At a recent family gathering, a cousin of mine expressed her desire to be a doctor. Not surprising, considering her parents are both in the same profession, and run a prominent hospital. It seems only natural that she will take the baton forward.

However, to get there, she will still have to go through the grind. Study for at least six years, serve in a rural posting, burn the midnight oil and gain some experience before she can fulfil her dream.

Rajendra Shekhawat has a similar story. He also wants to take up his mother’s profession and take on the baton, so to speak. The difference is that he may not necessarily have to go through the grind. His mother, Pratibha Patil, after all, is the President of India and Shekhawat has been given a ticket by the Congress party to fight the assembly elections from Amravati in northern Maharashtra, one of India’s biggest states.

“My family has been in the Congress for 40 years. My mother has worked for this party. My father has held several posts for the party”, Shekhawat was quoted as saying by the CNN-IBN news channel.

He isn’t the only one. Reports say many more leaders are gunning for tickets for their children or siblings in the forthcoming elections for the Maharashtra assembly. Poonam Mahajan, daughter of late BJP leader Pramod Mahajan, is contesting elections from the Ghatkopar assembly seat.

Dynastic politics isn’t a new phenomenon in Indian politics, but it has become an increasingly wide-reaching one in recent times. Almost every political party has leaders whose sons and daughters have entered politics, most of them without much political experience.

Rahul Gandhi, of course leads the pack, but there are several more, all of them cutting across party lines. And while every party criticises “dynastic politics” in their manifesto, they turn around and practice the same credo when it comes to their own sons and daughters. Of course that isn’t to say that these sons and daughters may not do well in politics, but aren’t they getting an unfair advantage over other political hopefuls?

What do you think? Should you get a ticket just because your parents have worked for a particular party?

As a growing power which aims to rewrite global economic and geopolitical realities, India’s first order of business is to secure its strategic periphery without provoking a backlash from its neighbours.

But the political crisis in Nepal, triggered by the resignation of Maoist Prime Minister Prachanda, is yet another reminder of India’s strategic challenges.

Nepal has for long sat in India’s sphere of influence, but the rise of the Maoists has seen an increasing antipathy in the nascent Himalayan republic towards New Delhi.

In fact, the Maoists’ foreign policy chief told Reuters that India was to blame for precipitating the crisis by blocking Prachanda’s move to remove army chief Roopmangud Katawal.

India sees the Maoists, who control 40 percent of the parliament seats, as edging towards China. So, it wants to find a counterweight to the Maoists in a ruling coalition, many analysts say. The showdown over Katawal’s removal presented the flashpoint.

In its quest for strategic influence, many say India may have lit too many fires around itself.

War and misery blights Sri Lanka, with political ramifications in India; Bangladeshi politics remains volatile and the country eyes India with suspicion; the military junta in Myanmar is pro-China; Pakistan is wobbling under a spell of violence that has a direct bearing on India’s security.

Home Minister Palaniappan Chidambaram says India is caught in a “ring of fire”.

But does India have the diplomatic dexterity to manage regional flashpoints that critics say could in part be blamed on India itself?

The Economist magazine says a potential challenge to India’s rise is geopolitical (and the Nepal crisis bears that out). It says how successful a global power India becomes will depend partly on its ability to mediate and resolve the rising number of crises in its neighbourhood.

But will India be able to intervene in Nepal or in a post-war Sri Lanka without being resented by the local population or the government? Or will it be resented for its perceived paternalism towards its smaller neighbours?

(Reuters photos of protests in Nepal and soldiers patrolling streets in Pakistan)

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is not contesting elections to the Lok Sabha, the lower and popular house of parliament.

This is for reasons of health and also because the constitution permits the prime minister to be a member of either of the two houses of parliament.

Like Singh, we have had prime ministers from the Rajya Sabha earlier but they sought to get elected to the lower house and succeeded easily.

As the de facto head of the government, the prime minister is expected to earn people’s approval directly.

Mayawati recently took a dig at Singh over the issue.

“This Manmohan Singh has not contested any public election…he was brought back door in Rajya Sabha and made prime minister,” the Bahujan Samaj Party chief said at an election rally.

“If Manmohan can become PM, why can’t an educated Dalit woman.”

This is possibly the first instance in Indian politics where the sitting prime minister has decided to stay away from the race.

But should India’s prime minister be a member of the Lok Sabha?

The opposition, after initially trying to make it a poll issue, now seems to have lost the plot.

The question keeps popping up on internet discussion boards.

FOR

– Those who support the idea of a prime minister from the lower house say that a popular vote marks acceptability by the people as compared to someone nominated to the Rajya Sabha.

– Such a person having earned the people’s mandate is seen as less susceptible to manipulation.

– A person’s performance as an MP is seen as a necessary test of his competence and claim to the top job.

– Some even suggest that a prime ministerial candidate should seek election with a pre-announced team, something like the shadow cabinet system in Britain.

AGAINST

– The most convincing argument against the idea is that the constitution puts no such caveat.

– The upper house is seen as a talent pool where competent candidates are sent after consideration. This compensates for impulsive behavior of voters which can sometimes make “good” candidates unelectable. For example, Manmohan Singh lost the 1999 Lok Sabha election from the posh South Delhi constituency.

– It is also felt that any prime minister would work according to the party’s ideology, membership of a house being irrelevant to his policies and performance.

– Moreover, the prime minister is in any case indirectly elected (by the party MPs), so the argument of his having greater acceptance may not cut much ice.

– Some feel that if the person is a representative of the majority party and competent then nothing else should count. Others say the proposal calls into question the very rationale of having an upper house, and therefore, needs to be fleshed out.

One comment on the online forum points to the question being a moral rather than a legal one.

There are two facts to bear in mind.

In the Westminster system of democracy, a prime minister from the upper house would be an anachronism.

Secondly, the constitution review commission recognised the lower house’s pre-eminence in its recommendation that the prime minister be directly elected by the house in the event of a hung poll verdict.

As for the practical aspect, the Congress is contesting around 400 seats in these elections, and finding a safe seat for a politician like Manmohan Singh, the sitting prime minister, should have been easy.

In March, opposition leader L.K. Advani raised the issue at an election rally.

“Singh will be more acceptable to the people of India if he decides to fight the elections and go to the Lok Sabha,” he said.

Did Advani have a valid point?

A parliamentary committee, with a varied political membership, recently recommended that there should be no sex education in schools.

Sex even if done at the proper time, with a proper person, in a proper place, is a topic that makes many Indians uncomfortable.

The committee itself refused a power point presentation on the question “after going through the hard copy because of its explicit contents.  The Committee felt that it was not comfortable with it and could be embarrassing especially to the lady Members and other lady staff present.”

The committee has recommended that chapters like ‘Physical and Mental Development in Adolescents’ and ‘HIV/AIDS and other Sexually Transmitted Diseases’ be removed from the general curriculum.

Instead, they want these topics to be included in biology syllabus for school leaving classes.

This leaves the students of the non-Biology streams at sea.

In school, two years before school leaving exams, I remember waiting expectantly as our Biology teacher reached the last page of a chapter on the Skin, which ended with a description of the anatomy of the female breast.

The teacher, a female, was an old hand and probably sensed the collective eagerness. She promptly skipped the page and went on to the questions at the end of the chapter.

A couple of years later as a Biology student in my school leaving year, the most dog eared pages in our Biology text book described the physiology of the female orgasm and the female reproductive system.

These pages too were skipped on the plea of self study.

At home, any discussion of ‘these’ was possible only in hushed tones with my brother. Involving your parents was out of question.

Nice kids are not supposed to take any interest in ‘these’ things. It’s a given.

Jyoti Bajpai, a development professional working in the field of reproductive and sexual health, recalls her own experience on sex education.

She and her female class mates at school were called away for a session on sex education on a pretext.

“What information we were imparted was limited to menstruation and menstrual hygiene and little else. It’s amazing that boys in my class were kept completely out of this. We were expressly warned against discussing any thing with them.”

When my mother was growing up her parents did their best to postpone the acknowledgement of the fact. She had to turn to her friends.

Things were much the same for my parents and my generation, but are they finally going to change for the coming generation?

A friend I talked to on this issue expressed his doubts on the appropriateness of sex education in schools. “It’s just going to be a source of fun for these kids and nothing else.”

But many Indians don’t see it as reason to deny adolescents the right knowledge, especially with 2.47 million cases of HIV infected persons in the country and with sexual transmission being the predominant mode of HIV transmission.

The NACO website says, “Most young people become sexually active during adolescence. In the absence of right guidance and information at this stage they are more likely to have multi-partner unprotected sex with high risk behaviour groups… “

With increasing exposure to television and internet sex education does not imply teaching kids about sex, which knowledge they will pick up anyways, but for many proponents of sex education it definitely means teaching them about what safe, healthy and acceptable sexual behaviour is.

A whole political culture has been built upon sexual mores- ranging from the Congress-led government calling homosexuality a disease to Hindu fundamentalist groups equating women visiting pubs as ‘loose’.

With two phases of elections to go it remains to be seen if this is going to earn political dividends.

Are our representatives in the parliament providing us leadership or abdicating it by following and mobilising their followers on their less informed instincts?

Hindu nationalism, Muslim "vote banks", anti-Christian violence, caste rivalry -- Indian politics has more than enough interfaith tension to offer populist orators all kinds of "religion cards" to play. Coming only months after Islamist militants killed 166 people in a three-day rampage in Mumbai, the campaign for the general election now being held in stages between April 16 and May 13 could have been over- shadowed by communal demagoguery.

(Photo:Voters show IDs at a polling station in Ayodhya, 23 April 2009/Pawan Kumar)

But in this election, the "religion card" doesn't seem to be the trump card it once was. It's still being used in some ways, of course, but the main opposition group, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), has played down its trademark Hindu nationalism in its drive to oust the secular Congress Party from power in New Delhi. A BJP candidate who lashed out at the Muslim minority saw the tactic backfire. During a recent three-week stay in India, I found religious issues being discussed freely and frequently in the boisterous election campaign. But they were usually not the main issues under debate and not isolated from the pocketbook issues that really concern voters. Click here for the rest of my report quoted above.

(Photo: BJP leader L.K. Advani, 8 April 2009/Amit Dave)

This is one of those stories where context is king. Thanks to the internet and India's lively English-language media, anyone around the globe can find Indian reports highlighting the religion angle. One of the news magazines, The Week, ran an interesting cover story about the "high priests of hate." On balance, I think it looks a bit overdone -- it was written at the height of the Varun Gandhi controversy -- but it had this classic anecdote:

"A former BJP minister once said that he had won five times in a row using a simple trick: his men would make an issue of a Muslim boy marrying a Hindu girl or the death of a cow in a Muslim area on the eve of elections. He lost the last Assembly election when he campaigned with a development agenda."

But religion isn't just on the politics pages. Outlook, another news weekly, reported that an American investor long associated with the Hare Krishna movement has offered to build a huge Hindu temple in a planned Himalayan ski resort as part of a project previously nixed by religious leaders who feared it would desecrate the mountain home of their gods.

(Photo: Elderly voter helped to cast her ballot in Puri, 23 April 2009/Jayanta Shaw)

The Economic Times reported on its property pages that "more and more Indians want to have homes in religious centres." Real estate developers and analysts differed on whether the financial crisis would hurt this trend, some seeing a lack of faith in the market while others firmly believed these investments were good. And the tabloid Mumbai Mirror had this story about a court defending religious names on clothes.

While in Mumbai, I went to see Asghar Ali Engineer to talk about the role of religion in politics in India. He explained the central role of communalism -- the use of religious, ethnic or other loyalties to mobilise social groups -- in Indian politics. A noted Muslim reformer, interfaith dialogue advocate and head of the Centre for the Study of Society and Secularism, Engineer said:

Communalism is not actually a conflict between two religions but between the interests of two or more communities. It is using religious identity for political mobilisation. That is where religion becomes a tool. Religion is not a fundamental cause, religion per se does not cause any problem. Nobody is fighting whether Islam is right or Christianity is right or Hinduism is right. The main point is what the government does for Muslims, for Christians, for Hindus... The BJP bases its whole politics around accusations that Congress uses Muslims as vote banks and inclines towards them, does a lot of favours for them. 'The Muslims vote for Congress and we are against vote bank politics,' that's what they claim. But the BJP itself is basing its politics on the Hindu vote bank.

India is not a nation in the classical sense as in Europe. France, for example, is built on the French language and culture. But India is a bewilderingly diverse country and we have made it one nation. Declaring it a nation was easy, but in the process of nation-building, all these forces have come into play. Whatever development takes place is not based on justice. It is highly skewed. Some religious communities get much more than others, some castes or regions get much more than others. That is why this question of identity has become so important. Those who are left out use their identity to mobilise their people. Similarly, those who are privileged see a threat when other communities mobilise, so they also have to use their identity to ward off this threat from lower castes and backwards religious communities. This is the interplay of religion and politics.

More from that interview in a later post. For more on the Indian election, see the Reuters India website and its special section on the 2009 election. Click here for a slideshow of election pictures.

Here's a video from the second round of voting on April 23:

Much has been written about Bahujan Samaj Party chief Mayawati’s inventive politics that saw her forging an unlikely alliance between Dalits and Brahmins — from the two ends of the Hindu caste spectrum — to win an election in Uttar Pradesh in 2007.

She did this with a promise to widen the appeal of her party beyond her traditional Dalit voters and bring Brahmins and other upper castes into her programme of all-round development.

As proof, she gave tickets to scores of Brahmins in 2007 and appointed a Brahmin (Satish Misra) as her chief adviser and strategist.

The move paid rich dividends, securing an absolute majority for her party in a state that last saw single-party rule almost two decades ago.

It also bolstered the chances of her party in the general election. She began being spoken of as a potential prime minister.

But two years have since passed, and there is speculation that all may not be well with Mayawati’s social engineering.

A report says the alliance between Dalits and Brahmins could be fraying at the edges.

This time too, Mayawati has given tickets to about 20 Brahmins in Uttar Pradesh, but will that be enough?

Analysts smell disenchantment in the air, given the fact that not much has changed for Brahmins who thought their vote for Mayawati would qualitatively change their lot in a state where the middle castes have by and large held sway over land and jobs.

Secondly, Brahmins are miffed at the lack of access to the Brahmin ministers and lawmakers who seem have ensconced themselves in a cocoon of power and pelf.

So will Brahmin voters extract revenge now, undermining Mayawati’s ingenious politics of caste?

(Reuters photo of Bahujan Samaj Party President Mayawati releasing the party’s election manifesto in Lucknow March 20, 2009. REUTERS/Pawan Kumar)

Muslims are seen as a crucial vote bank in several possible swing states in India’s general election and many politicians are making the right noises to court the community.

In the state of Bihar, which I recently visited, its chief minister Nitish Kumar told me his campaign focused on caste-blind development but also communal harmony:

“Now everybody is happy. There is complete communal harmony,” he said as we sat at night on the veranda at his residence.

If what he says is true, then communal harmony could be a vote winner for Kumar, whose party still has far fewer seats in the national parliament than that of his main rival in the state, the federal Railway Minister Lalu Prasad Yadav.

Prasad was chief minister for years, backed mainly by the Yadav caste and the Muslim vote. Could that Muslim vote now be slipping away from him?

Hussain Ansari, a Muslim rickshaw driver whom I met, ironically, outside Prasad’s campaign office, told me he will vote for Kumar: “The situation is changing. Lots of development is taking place.”

It remains to be seen to what extent Biharis believe Kumar has changed Bihar under his tenure as they go the polls.

But Kumar may also face a problem: he is an ally of the Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), of whom many Muslims are still wary.

So it is no wonder the issue of Varun Gandhi, a scion of India’s powerful Nehru-Gandhi dynasty and a BJP election candidate, has reared its head in the state.

Gandhi has just been released from jail, accused of making an inflammatory “hate speech” against Muslims in March. Gandhi said video clips of his campaign rally were doctored in a political
conspiracy to tarnish his image.

The BJP has so far stuck by its candidate. Kumar, on the other hand, for a long time demanded legal action against Gandhi.

Enter Lalu Prasad, who told a rally he wanted to flatten Gandhi with a roller and said he would have done so if he were the country’s home minister.

In a twist, local police in Bihar filed reports against Prasad for his speech against Gandhi.

The BJP in its manifesto also revived an old promise to build a temple to the Hindu god Ram in the northern town of Ayodhya, on a site revered by Hindus but disputed by Muslims.

Mobs tore down a 16th century mosque on the site in 1992, which led to Hindu-Muslim riots that killed nearly 3,000 people.

Analysts say the BJP’s pledge will garner Hindu votes. But it won’t necessarily help Kumar’s attempts to woo Muslims, and he vocally opposed his ally’s pledge:

“The BJP as a political party is free to hold its views on the Ram Temple and several other issues, but when we form a coalition government, no communal or contentious issue is on our agenda,” he is quoted as saying.

Muslims in parts of India say they feel alienated from the rest of the country, often left behind by India’s economic boom and tarnished by the same brush as Islamist militants.

In Bihar, though, communalism has not played a large role in the past, said Shaibal Gupta of the Asian Development Research Institute, who is based in the state.

He argues Hindus in Bihar have been split along caste lines to the extent that they do not present a united front in which communalism thrives.

“In the absence of a Hindu consolidation, communalism is not a very powerful force in Bihar.”

But Varun Gandhi and the BJP have become a talking point in 2009. Prasad will try his hardest to keep Muslims on side, and what better way than to play up Kumar’s ties with the BJP and the prime ministerial candidate, L.K. Advani?

“It’s a contradiction that the chief minister has criticised Varun Gandhi but on the other hand supports the BJP and L.K. Advani,” Ram Bachan Roy, a member of Prasad’s party, told me. “L.K. Advani is an incarnation of communalism.”

(Reuters photos of federal railway minister Lalu Prasad Yadav and a Muslim voter)

“The state government is trying to establish the rule of law…however so mighty someone may be, without any discrimination, whatever their clout is, they will still be put on trial.” 

This is what Neelmani, a senior police officer in Bihar, told me in a recent interview.

He said the “Jungle Raj”, which gave the state a reputation for corruption, kidnappings and crime, is coming to an end.

The state’s bad name made me expect the worst. But violent crime such as civilian killings has dropped sharply in the past four years.

When you ask people in the capital, Patna, what they are happiest about now, they often say they can venture out after dark without fear.

Chief Minister Nitish Kumar wants to present his leadership in stark contrast to that of his predecessors, Lalu Prasad Yadav and his wife Rabri Devi, who ruled the state for 15 years until 2005.

Prasad handed over the reins to his wife when he was accused in the “Fodder Scam”, a large-scale corruption case.

Her residence is just opposite Chief Minister Kumar’s, and despite the bluster around Kumar, Prasad and his wife may well think they can cross the road again in the future.

Taking a short trip to a village just outside Patna, it is clear Bihar faces an uphill battle.

I wanted to check out how Congress’ flagship National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) had worked.

The villagers complained they were getting ripped off by contractors and threatened with jail.

At a small government office in the area, I could see why. A contractor we talked to was very friendly at first. He gave us plates of delicious grapes and tea.

But when we asked him about NREGA, he clammed up.

His senior came in mid-way through the conversation, took him to one side and, so says a friend of mine who overheard them, muttered something about a short jail stint if he spilled the beans.

We asked where we could meet NREGA labourers. Twice a local came in, heard what we were talking about and offered to help, and twice they were quickly ushered out past a small sign by the door warning against corruption.

We ventured out on our own to find the workers. When we did, they listed ways in which their money disappeared in NREGA. 

One trick was simply not to pay them. Another was to get them to work for weeks and then not record it. Yet another was to take their thumbprints and then go collect the money.

The job scheme has faced problems in several states and done well in others. I was left in little doubt in which category Bihar falls.

Nitish Kumar is campaigning on a platform of caste-blind development and communal harmony — a message that may or may not resonate in a state where caste loyalties are still strong.

But no one can write off Lalu Prasad, who many credit for giving a voice to the poor, to lower castes, and to Muslims when he was chief minister.

His party argues that Kumar’s much trumpeted development platform has excluded many of the state’s poorest.

Prasad is now the federal railway minister. He won praise for rescuing the service from near bankruptcy and turning it into a cash cow, and has given lectures to American Ivy League students on the success story.

But some Biharis may wonder why he did not work the same miracles for them.

What’s common to a banker, a dancer and a former U.N. under-secretary general?

Answer: they are all contesting the general election in India.

The main battle in the polls from April 16 to May 13 this year, as in years past, is between the centre-left ruling Congress and the Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party. A loose alliance of smaller regional parties has formed a Third Front, as well.

But Meera Sanyal, the country head of ABN Amro Bank, is not aligning with any of them. She will contest from South Mumbai, an upmarket locality and the main business district, as an independent candidate.

On a month’s leave of absence as she dabbles in politics, Sanyal will go toe-to-toe with Congress incumbent Milind Deora, the son of the oil minister, with Facebook groups and her husband speaheading her campaign. She said she found it difficult to align herself with the ideologies of the big parties.

That thought is echoed also by Mallika Sarabhai, a reputed dancer, who is contesting as an independent in Gandhinagar in Gujarat state, taking on BJP’s prime ministerial candidate L.K. Advani.

Sarabhai, daughter of a space scientist, has worked with victims of the 2002 communal riots in which about 2,000 people, mostly Muslims, were hacked and burned to death.

Sarabhai, who has been vocal in her opposition to Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi, said she was against criminalisation of politics and wanted to bring the common man back into focus.

She also has support groups on Facebook, and a website, and while she is not expected to win, she has promised to fight.

And Shashi Tharoor, a writer and former U.N. under-secretary general, will be rolling up his sleeves to contest as Congress candidate from Thiruvananthapuram in Left-ruled Kerala state.

Tharoor, who was India’s candidate for U.N. Secretary-General in 2006, has had his eye on a more local political role since his return to his home state.

On the surface, Tharoor would seem to at least have some political skills. But should that disqualify well-intentioned, middle-class professionals?

“The middle-class considers politics dirty, and steers clear, but there are so many talented and smart people among us who should take responsibility and take the plunge,” said R.V. Krishnan, president of the fledgling Professionals Party of India, which is fielding a surgeon in South Mumbai.

Politics in India once drew the best and the brightest. Perhaps it is time to reclaim politics from our politicians and hand it to the bankers, writers and artistes?

The black sheep of India’s most powerful political dynasty or a young politician making his own way in that family’s most potent political rival?

Call him what you will, Varun Gandhi is grabbing headlines for all the wrong reasons in an episode that could embarrass his Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party at the start of a general election campaign.

The great-grandson of India’s founding father, Jawaharlal Nehru, was allegedly caught out making inflammatory comments against Muslims at a recent rally.

Local TV news channels are daily replaying clips in which he is alleged to have said the hands of those who threatened Hindus should be cut off, and going on to make crude comparisons between a rival Muslim candidate and Osama bin Laden.

India’s election commission will now monitor every speech Gandhi makes in the run up to the polls. To add insult to injury, Gandhi has since been accused of dishing out money to voters in his Pilibhit constituency in Uttar Pradesh state.

But the man himself stood defiant and said video clips of his speech had been doctored for political gain.

“That is a conspiracy, that is not my voice, those are not my words,” he said, but refused to name the likely conspirators.

The political lives of Gandhi and his cousin Rahul make for lip-smacking contrasts. Rahul’s mother, Sonia Gandhi, the Italian-born head of the Congress party whom many see as wielding the real power in government, has long groomed her son to be a future prime minister.

Congress leaders openly say Rahul’s rise to the top is a matter of when not if. Varun, who faces a criminal investigation into his alleged comments, presents his party with a fiery alternative to Rahul, but enjoys precious few benefits from his famous name.

Unlike most of the Nehru-Gandhi line, Varun joined the BJP. His mother fell out with slain former prime minister Indira Gandhi and drifted towards Congress’ main rival at the end of the nineties.

In the dynasty vs dynasty game, Congress promotes Rahul as the natural heir to his father Rajiv Gandhi, the country’s youngest ever prime minister who governed when a young India began its rise on the global stage.

In contrast, the BJP wants to position Varun as the only Gandhi who can uphold the ideals that Indira stood for, especially toughness on internal security and military prestige.

The BJP has in the past been accused of stoking tensions between Hindus and Muslims to pander to its large Hindu vote base. Comparisons between Varun Gandhi and Narendra Modi are inevitable.

Some have not forgiven the Chief Minister of Gujarat, regarded as one of the BJP’s most capable politicians, for what they saw as his quiet complicity in communal riots in his state in 2002 that left more than 2000 people, mostly Muslims, dead.

“Another Modi is rising. There is no necessary to apology, he told real situation,” reads one reader’s comment on an article on Gandhi in the Economic Times newspaper.

“Varun is among the few bold younger politicians taking the bull by the horns. The majority (Hindus) must have at least an equal say in their own country. But we are ruled by minorities with an Italian to boot,” said another.

Another thing Gandhi said this week in the midst of the row caught my eye. “I am a Gandhi, a Hindu and an Indian in equal measure,” he was quoted as saying.

Where had I heard such words before? The charismatic young Chief Minister of Jammu and Kashmir, Omar Abdullah, a friend of Rahul’s, delivered a barnstorming speech in parliament last year in defence of secularism.

“I am a Muslim and I am an Indian, and I see no distinction between the two.”

Whereas Abdullah’s speech was widely praised and became an instant YouTube hit, the question is what the future now holds for Gandhi’s fledgling political career.