'Rahul Gandhi has no tangible ideas': Ex-CEA slams Congress leader for his take on India's foreign policy

Former Chief Economic Adviser Krishnamurthy Subramanian on Thursday slammed Congress leader Rahul Gandhi for his views on India's foreign policy. He also called Gandhi 'a poster child of entitlement'. Gandhi, who recently spoke at Cambridge University and Chatham House think tank in London, was found lost while spelling out how he would like to run India's foreign policy.

The Congress leader's response, which did not impress many, was shared by BJP's Shehzad Poonawalla who said Rahul Gandhi's lack of depth and articulation to deal even with a simple question did not surprise him. 

Reacting to that tweet, Subramanian, who served as CEA from December 2018 to December 2021, said the Congress MP does not have any tangible ideas despite spending 20 years in Parliament. "He is not intelligent. He doesn’t work hard to make up for it. Ex, if he diligently attended Parliament, sat & listened, he would learn. #PosterChildOfEntitlement @INCIndia," he said in a tweet.

Rahul Gandhi has been attacking the Centre and External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar for India's handling of the border stand-off with China. He has, on some occasions, said that Jaishankar does not understand the China threat.   

At Chatham House, where Gandhi was in a one-on-one conversation, he was asked whether he had anything new to introduce in India's foreign policy as former Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru had done with Non-Aligned Movement (NAM). Responding to this, Gandhi said: "The principle of foreign policy, unfortunately, is self-interest". He, however, then talked about what kind of society he would like to build and how he would use the "energy" which is being generated by the country's transition from rural to urban.
 
"What we are trying to do is - we were a rural country, and we are making a transition into an urban country," he said. "And this transition has a huge amount of energy, potential for violence - but also potential for violence, the potential for transformation." "And we are trying to manage this energy as it is moving. If you look at UPA policies, they were all about trying to manage this transition from rural to urban connected country," Gandhi said.

The Congress leader said his party's foreign policy would follow that idea. "We would like to build a society that is productive, a society that is allowed to have an imagination, to live happily, to be educated to have a certain amount of healthcare - and our foreign policy would align with that," he added.

A short clip of that video was shared by Patrick Brauckmann, the author of Space and Time. Brauckmann said he never heard of a politician "as inarticulate" as Rahul Gandhi. "It’s actually embarrassing to hear him get lost in the simplest of questions," he said while quoting a line from Gandhi's answer - "India’s foreign policy should reflect the nation transitioning from rural to urban".    

The former CEA, in another tweet, pointed to Brauckmann's observation on Gandhi and said: "More evidence of how the world perceives @RahulGandhi: “embarrassing to hear him get lost in the simplest of questions."

Commenting on the video, Sandeep Moza, a Twitter user, said former US President Barak Obama had in his book appropriately described Gandhi: "Rahul Gandhi has '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."

Subramanian said Obama was right. "If @RahulGandhi were a student in my class, I would be thoroughly unimpressed." The former CEA said he was surprised when other professors gave him so much time and attention. It "can only be bcos of sycophancy to the Dynasty."