Rahul doublespeak

The most revealing aspect of the sensational letter of former Environment Minister Jayanthi Natarajan to Congress president Sonia Gandhi, published byThe Hindu on Friday, is the emptiness of Rahul Gandhi’s pro-poor, pro-tribal and pro-environment public posturing.

In her desperate letter, in which she literally pleads with Sonia Gandhi and asks for reasons for her unceremonious exit 100 days before the Lok Sabha elections, Jayanthi makes it very clear that she had received specific requests from Rahul Gandhi to block environmental clearances for some big projects and she had acted accordingly.

However, what followed were Sonia’s axe and Rahul Gandhi’s indifference. Rahul’s office even planted stories in the media saying that her resignation was not for party work even as her attempts to meet him went unanswered.

But this is what really exposes Rahul Gandhi's so-called concern for the environment. A day after Jayanthi was forced to resign, Rahul in his address to FICCI referred to the delays in environmental clearances and their impact on the economy.

The media stories, planted by Rahul’s office as alleged by Jayanthi, were obviously to make the message to industries clearer that she was indeed dropped for her obstinacy and not deputed elsewhere.

Jayanthi’s disclosure completes the sequence that shows that Rahul’s Bhatta-Parsol and Niyamgiri campaigns were mendacious: He takes out protests marches, asks Natarajan to block clearances, gets her expelled to mollify industrialists, plants media stories against her, and speaks in a pro-business language in which her ministry is directly blamed.

The Rahul who emerges from this sequence of events is not a true pro-poor or pro-environment activist, but yet another disingenuous politician who publicly professes something and does exactly the opposite.

Going by Jayanthi’s letter, Sonia Gandhi is also party to the plan to scapegoat her and placate big businesses. It was Sonia who asks the then Prime MinisterManmohan Singh to drop her. Manmohan has only good words for her work, both orally and in writing, and offers no reasons other than the fact that Sonia didn’t want her in the ministry.

According to Jayanthi, she hasn’t been assigned any party responsibility since her resignation and has been removed from the list of Congress spokespersons.

If not to please big businesses, is there anything else that made Jayanthi unfavourable to both Rahul and Sonia? Was there any truth in allegations that files were blocked by her ministry for bribes as alleged by Narendra Modi during the Lok Sabha election rallies last year?

Modi was, in fact, quite frontal, when he had said that without paying a “Jayanthi tax”, files wouldn’t move. Was the allegation of “Jayanthi tax” the handiwork of industrialists and politicians sympathetic to them who were aggrieved by her action? Or was it really true? Almost at the same time, there were also media commentaries singling her out for the country’s slow economic growth. Economic Times wrote:“It is amazing that she was given such a long rope and not relieved of her ministerial responsibility earlier. The long rope, instead of tripping her up, has choked off the economy's oxygen supply. The fall in real capital formation as a share of GDP by about six percentage points is at the root of the slowdown in economic growth over the last several quarters.”

After being rendered an outcast, Jayanthi waited for a year and has now left the Congress. By making her side of the story public, she has now thrown down the gauntlet to Sonia and Rahul.