Tavleen Singh writes: Rahul Gandhi, a real leader now?

Congress leaders Rahul Gandhi, Priyanka Gandhi Vadra, Imran Pratapgarhi and Deepender Singh Hooda, RJD leader Tejashwi Yadav, and others INDIA bloc leaders proceed in a bus towards the Supreme Court to file a petition against SIR of electoral rolls and poll irregularities during 'March for Democracy', in New Delhi. (Source: PTI)

5 min readOct 25, 2026 07:25 AM IST First published on: Oct 25, 2026 at 07:17 AM IST

It is not easy being a political columnist. Not even if you have been writing a column for almost forty years as I have. The problem, you see, is that all our political leaders seem to want only fulsome praise. Write one sentence that is marginally critical, and war breaks out on social media of a nasty kind with whichever party it is I have

dared criticise. If it happens to be the Prime Minister, his army of vicious trolls gets into immediate attack mode. And I am accused of being a ‘durbari’ of the Dynasty. If it is the Dynasty I dare criticise, poisonous Congress trolls charge me of being biased because of my ‘hatred of the Gandhi family’. Nobody believes that there is such a thing as