With talk of ‘fighting Indian state’, Rahul Gandhi assaults the nation and its people

Over time, Congress has repeatedly cast aspersions on the legitimacy of elections to derail democracy and spread chaos. It has attacked the integrity of the judiciary and the credibility of India’s security apparatus. Rahul Gandhi’s latest outburst merely brings to light what the Congress leadership may have long known: Having failed to sway voters through propaganda, they now appear to favour a scorched-earth strategy, undermining the very institutions that uphold the Indian state.

Conflating the government of the day with the Indian state itself is both a logical fallacy and a cynical move that blurs the line between legitimate dissent and anti-national propaganda. This new anti-state rhetoric eerily echoes the Maoists, who assert that every Indian institution is captured by capitalists. This is used to justify all-out war against the state. Equally serious is its resemblance to the logic of Islamist terror groups, which argues that since every arm of the Indian state is controlled by infidel non-Muslims, it is justified to use terror and violence.

This anti-state propaganda has long been the staple of the Congress supported woke and left-wing circles but now it seems the fringe has become the mainstream in the Congress. The rhetoric ignores the historical reality that it is after centuries of struggle that Indian people have been able to create their own sovereign state. The state is simply the organised political community of a people. And the very reason it came into existence was to defend the people from both external aggression and internal chaos. Those who advocate for the dismantling of the Indian state are inherently anti-India, who have never been able to accept that Indians successfully reversed centuries of colonial domination — encompassing not just British rule, but also the settler colonialism of the Mughals and Turks.

It is no secret that Congress and Rahul Gandhi have been playing to the tunes of such forces. Whether they are willing accomplice or useful idiots is something for them to explain. But perhaps the most troubling reason for Rahul Gandhi’s disdain for the Indian state is his unconcealed contempt for the culture and beliefs of the Indian people — the very civilisation that underpins this nation. India is not just a country or union of states but a civilisation. The “Republic of India” is a unique civilisational state. The Indian sense of identity emanates not from the last century when India began to imagine itself as a modern nation-state but from the civilisational continuity of several millennia. At present, most of the geographically contiguous parts of this civilisation are united under a single political authority and this political unification derives its justification from a shared civilisational heritage.

Attacking the Indian state follows naturally from the Congress’s broader assault on Indian civilisation. Congress seems to have lost all sense of political prudence after the Prana Pratishtha of Ram Mandir in Ayodhya, which is a living symbol of the reclamation of the sovereignty by the Bharat even in the realm of culture. Yet, much like the countless invaders and ideologues who failed to subdue India across centuries, Rahul Gandhi and the Congress will find their attempts equally futile. Those who once entertained such delusions have been consigned to the pages of history — just as Congress is steadily fading from India’s political landscape.

The writer is National Vice-President of the youth wing of the BJP and assistant professor, Delhi University.