannot be ignored, Bill Clinton is all set to be in the spotlight if Obama’s press secretary Robert Gates’ statement that the two presidents are to get together ‘sometime soon’ is to be believed.

While the administration is still reeling in the triumph of what Obama described as an ‘extraordinary humanitarian effort’, critics have not taken kindly to the fact that the US has yielded to a rouge regime and in the event legitimised it. It is argued that the trip has portrayed Washington in poor light for kowtowing Jung-Il and would encourage other countries, like Iran, to use arm-twisting tactics in the future to meet their ends. These allegations, however, would not hold water as Clinton, a private man today, has gone in his personal capacity and has not billed the exchequer for the North Korea trip. He has tapped his business contacts and well-wishers of the William J Clinton Foundation. Moreover, the administration was quick to distance itself from the rescue mission with secretary of state Hillary Clinton reiterating that US policies towards North Korea ‘remain the same’.

What was the deal or the compromises made, if any, is not clear yet, but from either point of view it is a win-win settlement. For an ailing Kim Jung-Il, who wants to handover a powerful N-nation to his youngest son Kim Jong Un, the release is a propaganda gimmick and a masterstroke that would silence the voices of dissent in Pyongyang as well as reaffirm the power of his dynasty.

In the coming days it would be interesting to see if there is a shift in the stand either country adopts, or of any developments within North. There are also chances of Obama extending his ‘open hand’ all the way up to the Supreme People’s Assembly.