If Rahul Gandhi were to make a speech on himself, he might begin thus: Rahul Gandhi has a problem. In fact, he has several problems, like all political leaders do. No, in fact I would go to the extent of saying that his problems are like that of all human beings. A leader, as we, him or her, should have as few problems as is humanly possible.

So as the first polling day comes within touching distance, the question is not whether he has upped the ante too late, and whether his attack on Narendra Modi, opposition BJP’s prime minister aspirant, has come a little too late in the day for it to have any genuine impact. The question is whether he has upped the ante at all; or, whether that raise, if at all, is too short to be noticeable.

Take this from his recent public address as part of what a “well-attended rally” at Balasinor in Kheda district of Gujarat: “Hitler was the biggest arrogant who thought people had no wisdom and there was no need to listen to them. He thought he had all the knowledge himself. Similarly, there is a leader today in India who says ‘I have done this, I have done that’ and behaves arrogantly. A leader should not be arrogant.”

That, as anyone with bare minimum knowledge of Indian electoral politics would infer, correctly, is a reference to Modi – as indirect as circuitous itself gets, as oblique as the roundabouts in Lutyens’ Delhi where Gandhi spends most of his time, and as vague, weak and meek as a character enacting a droll in some slapstick Bollywood flick.

Arrogant? Of all the human failings? Did he seriously think the people of Kheda, or anywhere else, would outvote Modi because he shares arrogance as a common trait with Hitler, arguably the biggest mass murderer of our times?

This obfuscation and refusal to call a spade precisely that – a spade – in torturously circuitous ways with the most ill-timed analogies was evident even in his much-talked-about interview with Arnab Goswami on Times Now news channel – his first in recent years.

Not any different was another detailed interview to PTI, the national news agency, done this week. Stating that the special investigation team’s clean chit to the Gujarat CM needs to be questioned, Gandhi said, “The specific allegation and evidence pointing to Mr Modi’s responsibility in the 2002 riots are yet to be adequately probed. Any talk of his having been given a clean chit may be politically expedient, but is far too premature. There are many unanswered questions. There is a lot more the country needs to know.”

And he leaves it at that – at least in the interview released to the media. Every sentence in this observation leads to multiple questions: a) what specific allegations and evidence? Who did not probe them “adequately”?

b) Why is the clean chit premature after so long? Did Gandhi himself, or his party, raise the issue before? If yes, at what level? And what happened to it?

c) What are the unanswered questions? Is anyone asking them? If no, why not? If yes, what has been the BJP’s response? Are the responses valid?

e) Why does the country not know even 12 years since the riots, 10 of them being administered by the Congress-led UPA?

The problem, as many even within the Congress admit off the record, is that the party vice-president has done precious little to take away from the prime minister’s silence on most issues for the bigger part of his tenure. This silence, as party spokesperson PC Chacko said recently, “proved costly” for the alliance.

Manmohan Singh, Chacko said, was “reluctant to interact with the media. Many of us often pleaded with him to meet the media at least once in a week or a month. But for some reasons he did not do so”.

He might as well have been talking about the party vice-president, whose silence for great lengths of time followed by sudden bouts of ambiguous statements has done them no better.