Varun Gandhi’s recent troubles need to be understood in their proper context. That context is that he is what an earlier generation of critics used to call an Indo-Anglian writer, a poet. In 2000, he wrote a book of poems with the subtle and original title, The Otherness of Self, illustrated, among others, by Anjolie Ela Menon and Manjit Bawa. Asked about his debut, Varun Gandhi said that he wrote poetry “[b]ecause it is so precise and illustrates the strength of language”. To contrast this writerly sentiment with the thigh-slapping crudeness of his election speeches would be a cheap shot because there’s no real contradiction here. Feroze Varun Gandhi reserves his finer feelings for English verse; in the course of an election campaign, he speaks the robust vernacular prose in which Indian politics is done.

The speeches that got Varun Gandhi censured by the Election Commission and imprisoned by the law could only have been made by an anglophone Indian. In these speeches, all delivered in Hindi, he promised to deal summarily with troublesome minorities. He spoke of Muslim candidates with fearsome names like Karimullah and Mazharullah, he encouraged non-Hindus to migrate to Pakistan, he compared Muslim candidates to Osama bin Laden, he spoke of a “mad Sikh” candidate who he claimed was fighting the election as an agent of a Muslim and described the Hindus who supported him as traitors to the Hindu community. He described Muslims with a pejorative term that can’t be reprinted in a family newspaper.

Varun Gandhi has two sets of answers for his critics. On the record he claims that he didn’t make those statements. Off the record, the justification for these remarks is that he said what he did because he wanted to reassure the Hindus of his constituency in Pilibhit, who, according to him, were living in a state of fear. He wanted to leach this fear of Muslim terror out of them and consequently went into rhetorical overdrive because that’s the idiom that works in Indian politics.

This is the sort of justification that’s only available to the English-speaking Indian politician. You’re accountable for what you say in English because English is the language of seriousness and modernity. Anything you say in the vernacular can’t be held against you because the point of using an Indian language (such as the Hindi that Varun Gandhi deployed in Pilibhit) is to establish an ‘emotional’ connection. In this view Hindi becomes the language of political stagecraft, of stylized rhetorical excess and the politician temporarily becomes Prithviraj Kapoor. And just as no sophisticated film-goer would expect realism from a Prithviraj Kapoor film, no sophisticated English-speaking Indian ought to expect a political speech in Hindi to be temperate or reasoned.

Temperate and reasoned is for interviews in English. In his interview on Hard Talk in 2007, Varun Gandhi is everything that an anglophone would expect a fellow English-speaker to be. He is poised, plausible, fluent and he describes his politics as “relevant”, “moderate”, even “progressive”. To look at his performance in that interview (forgetting, for a moment, the content of what he said) is to see an ambitious young politician handling Stephen Sackur’s provocations with unruffled calm.

In Varun Gandhi’s mind, English-speaking India is a kind of off-shore tax haven, a place removed from the rowdy, no-holds-barred reality of the rest of the country. Anglophones, in this view, don’t live in the real India but in a sanitized mall. Now Varun shops in the same mall, but his justification is that he has to step outside it to do the real-world work of politics. In the mall we can all celebrate liberalism and secularism, but these ideas have no traction in Bharat-that-is-India. In that world, Varun Gandhi’s apologists would have us believe, the only legal tender, the only political currency is the polarizing rhetoric of caste and community.

It’s a rhetoric that both mother and son do very well. After Varun Gandhi’s arrest in Pilibhit, Maneka Gandhi accused a Muslim policeman of instigating violence at the time of the arrest. Even by the non-exacting standards of Indian electoral politics, this was a nakedly inflammatory allegation, but for Maneka and Varun Gandhi there is a Chinese wall between the metropolitan India that they live in and the provincial world in which they campaign, so nothing they say in the latter can be allowed to disturb their persona in the former.

When her son was jailed under the National Security Act, Maneka Gandhi told the press that using the NSA against him was dangerous and disproportionate because it was a law meant to secure the country against grave offences, not the sort of thing Varun Gandhi had done. What she was implying was that nothing her son said in Hindi could be taken to constitute a grave threat to communal harmony, or the security of the nation because political rhetoric in Hindi was inherently more melodramatic than rhetoric in English, just as Hindi films were made in a different register from English films.

There’s a reason why Varun Gandhi represents a new low in electoral politics. Someone who is mainly Gujarati-speaking or Hindi-speaking knows, in a general way, that he is responsible for what he says in that language. This is not to say that the Hindi-speaking politician won’t say vile things about Muslims: he might but he will say them knowing that his utterances will come to define him because that’s the language in which he lives. But Hindi, for Varun Gandhi, is a transactional language, something he does political business in. Since he sees electoral politics as a jungly world where he has to growl and snarl to find traction amongst the unwashed and the low-born, he will say things that even Narendra Modi might hesitate to say in front of the television cameras because Varun lives in English and sees his Hindi-speaking political life as a series of necessary off-stage noises.

When this Chinese wall between political life in the vernacular and metropolitan life in English is breached by some perverse news channel, Varun Gandhi does the logical thing: he denies it ever happened. He claims that the footage has been doctored and when the Election Commission rejects his claim, he complains that the Election Commission is picking on him. And, in an odd way, he’s right. His point is that the media and the Election Commission can’t hold him responsible for the things he says when he goes native, because in the jungle, the rules are different. If anything he says there is reported in English it will necessarily be torn out of context or lost in translation.

This might strike us as cynical and self-serving, even sinister, and it is all of these, but what should worry us is that Varun Gandhi and his ilk believe their justificatory arguments. These apologias for vileness will become more commonplace as affluent anglophones enter politics in greater numbers: Varun Gandhi is what you get when the babalog turn feral.