Trump & his trumpeter

THIS WEEK I was planning to write about Narendra Modi's image both here and in foreign lands.

- Tavleen Singh

Readers of this column regularly berate me for writing more often about the Dynasty than the Prime Minister. They charge me with 'hatred' of the Gandhi family and troll me viciously. I was planning to bow to the demands of the box office and comment on Modi's stature at home and abroad. Especially abroad where on the world stage the most powerful leaders today are a collection of clowns, tyrants and brutal warmongers.

This subject will have to be postponed for another time because Rahul Gandhi, always irresistible, said something that was so weird and mysterious that I found it hard to ignore. Days after he challenged the Prime Minister to say 'Donald Trump, you are a liar' inside the Lok Sabha, he suddenly found himself on Trump's side. The President of America, as has now been widely reported, said that the Indian economy was dead. A comment that in the eyes of most political analysts was both offensive and foolish but not in the opinion of the Leader of the Opposition.

When reporters accosted him outside Parliament House and asked what he thought about Trump's remark, he said, "But the Indian economy is dead.

Trump is right. Everybody knows that the Indian economy is a dead economy...except the Prime Minister and the finance minister." He added that the BJP had destroyed the Indian economy to help Gautam Adani. Now I am no economist, but you do not need to be one to know that this remark is both bizarre and bewildering.