Rahul Gandhi’s question, “So, Jesus Christ is a form of God” went viral minutes after chatting with the controversial Christian preacher George Ponniah from Kanniyakumari. After hearing the priest’s response—”He’s a genuine God… God exposes him as a man, a human person, not like Shakti or this power.” There was widespread shock and fury in Congress. It was thought that this exchange was enough to derail the Congress’ ‘Bharat Jodo Yatra’, at least in the northern part of the country.
Perhaps Rahul wasn’t given enough context before meeting with this controversial, “arrogant” preacher who thought he was the only one who could win over Christian voters in the Kanniyakumari area. Others thought that rather than publicly spectacle himself, he might have asked his Catholic mother Sonia some of these more fundamental questions about Jesus.
On the other hand, Rahul Gandhi is renowned for sometimes shocking his party. Perhaps that’s why he decided to have that disastrous conversation with Pastor Ponniah. The chats with the pastor were considered neutral for the Congress if Rahul had also bothered to visit several Hindu worship sites in Kanniyakumari. These included, at the very least, the Kanyakumari temple (also known as the Kumari Amman temple) and the Nagaraj temple. According to a Tamil Nadu Congress party spokesperson, “Although over the years, Christians have numerically become strong in the region,” the BJP still has an MLA representing a substantial Hindu community.” It seems that the Congress was more concerned with keeping the Kanniyakumari Lok Sabha seat that it had won in 2019 than with striking a fair balance.
Pon Radhakrishnan, a Union Minister, won the Kanniyakumari Lok Sabha constituency in 2014. H. grabbed it and hid it. In 2019, Congress member Vasanthkumar. When he passed away two years later, and by-elections were conducted, his son Vijay Vasanth again won the position. Tamil Nadu Congress insiders revealed that the party had reached out to pastor Ponniah for the 2021 Lok Sabha by-elections, corroborating the widespread belief that he was the deciding factor in the Congress’s back-to-back electoral victories.
Even though Ponniah has a history of making remarks that have gotten him in trouble, they did this anyway. According to reports, Rahul Gandhi is considering leaving the Wayanad Lok Sabha seat in 2024 after being arrested for making a hate speech against Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Amit Shah, a DMK minister, and others in Madurai. The Kanniyakumari LS seat is seen as a possible alternative. Many believe that the Left Front, led by Pinarayi Vijayan, has a good chance of winning all 20 of Kerala’s Lok Sabha seats.
Although Congress has been trying to downplay the Ponniah scandal, it has not been easy to do so with the Bharat Jodo Yatra in Kerala. While Congress’s communications chief, Jairam Ramesh, had no problem placing the blame on “an ugly tweet from the BJP hate machine,” which has become desperate after the “successful” inauguration of Bharat JodoYatra. Pawan Khera, a spokesman for Rahul’s party, compared his relationship with Pastor Ponniah to that of Gautam Buddha and Angulimala, a notorious criminal who later converted to Buddhism. The funniest part is that Shehzad Poonawala of the BJP wouldn’t let Congress off the hook by telling inflammatory stories. Even yet, he was still curious as to whether or not Rahul Gandhi was the Buddha or Angulimala.