New Delhi, September 27
Three days after the Union Cabinet chaired by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh cleared the controversial ordinance on convicted lawmakers, Congress vice- president Rahul Gandhi led his party’s dramatic U-turn on the issue, trashing the ordinance as “complete nonsense which should be torn apart and thrown away”.

Rahul’s scathing castigation of his government’s move to protect lawmakers from immediate disqualification upon conviction by a trial court left the PM, currently in New York for the UN General Assembly Session, red-faced prompting him to say the matter would be discussed by the Cabinet.

Back home, while Rahul qualified his remarks as “personal”, they went down deep as the “official party line”. Congress spokespersons dumped their hitherto held position that the ordinance was meant to “protect the Constitution and not convicted lawmakers”.

Not just that, within seconds of Rahul’s admission that “what his party and the government had done was wrong”, Congress leaders privately said the ordinance was already history.

The party’s change of tack happened through a dramatic turn of events at a routine press interaction that the Press Club of India organised today with Congress’ general secretary in-charge of communications Ajay Maken. Within minutes of Maken’s interaction with the media on the ordinance issue, Rahul landed on the scene to say just the opposite of what Maken had said a while ago.

Maken was referring to Finance Minister P Chidambaram’s defence of the ordinance and the fact that the BJP was playing a political blame-game after first agreeing to the move at an all-party meet on August 13. But Rahul came out openly to declare that all the party and the government had done so far on the issue was wrong.

“What the Congress has done and what our government has done is wrong. People will give you political lines, but I will tell you what I personally feel about this ordinance. It is complete nonsense and should be torn apart and thrown away,” he said in a shocker of a statement.

The Congress vice-president didn’t stop at that and added, “In my organisation, arguments were made that we need this ordinance because of political considerations and everyone does this - the BJP, Congress, JDU 
and the SP. It is time to stop this nonsense.”