That someone as intellectually handicapped as Rahul Gandhi could overtly covet our country’s premier political post and that our media enthusiastically endorses his candidature is one of our many descents from the times of the iconic Gandhi to that of his surname hybrids. In our chequered history, we were always called upon to make a political choice between two contrasting characters - Gandhi or Bose, Nehru or Patel, Morarji or Indira, Rao or Sonia et al were the earlier dilemmas, and if the media were to be taken seriously, Modi or Rahul would be the question before us in 2014 - but in the hindsight it appears that either having been emotionally swayed or for being politically naive we had always picked the wrong one.

To begin with, had we made Bose our leader of the freedom struggle and opted for Patel as our first Prime Minister, surely, we could be living in a different India today and to speculate what it would have been like, it suffices if we appreciate how we were undone by Gandhi’s pacifism and Nehru’s idealism. Gandhi, instead of infusing a sense of self-belief in us, afflicted with political servitude and feudal oppression for a millennium, turned our haplessness into the tyranny of his non-violent movement. While the communal carnage that preceded and succeeded the division of our land exposed the fallacy of his philosophy, the sense of purpose that his persona briefly inculcated in us, in later days, gave way to the bane of self-aggrandizement, thereby bringing into question the validity of his legacy. But had we marched under Bose’s banner of revolt, in the process of wresting our country from the British domain, we would have consigned our defeatist past to the dustbin of history to hold our heads high all again after a millennium of bowing.

Nehru’s abhorrence of the idea of Indian nationalism on the untenable premise that it would be hurtful to the residual Muslim population had been the sole hurdle to our country’s emotional unification.

What logic it was?

When it was okay for the Muslims with an ancestry of a millennium on this soil to have a homeland of their own in Pakistan, what’s so unnatural for the Hindus, who were there for ages that too after centuries of alien rule, wanting to imbibe nationalistic feelings amongst them! More so, Nehru made the kashmiriyat, a Muslim aberration of yore (which the Islamists had since rectified to the hurt of the Kashmiri Pundits) as the leitmotif of India’s cultural idealism; unpardonable for he had the full intellectual grasp of the Islamic separatist ethos and the Muslim sense of umma that suffers not the geographical constraints of national boundaries. What’s worse, as he had succeeded in making his wooly romanticism the touchstone of distorted secularism, in the comity of nations, ours is the only country that scorns the right of the majority of its citizens to imbibe nationalism because the religion of its dominant minority doesn’t subscribe to it; and no nation had ever yielded and continues to yield so much to appease the minorities at the cost of national integration.

That’s not all, overawing his ideological opponents, as he succeeded in making his personal sophistry (in spite of the Muslim opposition to vande mataram as the national anthem on the specious ground that Islam does not allow bowing before any but Allah) as the political correctness of our Semitic-naive discourse (evident in the nation’s media), sixty-seven years after his ‘tryst with destiny’, we are condemned to live in a land perilously divided by communal, regional and caste fault lines in both letter and spirit. That even our classes leave alone the masses, still fail to conceptualize what the state of the nation would have been like had not Mohandas Gandhi blocked Sardar Patel’s way to the Teen Murti Bhavan is indicative of the dwarfish grasp of our intellectuality.

Had not the cussed congress syndicate, so as to thwart Morarji Desai the stalwart from becoming our prime minister, thrust Indira Gandhi the ‘goongi gudiya’ upon us, our Bharat would not have been accursed by the Nehru dynasty with the Gandhi surname. And if only our countrymen, ‘alive’ to the fact that Narasimha Rao was at penning an epitaph for Sonia’s hegemony, had put the reins of power back into his hands, the ‘first family’ of the congress, at the turn of the new millennium would have been a history; since it was not the case, our descent into disarray was steeper than ever before. As it takes years of painstaking research and acres of foolscap paper to record the inimical effects of the dynasty from Nehru (whose ancestral State remains a disputed territory) down to Sonia (whose much delayed citizenship is a matter of controversy) this piece is restricted to the latter’s retribution on Narasimha Rao and Andhras’ capitulation regardless.

Courtesy the sympathy votes her widowhood earned for her husband’s party, which mid-poll was heading towards an electoral rout, Sonia became a kingmaker, and had chosen Rao the statesman politician to be the king beholden, who to her chagrin turned out to be a Chanakya-like tactician. So long as the ‘dutiful’ king was at her beck and call and was wont to report at 10, Janpath, all was well, but as sycophancy is not a scholarly vice, Rao stopped stooping down to courting her and instead started governing the country by acquiring some grip over her party. Proving William Congreve right that ‘heaven has no rage like love to hatred turned, nor hell a fury like a woman scorned’, Sonia bade her time to avenge herself and that came when Rao failed to lead the Congress back to power. If in Iliad the Greeks had to build a Trojan Horse to enter into Priam’s Fort, Sonia found readymade stuff in the congress stable first to bust Rao and then to oust Sitaram Kesari, for her to take over the party reins in right earnest.

When Rao died, albeit after firmly placing our country in the reform mode, Sonia had ensured that his body was ill-treated, a la affair Achilles, where the Greek had abused Hector’s corpse in the Tojan war, but unlike Paris the sibling of the slain hero, who avenged the offender, Indians, more so Andhras, to whose flock he belonged, anointed the Italian as their unofficial queen; that much for the Telugu pride and the Telangana sentiment for Rao was their own man.

The question that naturally arises is why that was so, and the answer lies in the Nehru’s legacy of non-nationalism; after all for the non-Andhras, Rao did not belong to their region and even for the majority of his own people, he was of not of their respective caste, and so runs our country’s political story.

When such was the account the Andhras and their leaders gave about them, what was so strange that Sonia took them all for granted and treated them with the contempt they deserved, and eventually it was their pusillanimity that held them from raising a little finger at what was being meted out to their tallest leader’s mortal remains and his political legacy that had proved to be the bane of their people, embroiling them all in the Telangana imbroglio.

Woe betides our intellectuals, who all along failed to realize that Nehru’s dynasty had been the bane of our country, and it took a chaiwala from Gujarat to give a clarion call for a Congress Free India; by not reelecting Rao in 1996, we failed ourselves, would we make amends in 2014 by electing Modi is the question.