April 17, 2018, a year short of a decade since Gandhi digested the fare he tasted at the lunch and the day after a Hyderabad NIA court acquitted five persons charged for engineering the Mecca Masjid blast that killed nine, the BJP resurrected Rahul’s lunch loquacity and charged the Congress President with an “inexplicable dislike” for the ‘Hindu’.

Left unsaid was the premise that the BJP had only love for the ‘Hindu’, who ever since the recent Gujarat assembly elections has been top of the food chain among vote-banks for both the BJP and the Congress. Life is lip service whether at a power lunch or at a political rally.

Rahul ‘Janeoudhari’ Gandhi rattled the Modi-Shah election machine with his temple-run in Gujarat. Modi’s ‘Gujarat Model’ was called out. It took a Mani Shankar Aiyar to botch up Rahul Gandhi’s well-thought out strategy to upset the Modi-Shah Hindu bandwagon. Aiyar mocked Modi’s pedigree and gave the PM grist for the mill. Even with that the BJP had to concede to the Congress, a “moral victory.”

Now, months later, on the eve of the Karnataka assembly elections, and heading for the big one in 2019, the battle for the Hindu vote-bank has entered its homerun. If the Congress scored with granting religious identity distinct from the Hindu to the Lingayat, there is a sense of vindication in the BJP with a ‘Didn’t we say so?’ Sambit Patra smirk.

And, quite in keeping with the ‘global’, the NIA, like its famous American cousin FBI, is in the eye of the storm. People are being reminded that NIA sleuths are not to be trusted no-good investigators. The judge in the Mecca Masjid case was left with no evidence to hang the accused and soon after delivering his verdict he hung his boots in “personal” disgust. People are also being told of Sushil Kumar Shinde and P Chidambaram, both former UPA home ministers, who together “invented” the vile term “Saffron Terror”.

The ‘Hindu’ by nature engages in war but is incapable of taking the battle home, except when cousins fight with god at the helm of the chariot! That was the Mahabharata! And when the Congress and the BJP face off, it is a Mahabharata. Apparently, after the clean chit given to the Mecca Masjid accused, the BJP has got hold of the ‘Brahmastra’, and the ‘Hindu’, his body pierced in arrows, is once again being told to decide his status/future in the land of the ‘Hindu’ – Hindustan.

But for the ‘Hindu’ it is still ‘Kalyug’, when nothing good can happen for him, till the next yug arrives, by when all of the current lot alive will be history. But, for now, divided by caste and varna, the ‘Hindu’ is fodder to the politics of the day.

History has never been kind to the ‘Hindu’. And though valour was never his Achilles heel, he lost crucial wars, whether against the Muslim marauder or the British shopkeeper. At Somnath, Panipat and Buxar – battles lost. Only Mahabharata was his highpoint. But that is mythology slung together with words of Gita. The Vedas are so ‘hoary past’ only those versed in a language out of fashion can make head or tail of what they spoke.

Returning to the present and going forward to 2019, the hoary past has caught up with the ‘now’. The belief is that the ‘Hindu party’ will win the country, not the ‘Hindu nationalist party’. The 47-year-old Rahul Gandhi, infused with the energy of youthful subordinates, was doing great till the Mecca Masjid verdict. The day after, the Congress as is irrevocably anti-Hindu and it’s nothing like what Rahul tasted at the US envoy dinner – wholesome.

Shinde’s 2013 assertion “this is saffron terrorism that I have talked about” has come to haunt Rahul Gandhi. As also P Chidambaram’s less specific utterances made after the 2009 lunch. Shinde’s charges were made in the presence of the Congress cream – Sonia Gandhi, Rahul Gandhi and Manmohan Singh. Years later, words are living up to their reputation: Words come back to bite!

If anybody has failed the Congress it is the NIA which lacks the teeth of the FBI. There cannot be a tall enough ‘James Comey’ in the NIA. How many NIA sleuths can get one-on-one with a Prime Minister of the day and allowed the luxury of writing notes on what all was spoken hush-hush between the two? Comey wrote a bestseller. The NIA sleuth if he did that will buck the Official Secrets Act and that will be last act! (IPA Service)