Tavleen Singh writes: Congress party must do more than protest

Lok Sabha LoP Rahul Gandhi and Congress MP Priyanka Gandhi Vadra during INDIA bloc MPs' protest against Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar at Windsor Place near Jantar Mantar, in New Delhi on Wednesday. (ANI Photo/Amit)

5 min readOct 11, 2026 06:44 AM IST First published on: Oct 11, 2026 at 06:30 AM IST

In times of political protests and government crackdowns, the role of a commentator like your humble columnist becomes fraught with charges of partisanship. This is what happened last week. While trawling social media platforms, I came upon a video of Priyanka Gandhi and some Congress ladies sitting in a circle, like at a wedding sangeet party, singing a song the Cockroach Janta Party made famous. Except that the target of the song was not ‘Bal Narendra’ but Gyanesh Kumar. Same tune, same gesture of rocking a baby to sleep, but the words were changed.

When the song was sung by young girls in Jantar Mantar, it had a resonance that was lost in this version. This made me express what I thought was an honest opinion about what is good for the cockroaches not being good for senior members of our oldest political party. By this I meant that the Gandhi siblings needed to come up with more than street-fighting to win public trust. And a few more elections than they have so far. Why have the party’s think tanks not found the time to draw up a list of concrete reforms to the Election Commission and especially the process of appointing election commissioners?

This is not something I would expect the cockroaches to produce, but it is something that our main opposition party should already have come up with. Instead, their only demand is for the chief election commissioner’s resignation. What real difference will this make? It will embarrass the government for a moment, and then a replacement will be chosen, who might be as much a lackey of the government as Gyanesh Kumar has appeared to be.

Never did I believe that this small criticism of the opposition party’s tactics on ‘X’ would result in me being reviled for being senile, irrelevant and partisan. Aah… and that charge that always comes up, which is that I ‘hate’ the Gandhi family, because I was dropped from Sonia Gandhi’s inner circle and have not got over this rejection. For the umpteenth time, I want to clarify that I was never in this inner circle, and if anyone knows that my friendship with Sonia ended, because of an article I wrote in India Today, they know this from me. Congress party trolls are every bit as abusive and viciously personal as those who defend Modi, so I found my timeline filled with such vitriol that I hesitated to open it.

What it has given me a chance to do, though, is to make a few suggestions that I hope the devotees of the dynasty take up with the Congress party’s ruling family. Nobody stops them from street fighting, as a political tactic, but as India’s only opposition party at the national level, should they not also give us alternatives to what they think the government is doing wrong? Rahul Gandhi bangs on about how every ‘institution’ has been destroyed by the Modi government, so can he suggest guardrails? Can he give us concrete examples of damage done? Can he lay out a detailed plan for reform? Is that not how the opposition is supposed to perform in a democracy?

Speaking of which, may I suggest that Rahul Gandhi stop repeating ad nauseum that democracy has been destroyed since Modi became prime minister. He has said this so often, and for such a long time, that the charge has lost its sting. It would be so much more interesting if he came up with an explanation of where he sees democracy being “destroyed” and in what way. Unless this happens, he leaves himself open to the charge often made that the only reason he says this is because he seems to find it so very hard to win elections.

He may have won a few more elections if he had gone to voters with a specific plan of what he would do differently if he became prime minister. What would he do differently with the economy? How would he reduce the corruption that is eating into the very soul of our ancient land? How would he improve the appalling state of government schools and hospitals? How would he improve governance, especially at the municipal and village level? How would he deal with the unemployment crisis? I could go on and on.

As for those of you who have spent the past week hurling abuses at me on social media, I have a small request. Please stop calling me “aunty”. I am not related to you and have no wish to have any ties with people who spend their entire time vomiting bile from the safety of anonymous handles. You may believe that Rahul Gandhi and his sister are remarkable leaders for taking to the streets to shout slogans and create chaos. I happen to believe that in the exalted position they find themselves in, there is a lot more that they need to be doing.

In most democratic countries there are such things as shadow cabinets and alternative models of development. So why has the Congress party, after twelve years in the opposition benches, not been able to yet tell us what they will do differently if they come to power in Delhi? It is clear from the endless protests we have seen in recent months that people are looking for an alternative.