NEW DELHI: ‘Magicians, gardens and grandmothers’ – Rahul Gandhi on Friday shocked the Lok Sabha with his story of how his grandmother took him to a garden to eliminate his fear of the dark and a magician who lost his magic after a failed performance.During the debate on the women’s quota-related bill, the Leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha also joked that Prime Minister Narendra Modi and he have no “wife issues” as he stressed that everyone learns from women in life.When Rahul continued his magician analogy (apparently aimed at the Prime Minister), the finance ministers disrupted the proceedings by protesting. Amid the uproar, Defense Minister Rajnath Singh asked Rahul to apologize for his “derogatory remarks”.Speaker Om Birla asked Rahul not to go off topic, leading Congress workers to demand that he be allowed to continue speaking.Rahul said: “I remember when I was a little boy, I was afraid of the dark. We had a big dog and it used to attack me and my sister. One day my grandmother found out about it… She took me to the garden and left me there and said, ‘Don’t be afraid.'” I watched her walk away and I didn’t have the courage to tell her that I didn’t want to stay there. Those minutes felt like hours to me. I imagined snakes, dogs… anything that scared me.““My grandmother came back and asked, ‘What are you afraid of?’ I said, ‘I’m afraid of that dog; I’m afraid of everything.’ She said, ‘You’re not afraid of dogs or bats or the dark.’ You are afraid of your mind, your imagination and your thoughts,” Rahul said as the Speaker looked confused.Birla insisted that Rahul get back to the point, but he didn’t relent: “Then she told me, ‘You shouldn’t be afraid of the dark, because the truth is often in the dark. If you don’t have the courage to face your fear, you will never understand the truth or fight for the truth.'”Rahul didn’t stop there. “The fact is that magicians have been arrested – the magicians of Balakot, the magicians of demonetisation and the magicians of Operation Sindoor,” he added.
