Varun Gandhi

Here is a good and objective editorial on the media hungama on Varun Gandhi's speech.

http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/Editorial/Thrown-to-the-wolves/articleshow/4295119.cms

"Someone should have told the poor boy. How was he to know that saying those electioneering things would mean such a brouhaha? Here he was, a young man with an impressive, though troubled lineage, phoren-returned, simply seeking to make his mark politically, much as so many others have done before him.

And suddenly, Varun Gandhi is neck-deep in shifty stuff like EC notices and CDs and tamperings and what not. Not for nothing was his first amazed reaction the ‘what’d I do wrong?’ sort.

Haven’t we all seen so many of them leaders say worse things and make a career out of it? And since the pseudo-secular camp was already taken, what choice did he have but to join the other gang and speak up in defence of the defenceless, downtrodden majority of the nation?

And out there, in the dusty heartland, where PC chat is hardly de rigueur, he naturally assumed this was the best way to get some enthusiasm going among the locals. Sure, he seems to really have been the target of a conspiracy.

Why else, pray, would suddenly he be blamed for saying things which others have said so often, and so much more forcefully? It isn’t also the case that he just made a minute miscalculation. The chap was told things were this way, and he merely proceeded.

Then, even more insidiously, someone seems to have advised him to take a ‘so what if I did’ stand. Probably told him it’d mean nice bouts of publicity and also gather the requisite flock around. When he did do that, the party he was supposedly running for now seems to have done a Pontius Pilate.

Make no mistake, what we are witnessing is no case of a wannabe leader quoting publicly what his (supposed) party oft ideologises. This is a clear case of a normal young man, full of perfectly acceptable aspirations being thrown to the wolves.

Of being abandoned after never being informed that there might well be something wrong with what he was saying, or even led to think. Sigh. Can we all not pretend this was just youthful passion at work? "