Rahul plays ‘Good samaritan’

INDIA: India’s political hopeful Rahul Gandhi played “Good Samaritan” on Tuesday, rushing an injured teenage boy to hospital while out campaigning, a report said.

Gandhi, who is spearheading the national ruling Congress party’s campaign in elections in India’s most populous state of Uttar Pradesh, spotted the teenager bleeding profusely along a roadside, the Press Trust of India reported.

The MP, scion of the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty which has given India three premiers, told his motorcade to stop and helped to lift the teenager into his own car.

The car sped the boy to a nearby hospital in Gandhi’s sprawling federal constituency of Amethi and the politician spent some time waiting for news on his condition, the news agency said.

The boy, Sushil Kumar, had been stabbed in the stomach but is now out of danger.

It was unclear how the teenager had been attacked but Gandhi had told authorities to seek to arrest the culprits, the agency said.

Uttar Pradesh is known as one of India’s most lawless states.

“I was desperately waiting for some help to take us to the hospital. Rahul saw us and stopped. He asked me what had happened and immediately picked up my son and took him in his car,” said Sushil’s mother Devkula.

“Only Rahul could do something like this,” she said, according to the news agency. Gandhi is fighting an uphill battle to improve Congress’s performance in the state where it has almost been wiped out.

No one expects the 37-year-old novice politician to turn around the party’s fortunes in the Hindi-speaking heartland where the marathon seven-stage election winds up in May..

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has projected him as the state’s future leader, telling a rally “he is sweating it out for you” to create a “new Uttar Pradesh,” and many Congress members tout him as a future prime minister.

New Delhi, Wednesday, AFP.