The Big Story: The rustic Rahul

Continuing his experiments with the rustic, Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi has put forward compelling evidence that Prime Minister Narendra Modi is anti-farmer. Speaking at a public meeting in Azamgarh, Uttar Pradesh, on Sunday, Gandhi pointed out that the prime minister posed with United States President Barack Obama for selfies but never with farmers. He never hugged them either, since he was afraid his clothes would get dirty. The counterpoint presumably is that he, Rahul Gandhi, is not afraid to get his clothes dirty.

In the run-up to the Uttar Pradesh polls next year, Gandhi is assiduously courting the farmer, launching a statewide "kisan yatra". Part of this outreach is the khaat sabha, or cot meeting, meant to bring the informal sociability of a village gathering to the political rally – the Congress's answer to Modi's "chai pe charcha". The farmer addressed in this campaign sleeps on wooden cots and is always to be found in clothes still muddy from the fields. It is the farmer who seems to live in the urban upper middle class imagination rather than the villages of Uttar Pradesh – wooden cots, for instance, have been replaced by lighter, cheaper beds of nylon and steel in most places. Having imagined his target audience, Gandhi proceeds to make gestures of condescension to it. As part of the yatra, he collected a number of "kisan mangpatras", the farmer's charter of demands. In many cases, the farmer wrote down how much money he had taken in loans and Gandhi promised to waive the amount if he came to power.

Yet gestures of condescension can yield only so much political mileage, as Gandhi might have found after his misadventure in the last Uttar Pradesh polls. Then, the Congress scion had travelled the countryside, sleeping in rural households, eating meals there, even bathing under a hand pump. The life lived by thousands of farmers had suddenly been turned into a political fetish. Rural Uttar Pradesh was not impressed and the Congress lost badly in the polls. This time, too, Gandhi will need to fight a campaign that goes beyond the optics, come up with long-term measures to alleviate rural distress. It will take more than hugs and waivers.

The Big Scroll: Scroll.in on the day's big story

Sunaina Kumar traces a history of the cot in India.

Political pickings

1. On a day when seven militants were killed in two separate encounters in Jammu and Kashmir, Home Minister Rajnath Singh ordered security officials to clamp down on those instigating unrest in the Valley and restore normalcy within a week.

2. The Bihar government has shifted principal secretary KK Pathak, author of the state's stringent new prohibition law, out of the excise and prohibition department.

3. In Andhra Pradesh, the Kapu joint action committee elected Mudragada Padmanabham as leader and urged him to launch rallies to create awareness about the importance of Backward Caste reservation for the community.

Punditry

1. In the Hindu, Janaki Nair rues the "culture of obedience" that has compromised the intellectual agenda in the country's best universities and institutions.

2. In the Indian Express, Ashok Gulati recommends building buffer stocks of water during the monsoon to cover shortages in other seasons.

3. Also in the Hindu, TT Ram Mohan finds the new labour laws will weaken protections for workers at a time when the Indian economy is not generating enough jobs.

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