06 December 2013, 01:52 PM IST
In the end it turned out to be a toofan in a chai cup. When the Huffington Post carried a report that the Congress president, Sonia Gandhi, had a personal wealth portfolio amounting to some two billion dollars – which made her the twelfth richest political leader in the world, and richer than the queen of England – it raised both eyebrows and hackles.
Following the Post disclosure, South Block may or may not have entertained apprehensions that the resident of Buckingham Palace might send an emissary to 10 Janpath seeking a loan to help tide things over till the next installment of the royal pocket money had been cleared by Westminster. But that eventuality apart, such a publicised abundance of riches belonging to the leader of a political organisation which over 60 years has been promoting itself as being pro-poor – if not pro-poverty – wouldn't go down too well with the aam admi, particularly when India's winter of discontent is crackling with the static electricity of election fervour.
A suitably huffy Congress spokesperson promptly rubbished the report. As though on cue, the online publication retracted its earlier statement, and withdrew the Congress president's name from its richy-rich list. Subsequently, the Indian media gave out details of the Congress leader's financial status based on the pre-election affidavits she had filed, which turns out to be far more modest than what the Post had erroneously claimed.
The episode suggests that we might be right in paraphrasing the poet and say that 'There are no rich nor poor, but thinking makes them so'. Indeed, Sonia Gandhi's overnight riches-to-rags (relatively speaking) downgrade might find a parallel in what used to be called India's growth story and what might now more aptly be termed India's growth which is history.
From an internationally lauded 8-plus% growth a year, India is now limping along at an estimated rate which is on the wrong side of 5%, and the bouquets it formerly received from the community of global finance are in some danger of being morphed into BRICbats, with rating agencies threatening to demote the national economy to junk status.
To compound confusion, the country's two biggest political parties, the BJP and the Congress, are at statistical loggerheads as to which of the two authored India's growth story and which of the two de-authored it, so to speak, like a Cinderella tale in reverse in which a princess ends up being a drab kitchen maid.
The Huffington Post has acknowledged its role in turning Sonia Gandhi's imagined gilded carriage into a mundane pumpkin. But who's to take the rap for turning the India success story to the India sucks story? Ballot Box 2014 may well provide the answer.
jug.suraiya@timesgroup.com
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