So when on Thursday he went up to the dais at the Maquinez Palace at the inaugural of the Goa Arts and Literary Festival to take questions from Sagarika Ghosh, there was a lot of expectation. He didn’t disappoint.
Calmly, eloquently and with bias towards none, he took on the BJP and then the Congress, reminding the audience that he had opposed Emergency and once contested against Rajiv Gandhi.
Stating that democracy has great scope for creating great leaders and that most of us are happy when we see a team of leaders, he took a dig at the current Union ministry saying, “Today we very obviously have a very powerful person as our Prime Minister. We all know that he is totally engaged and he has highlighted a lot of important issues… He has a cabinet of great talent. But sometimes, I get this impression that there is this wonderful horse with a team of also wonderful horses but who have put on the skin of donkeys. So there’s a great horse, but we don’t see other horses. This is my disappointment with today’s democracy. I want to see lots and lots of great horses.”
Referring to the elections of 2014 and discussing the role that money played, Gandhi cautioned that “massive amounts of money and tremendous marketing blitz can drown democracy. Of course we saw this in the last election.” He said that the founding fathers of Indian democracy would in part celebrate some of the aspects of India’s current democracy, but not the power of money.
He also had something to say about the Congress. If Indian democracy is what it is today, then the ‘great role of the Congress party in what they failed to do’ cannot be overlooked, he said.
Gandhi also said that we cannot undermine the importance of institutions. “All of us need to introspect on the importance given to individuals. Individuals are important, but we give too much importance to individuals,” he said.
When the discussion touched upon moral rearmament, and the example of Goa being a very tolerant State was proffered, Gandhi said, “Can Goa teach this humanism to the rest of India? May Goa succeed in re-teaching this truth to the rest of India.”
