Why should we trust Rahul to address issues honestly when he was so evidently willing to lie over fundamental issues only to save his family and his party’s reputation?

It would have been comic but for the fact that the man who was such cause for national entertainment last night is, and will continue to be in all but designation, the head of India’s largest political party. It thus has to be seen as a tragedy that we had to listen to such a man speak at such length to say so little of substance, all the while posturing hypocritically and callously about the actual facts that led to the mass murder of innocents.

When Arnab asked him: What is your view, would like to expound your views, your PM accuses Narendra Modi in his press conference of presiding over "the mass massacre of innocent citizens on the streets of Ahmedabad." Mr. Rahul Gandhi my question to you is this, do you agree with your PM when he says that?

He answered: Well, I mean what the Prime Minister is saying is a fact, Gujarat happened, people died but the real issue as far I am concerned...

Gujarat happened, people died, but of course those are not the real issues as far as he is concerned. In the course of another answer he managed to tell us what he thought the real issue was:

Look. All I'm saying, all I'm saying is that there is a difference between the 1984 riots and the Gujarat riots. The simple difference is that in 1984 the government was not involved in the massacre of people. In Gujarat it was. The question is why do these kind of things take place. Why is it that the Gujarat riots took place? The Gujarat riots took place frankly because of the way our system is structured, because of the fact that people do not have a voice in the system. And what I want to do. And I have said it and I will say it again. What I want to do is question the fundamentals over here. What I want to do is ask a couple of questions. I want to ask why candidates that are chosen in every single party are chosen by a tiny number of people. I want to ask why women have to be scared to go out on the street. I want to ask these questions. These are fundamental questions.

At this point, I began to wonder, as, no doubt, so many others did, is this man for real?

He was lying about the facts. Policemen across ranks were indicted for the killings in Gujarat, as they were indicted for the killings in Delhi. Ministers of the BJP Gujarat government were named in 2002 as were ministers of the Congress Union government in 1984. Several Sangh politicians were rewarded for their role in the killings as were several Congress politicians.

He was saying what, under the circumstances, amounted to callous nonsense. The killings did not take place because the people do not have a voice in the system, they took place because the system did not have the courage to take on the voice of the mob, and in fact collaborated with it.

Given that no member of the Gandhi family ever had been so grilled in public it does verge on the unfair to suggest Arnab should have pushed further, but he should have.

When Rahul said – The difference between the 84 riots and the riots in Gujarat was that in 1984 the Government was trying to stop the riots. I remember, I was a child then, I remember the Government was doing everything it could to stop the riots – what exactly did he mean?

What did he think doing "everything" meant? Given that he invokes his father’s legacy at every step what did he think of his father’s statement about a great tree falling? Why was it that for him the legal process was a defence where the Congress was concerned, it wasn’t where the BJP was concerned?

It betrays political stupidity to be unprepared for a question on why he thought Modi’s government was complicit in the killings, but it says something worse about Rahul that he was willing to deny the reality of the 1984 killings.

It does not help his cause that his demeanor through the rest of the interview was in keeping with such prevarication. After squirming through an hour of further questioning, where he did nothing to improve the disaster the interview had already become within the first half an hour, he declared that Arnab had become mired in superficialities. He then informed us that "the real core issues in this election are, 1)Are we going to head towards a democracy, towards deepening our democracy and towards opening up the system or are we going to head towards concentration of power? 2) Are we going to head towards empowerment of women? Are we going to be a half strong nation? Be a half proud nation? Or are we going to actually empower women?’’

Some of these are worthy questions, some of these are born out of an acute misunderstanding of our democracy and our Constitution, but really the core question goes well beyond these – Why should we trust Rahul to address any of these issues honestly when he was so evidently willing to lie over fundamental issues only to save his family and his party’s reputation?