# The Dilemma Rahul Gandhi Has Put to the Home Minister Is Sharper Than It Looks, and Narrower Too > A signed column argues that Amit Shah either authorised the policing of the July protests or did not know about it, and must resign either way. The argument turns a government's own claim about itself into a trap. It also leaves out a third answer. - Source: India Max - Canonical URL: https://indiamax.net/article/rahul-gandhi-culpable-incompetent-column - Author: Priya Menon - Section: Opinion - Published: 2026-08-10T09:00:00.000Z - Updated: 2026-08-10T09:00:00.000Z - Tags: Rahul Gandhi, Parliament, Accountability, Student Protests - Hindi edition: https://indiamax.net/hi/article/rahul-gandhi-culpable-incompetent-column - Reported first by: The Hindu (https://www.thehindu.com/opinion/lead/either-culpable-or-incompetent/article71325526.ece) --- Rahul Gandhi, the Leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha, has written a signed column in The Hindu on the policing of the student protests of 20 July. Everything in it is his account and his argument, and it should be read as that. The allegations it makes about what was done to protesters are serious, contested, and now partly before the Supreme Court, which said last month it was considering an independent inquiry into claims of police excesses during those demonstrations. His account describes protesters attacked with tear gas, beaten with nail studded lathis and shot with pellet guns. He writes that he met a nineteen year old, Sahil Lochab, who had lead pellets lodged across his upper body and one in his eye that is likely to have blinded him. He says women protesters were struck by baton wielding police, that minors were beaten and had bones broken, and that in Siwan in Bihar student protesters were shot at with firearms including an assault rifle. These are the claims of a political leader writing in his own name. They are not findings, and no court or inquiry has yet established them. The argument built on top of them is the part worth examining, because it is more carefully constructed than the usual run of opposition columns. Gandhi points out that the violence he describes took place in central Delhi, around five hundred metres from Parliament, and that both forces deployed there, the Delhi Police and the Rapid Action Force, report to the Union Home Minister. He then notes that this government presents itself as one in which nothing moves without approval from the top, claiming central credit for everything from space missions to Olympic medals. From those two premises he draws his conclusion. Either Amit Shah authorised what happened, in which case he is culpable, or he did not know it was happening, in which case he is incompetent. On either branch, Gandhi argues, the Home Minister should resign. The neatness of that is not accidental. It works by taking a government's own account of itself and turning it into a liability. A political style built on total centralised credit has difficulty claiming decentralised blame, because the first claim denies the very autonomy the second requires. That is a genuine argument, and it is the reason this column has travelled further than most. It is also narrower than it looks, and honesty requires saying where. The dilemma excludes a third possibility, which is that operational decisions during a fast moving crowd situation are taken by field commanders in real time without any ministerial instruction, which is how public order policing actually works and is expected to work. Ministerial responsibility for what a force does is a constitutional convention about answerability. It is not a claim that the minister personally directed each baton charge, and collapsing the two is what allows the argument to move from a failure of oversight straight to a charge of authorship. A reader can accept that the Home Minister owes Parliament an answer without accepting that he issued an order. Where the column is on firmer ground is on what has not happened since. Gandhi writes that no inquiry has been ordered and no statement made, that the Home Minister has not come to Parliament, and that opposition motions seeking a discussion have been rejected day after day. Those are checkable claims about process rather than about intent, and they point at the mechanism that actually matters here. A demand for a resignation is theatre in a system where no Indian home minister resigns over police conduct. A demand for a debate is not, because answering questions in the House is the one thing the office is constitutionally obliged to do. That is the through line worth noticing, and it runs beyond this column. Accountability for the July protests is currently being pursued in the Supreme Court, which is weighing whether to order an independent investigation, and in the Delhi government's decision to treat the cases against protesters as closed. It is not being pursued in Parliament, which is the institution designed for it. This page has watched the same migration in three interstate water disputes and in two reservation cases over the past fortnight, where questions that belonged to a commission, a technical authority or a legislature ended up before a bench because the designated forum did not function. A court can order an inquiry. It cannot make a minister answer a question, and it was never supposed to have to. Gandhi closes by saying the youth of the country have woken up and that the Opposition will not let the matter pass. Whether that holds is a political question with an electoral answer. The narrower test arrives sooner and is easy to observe: whether a discussion is admitted in the House, and whether the Home Minister attends it. --- Originally published by India Max. Free to cite with attribution and a link to https://indiamax.net/article/rahul-gandhi-culpable-incompetent-column.