First, there was the sycophancy. I have covered political rallies since Indira Gandhi laid the foundations of the Dynasty and trust me when I tell you that not even in the darkest days of the Emergency when ‘Indira was India and India was Indira’ have I seen such a spectacle of sniveling, groveling, shaming sycophancy.

Remember that Mrs Gandhi was surrounded by a court in which courtiers told her hourly that she was the greatest leader ever, but they did it with a sneer and a wink. They knew it was not true.

With our current Mrs Gandhi, traditional Congress sycophancy has acquired a new and desperate edge. As if the humblest Congress worker knows that he has to wear his devotion to Sonia Gandhi on the sleeve of his grubby, khadi kurta. Every pole that held up the white shamiana at last week’s rally had a placard of either Sonia or Rahul Gandhi on it.

Nearly everyone who entered carried more placards of Sonia, which they raised high when someone from the stage ordered them ‘to lift up Soniaji’s pictures for the cameras’.

In the press enclosure there were gigantic pictures of Rahul baba and his Mummyji and Daddyji, resembling enlarged versions of the pictures you see of Sethji and his family in old-fashioned shops and business establishments.

Every speaker intoned Soniaji’s name like a mantra and some followed up with personal paeans of praise.

Sample: “This lady who was born in a rich, prosperous family came to us as a daughter-in-law and has added gloriously (char chand) to the glory of her husband’s family.”

The Prime Minister’s name was mentioned only twice and nothing was said by any of the speakers about his immense contribution to changing the face of the Indian economy.

This brings me to the second reason why the rally depressed me.

It was the mindless populism that made up the bulk of the speeches. I do not approve of populism but can understand its uses at election time. Voters are more enthused by extravagant promises and passionate rhetoric than by a catalogue of good deeds, so if at election time a politician indulges in rhetorical nonsense he can be forgiven.

But an election is not due in Rajasthan for two years. So where is the need to mislead farmers into believing that the creation of an SEZ (special economic zone) amounts to robbing them of their land? Why tell them, as the MP from Alwar, Karan Singh Yadav, did that “their land is being taken from them to be given to businessmen from Mumbai.”

Personally, I do not like the SEZ idea because I believe that India will only progress when every district is given SEZ laws and facilities, but does Mr Yadav not know that the policy he is attacking was made by his party’s Prime Minister?

Does he not know that development and economic progress have a price and often it is land? Could we have built highways and power stations if farmers had not been persuaded to sell their land? Can rural India ever become rich if the vast majority of the population continues to rely on subsistence farming as their main source of livelihood?

Speakers at the rally included a former chief minister, several ministers and a representative of the All India Congress Committee (AICC), Mukul Wasnik, but not one person mentioned Dr Manmohan Singh’s very real achievements: his decision to open the economy to private investment at a time when India teetered on the brink of bankruptcy. And, his determined efforts to persuade the world that India was open for business and ready to participate in the global economy.

Instead, they blathered on about the poor and poverty, and shortages of drinking water and electricity as if these were things that happened only because a BJP chief minister has ruled the state for two years. Some speakers even blamed dengue fever and chikungunya on Vasundhara Raje without noticing that by the same rules of analysis their revered patron saint, Soniaji, would have to be blamed for the epidemic in Delhi.

Many of the speakers at the rally were young and what depressed me most was that the speeches they made, the manner in which they made them and the issues they considered important had not changed since the days of Indira Gandhi, when I first covered a political rally.

If these are our future political leaders, then India is going to remain mired in poverty, backwardness and squalor way into the 21st century. How depressing is that?