Asian Window

Mukul Kesavan in The Telegraph:

In Varun Gandhi’s mind, English-speaking India is a kind of off-shore tax haven, a place removed from the rowdy, no-holds-barred reality of the rest of the country. Anglophones, in this view, don’t live in the real India but in a sanitized mall. Now Varun shops in the same mall, but his justification is that he has to step outside it to do the real-world work of politics. In the mall we can all celebrate liberalism and secularism, but these ideas have no traction in Bharat-that-is-India. In that world, Varun Gandhi’s apologists would have us believe, the only legal tender, the only political currency is the polarizing rhetoric of caste and community.

It’s a rhetoric that both mother and son do very well. After Varun Gandhi’s arrest in Pilibhit, Maneka Gandhi accused a Muslim policeman of instigating violence at the time of the arrest. Even by the non-exacting standards of Indian electoral politics, this was a nakedly inflammatory allegation, but for Maneka and Varun Gandhi there is a Chinese wall between the metropolitan India that they live in and the provincial world in which they campaign, so nothing they say in the latter can be allowed to disturb their persona in the former.

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