AUG 7- Congress vice president Rahul Gandhi has said what we needed to know: “Poverty is a state of mind.” Let us now look at that statement a little closely.
Even a dubious statement like this has to be looked at, for you never know there might be some element of truth to it. Or was he referring to the new statehood demands when he said “state”. Hard to tell but let’s proceed with the examination.
The poor are seldom heard. People, who are voicing outrage at this statement are the middle class who think they are poor, including the Logger, but the poor man/woman is worse off.
For, they don’t have the option to decry this hollow remark. They don’t have time to worry about Rahul Gandhi. They are busy looking for the next meal.
When one is poor, there is no state of mind.
The mind is only filled with the growling stomach that wants to be fed and the other members of the family and their respective tummies that need to be so adroitly filled with the Rs.27 (in rural areas) and the Rs.32-something (in urban areas) to ensure that some paise get something else the next day.
Rahul Gandhi said this in Allahabad yesterday, “I understand the weaknesses of our system. I will try my best to help the people but unless and until the voice of the marginalised comes out from within, nothing can be done.”
Maybe the hungry poor should hold microphones to their emaciated tummies for their meagre grumbles to be heard at the national level. If Rahul Gandhi knows the weaknesses of the system, why doesn’t he just fix it?
The Logger’s sure he said that he knows the system several times earlier. But all the poor get is talk and, that too, a trifle unsettling chatter.
Returning to his speech at Allahabad yesterday, he said, “Poverty is just a state of mind. It does not mean the scarcity of food, money or material things. If one possesses self-confidence, then one can overcome poverty.”
There are a few who have not let their poverty hold them back but most of these are people abroad. There are many poor peasants who have left the shores of India to prosper, of course after extraordinary labour and toil in the UK and the US, but the poor in India remain.
Sure, self-confidence won’t harm anyone. Maybe the hungry poor will take to crime with their new experiments with self-confidence. But this again, as the Logger knows, is imaginary. The poor have been beaten enough to even retort.
It is to be remembered that Gandhi’s party colleague Raj Babbar took back his statement that he could get a “full plate of rice and dal for Rs.12 in Mumbai even now” after widespread condemnation.
Words make for better eatables compared to what one gets for Rs.12, Babbar seems to have found out. And they come free of cost. <Muft>.
Is it time Rahul Gandhi went to the old hand excuse of “I was misquoted” or eat humble pie and take those words back like Raj Babbar? The veteran actor did not complain of indigestion afterwards, did he?
But what’s to be feared even more is his next remark, “My one and only political aim is that I want to tune my ears to the voice of the poor and the marginalised.”
Okay, Rahul, the poor are a votebank but you can’t win them over by saying poverty’s a state of mind, you know. You need to do something. Just do it, like the iconic Nike line.
INDIA TODAY
