5 min readOct 11, 2026 07:07 AM IST First published on: Oct 11, 2026 at 06:30 AM ISTIn times of political protests and government crackdowns, the role of a commentator like your humble columnist becomes fraught with charges of partisanship. This is what happened last week. While trawling social media platforms, I came upon a video of Priyanka Gandhi and some Congress ladies sitting in a circle, like at a wedding sangeet party, singing a song the Cockroach Janta Party made famous. Except that the target of the song was not ‘Bal Narendra’ but Gyanesh Kumar. Same tune, same gesture of rocking a baby to sleep, but the words were changed.When the song was sung by young girls in Jantar Mantar, it had a resonance that was lost in this version. This made me express what I thought was an honest opinion about what is good for the cockroaches not being good for senior members of our oldest political party. By this I meant that the Gandhi siblings needed to come up with more than street-fighting to win public trust. And a few more elections than they have so far. Why have the party’s think tanks not found the time to draw up a list of concrete reforms to the Election Commission and especially the process of appointing election commissioners?