Rahul hugged him publicly to demonstrate — or rather, to ridicule — Prime Minister Narendra Modi's foreign policy: the practice of hugging world leaders and calling them friends.

Sandeep clasped and enfolded him, as if was waiting for this moment for years, in the true tradition of sycophancy in the Congress  party. He didn't stop at this, walked back across the stage to Rahul and said in Hindi, "Meloni samajh ke toh nahin pakda" — roughly, "did you hug me thinking I was Meloni."

Sandeep comes from a respectable lineage, which is why he has lasted so long in the party. Rahul, to his credit, has set a low benchmark for staying in politics — he keeps trying while endlessly failing. And lately, in the way the Congress leadership has been behaving, there isn't much to choose between it and the BJP.

Sandeep worked briefly in the development sector in Madhya Pradesh before joining politics, and won the East Delhi Lok Sabha seat twice — in 2004 and 2009 — while his mother, Sheila Dikshit, was chief minister of Delhi. Very convenient. Since then — and it's hardly fair to blame him for this — the Congress party hasn't won a single seat from Delhi, in either the Lok Sabha or the Delhi Assembly.

Arvind Kejriwal became Sheila Dikshit's political nemesis after her fifteen years as chief minister of Delhi. Pawan Khera — whom Sonia Gandhi remembers as "safed balwala" — was Sheila's man Friday, and was eventually inducted into the Rajya Sabha. He has done much better than Sandeep: the true inheritor of Sheila’s legacy, without even being part of the family.

This nincompoop Sandeep, educated at the elite St Stephen's College, has never achieved anything on his own — his present is still fuelled by the past, and his sole claim to fame is proximity to the Gandhis. So he was the happiest man in the Congress party, because he happened to be in the right place at the right time — hugged by Rahul. I couldn’t help but recollecting, in another brilliant move to belittle the prime minister, Rahul had walked across the well of the Lok Sabha to hug Modi. Modi, however, was not so forthcoming.

Sandeep contested the last Delhi Assembly election against Kejriwal from the New Delhi seat on a Congress ticket. The BJP's Parvesh Verma —also the son of a former Delhi chief minister, Sahib Singh Verma — won. Sandeep described his own defeat alone with Kejriwal as "revenge" for his mother's losses; Sheila had lost the same seat to Kejriwal. To him it was a great achievement. Though someone should explain to him that revenge means forcing a win, not merely facilitating Kejriwal’s defeat — especially when doing so hands the seat to the BJP. Such a bleak way to look at things.

And now we see his true colours: a public embarrassment. In his moment of glory, he came across as a crude misogynist — quite a way to repay his mother, arguably one of the most respected women chief ministers the country has had.