But Nehru did it too!

If the best explanation you can come up with for your actions is, ‘The Congress did it too’, I pity you.

And if the specific explanation is, ‘Jawaharlal Nehru did it too’, I am curious to know whether he is an ideal you find worth emulating, and if so, when we can see your casual good looks, a sense of fashion that didn’t need millions of dollars to be paid to PR agencies and stylists, the bestselling books you have written (no, Exam Warriors does not count), the dams, roads, airports, railway stations, and buildings you commissioned (not the ones the previous government had approved, budgeted for, and started, and no, statues don’t count either), the institutes of eminence you envisaged and pushed to fruition (other than the mythical Jio University, of course!), your famed international statesmanship that is respected around the globe (and no, creepily hugging world leaders to their clear discomfort does not count), your thoughtful and highly intelligent published letters & speeches (and no, those written by professional writers and streamed through the teleprompter do not count), your profound thoughts on fundamentals like spirituality, science, rationality, history, democracy, etc. (and no, making up juvenile acronyms don’t count), the second string in your cabinet that is as strong, intelligent, proficient, and capable as yourself (and no, whoever you are thinking about does not count), the military training and scientific research organisations you made happen (and no, the cutting of CRPF’s ration money or the ISRO scientists’ salaries do not count), the ease with which you talk to intellectuals (no, Rajiv Malhotra isn’t one), artists (ditto for Vivek Agnihotri), writers (you gotta be kidding me if you are going with Chetan Bhagat!), poets & musicians (ah yes, you have Prasoon; one mark for that), heads of state (no, calling the POTUS by his first name as he quite clearly winces does not count), sportspeople (I guess Gautam Gambhir does qualify), industrialists (Mukeshbhai and Gautambhai aren’t exactly JRD or Ramnath Goenka, but they’ll do), bankers (nopes, crooks like Chanda Kochhar don’t count), and common folk (not the choreographed visits to your own mother, no), and finally, the chutzpah to flirt openly with the wife of British royalty even while having remained steadfastly loyal to your own wife in her life (and being the dutiful husband in her illness and death), the devil-may-care attitude to light up in public, the sense of deep connectedness with Indian people combined with an unparalleled fearlessness to mingle with them and to travel in an open vehicle, and many other things you are not just incapable of, but also stuff you will not understand, since it is beyond your puny imagination and intellectual limits, or that of your camera-hungry, narcissistic, genocidal, megalomaniac peacock of a leader who is pumped up on so much hot air that he has forgotten the basics of governance, economy, security, strategic thinking, diplomacy, welfare, justice, or even the principles of fairplay and civility in his quest for being the last man standing, something Nehru would have recoiled from in disgust and if he knew this is where we’d be in less than a hundred years, in true horror and disbelief.

So, show me this before you say, ‘But, Nehru did it too.’

अपने बाप से बराबरी करोगे? बात करता है!