In the first half of the budget session, the presence and presentation, both verbal and non-verbal, of Rahul Gandhi, the Leader of Opposition, have attracted both cynical and sycophantic commentaries. There is nothing new about this. Congress has managed to create a spectacle and a slogan during each of the sessions of parliament in the last few years. It is presumed that they do so to surmount their lack of numbers, but more importantly, to assert their assumptions of moral superiority.Besides physical disruption of parliament, Congress has constantly characterised those in the top tier of the Union government, and the BJP leadership, as morally inferior, if not degenerate. In the process, Rahul Gandhi has sought a saintly halo for himself and his party. He does this often with the entitled charm that his dynasty allows him to exude, without perhaps realising that such a halo grows only in gardens of quietude and serenity, not amidst the chaos of power-seeking and plenitude of hypocrisies.AdvertisementAlso Read | Rahul Gandhi writes: Match-fixing MaharashtraRahul Gandhi’s strategy for his party has been a confusing mix of the quasi-spiritual and the quasi-physical. He appears to have found the fusion of the two in the translocated philosophies of Japanese and Chinese martial arts, as well as Buddhist meditation techniques. All of which somewhat seem to instruct Gandhi to place an excessive premium on one’s own moral strength and righteousness. To feel and act fearless has been his singular political mission for a long time. This whole process has made him a kind of fetish worshipper of courage.Even in the latest session of parliament, his fetishisation of courage was apparent. He positioned himself as courageous and characterised everyone opposite him as “compromised”, “scared”, or “surrendered”. The Congress placards and banners outside parliament denoted this too. In his budget speech, making a reference to Jujitsu, Rahul Gandhi said: “In martial arts, the sequence is grip, choke and tap. This grip also exists in politics. But in politics, the grip, choke and tap remain hidden.” Taking a swipe at Prime Minister Modi, he said, “You know why he sold India? Because they are choking him. They have got a grip on his neck… We can see fear in the eyes of the Prime Minister.” Later, when the US Supreme Court ruled against President Trump’s tariff decisions, he reiterated his charge, “The PM is compromised… he will surrender again.” Interestingly, it was reported in January this year that “sensei Rahul” had demonstrated Jujitsu techniques to his party workers in Kurukshetra to equip them to combat the BJP. He repeated it before members of his party’s research wing in Delhi, immediately after his reference to it in the Lok Sabha.Even when it came to the unpublished excerpt from General MM Naravane’s memoirs, this fetishisation played out. The trope was of a brave army man (in Rahul Gandhi’s own mould) being left to fend for himself by the prime minister, when there was a crisis at the border. While the words used by the Gen Naravane are not unilaterally suggestive of the spin put on it (something which the General himself has now clarified), there was no circumspection in Gandhi’s words. On the other hand, had he asked if the prime minister’s reported words, “Jo Uchit Samjho Woh Karo” (Do what you deem appropriate), to Gen Naravane, denoted an offer of professional freedom or signified a total shirking of responsibility, perhaps it would have elicited a debate that would commit the government to a statement and a position. Gandhi’s tactless insinuation only helped the government to heap deliberate insinuations on him and his family.AdvertisementWith the shirtless protests at the India Impact AI Summit, the official handles of the Congress party backed it with images of a bare-chested Mahatma Gandhi, an unmistakable false equivalence. One of the posts even said, “The last time a shirtless Congress protested, the British were thrown out of India.” Yet another post said: “Cowards do not love; love is the mark of the brave.” The ideas of the “brave” versus the “compromised” have by now come to acquire an archetypal play.In the past, with almost every single issue Rahul Gandhi has raised inside or outside of parliament, he has created a binary of either fear and fearlessness, love and hate, truth and lies, facts and fake, forgiveness and retribution, inclusion and exclusion, or divisiveness and harmony. Invariably, each time he has made himself the protagonist of virtue and deigned the one opposite him, or against him, as the fallen one, or the compromised one, or evil incarnate. The binaries are a problem by themselves, but an even greater problem is to repeatedly, and nearly obsessively, place oneself at the righteous extreme. This is about a lack of reflection and healthy circumspection of one’s own words, thoughts and actions. On the Savarkar issue, for which Rahul Gandhi has attracted defamation suits, he placed himself on a moral ledge when he said: “I am a Gandhi and not a Savarkar” and “a Gandhi never apologises.”There has been no other nuance to Gandhi’s dialogues beyond bringing these binaries into a certain simplistic play in a complex political setting. In 2018, he went across and hugged Modi in parliament, speaking in the language of priestly beatification that he would “release or unlock the love trapped inside him”. He also allegedly blew a flying kiss in parliament, imagining himself as a reconciler of contradictions. He hugged people on his Bharat Jodo Yatra as a supreme salesman of his “mohabbat ki dukan.” His rhetoric of righteousness has slowly turned into blisters of self-righteousness, thereby circumscribing the opposition space. This has helped the BJP enormously.you may likeThe fetishisation of courage has serious political consequences for Rahul Gandhi and the Congress party. It does not allow one to focus and pursue a political issue that they themselves have raised.Anyway, one only has to reckon the number of issues that Gandhi has raised in the past years, and then has allowed it to languish in the chambers of vanity that presumptions of courage construct. The issues related to Rafale, China, Adani, caste census, reservations, federal autonomy, stock markets, economy, RSS, democracy, Agniveer, Operation Sindhoor, “vote chori”, the rural employment scheme, etc., all of which stalled parliament at different points, have lost momentum in the maelstrom of Gandhi’s courage fetishism. In the 1980s, VP Singh, with one single issue, Bofors, could build up momentum against Rajiv Gandhi’s brute majority of 414 seats. The lessons are all there in his own family’s history. The myopia of courage debilitates political sight and insight.The writer is the author of Strange Burdens: The Politics and Predicaments of Rahul Gandhi (Penguin Vintage, 2023)