The legion of Rahul Gandhi’s detractors and baiters can be forgiven for thinking that in so many words former US President Barack Obama has called him a “Pappu.” I do not subscribe to that sobriquet but I understand what informs Obama’s assessment of Gandhi’s.
I must confess to a measure of surprise that a usually deliberate and sober Obama has been so candid in expressing his views about those outside America. According a review of the former president's much-anticipated memoir 'A Promised Land' in the New York Times, Obama describes Rahul Gandhi as “a nervous, unformed quality about him, as if he were a student who’d done the coursework and was eager to impress the teacher but deep down lacked either the aptitude or the passion to master the subject.”
Or in other words a “Pappu.”
The description is bound to endear Obama to the vast constituency on the right of center in India’s politics that has with great derision and perverse joy derided Gandhi for a long time. Objectively, it is a withering indictment by Obama which is bound to rankle the Congress Party leadership.
It is obvious that freed from the niceties and decorum of being president, Obama writes of figures such as Gandhi with the reassurance that it does not matter any more how his assessment might be construed diplomatically. It is perhaps safe to say that Rahul Gandhi may not have harbored a similar opinion about Barack Obama but in light of this, it might change. However, given that Gandhi felt it fine to hug his most trenchant critic, Prime Minister Narendra Modi—much to the latter’s discomfiture and awkwardness—in parliament, he may treat Obama’s undisguisedly uncharitable view with a measure of forgiveness if the two ever meet again.
Unlike his father, Rajiv Gandhi whom I met during the course of my posting in New Delhi, I have never met Rahul. From what I have heard and seen of him there is a measure of strange unevenness to his public conduct when it comes to expressing opinions. He does go off the rails in his earnestness. I would not be able to make a more specific assessment beyond that not having ever met him.
For its part the Congress Party was quoted as saying that it does not comment on “an individual’s view in a book.” I suppose that is one way to look at it.