He seems compassionate, unlike a typical politician,” is how a woman voter described Rahul Gandhi to Mukul Sangma, the recently deposed chief minister of Meghalaya. Elections were on in the state and Rahul was campaigning. Despite Mukul’s failure to lasso in enough MLAs to reclaim his crown, the state has old, entrenched zones of Congress support—as the 21 seats it won showed. Old-time voters bring a unique comparative insight, shining the torch tangentially from their loyal ledge. The woman voter was a Congress supporter who has seen a few generations of Gandhis; meeting Rahul had left her with both a warm feeling and a worry—it was “as if he needed us, needed to connect, rather than the other way around”. In comparison, “his grandmother’s presence would inspire awe, as if all problems just evaporated. She had the will to swing things her way with her determination”.
With connectivity on the agenda, the impression is prevalent within some quarters that potential allies prefer to speak to Sonia Gandhi instead of Rahul, despite direct confirmations to the contrary by key figures in the non-BJP, non-Congress space. “I may be getting very old, but he has matured too,” said one leader, self-deprecatingly. No such issue exists, another feisty loyalist had told this writer a few seasons ago, pooh-poohing the thought of any such communication gap in politics.
But what provokes these comparisons? The answer is the overall context in which Rahul now finds himself—freshly in charge, creating a bit of buzz, bringing in the energy of structural changes like all new leaders do. The Congress plenary last week saw the party negotiate the power shift with practised finality: it was supposed to partially elect or fully nominate a new Congress Working Committee (CWC). Departing from the Sonia days, the CWC will now meet every three months, like it used to earlier. But its composition was left entirely to Rahul— a sign of his total ascendancy. The centre of gravity has shifted in a set of neatly choreographed moves, with Sonia moving to a key political role partly behind the scenes, and partly as a bridge for the UPA. The Family, contrary to speculations, acted with total cohesiveness. The Old Guard, barring one or two, have been accommodated.
The political reality outside is not as easily negotiable for Rahul: the party is facing an electoral famine. Despite last year’s hard-fought battle of Gujarat, recent losses have restored the general consensus that the Congress has lost the will to win an election. First there was the North-East washout. And then, even in the hurrah moment for the Opposition in the UP and Bihar bypolls, it found no consolation—both its candidates lost their deposits in Gorakhpur and Phulpur.
The ‘whatever-it-takes’ spirit of the Indira era is missing. The truth is that if the Grand Old Party (GOP) happens to fall short of the half-way mark in any Assembly poll, it does not have the ability to form the government, while the BJP can, with just one or two seats. The GOP has no shortage of deal-makers, but the old chutzpah is missing. ‘Auspicious’, in India is related to prosperity; the empty pockets of party treasurer Motilal Vora do not bring forth any sense of well-being. Yes, the search is on for a younger replacement; someone who can get some lifeblood flowing. But the Congress did not avail of the new electoral bond scheme which, it was convinced, is designed to track and harass its financiers and donors.
It is too early for a rounded RaGa appraisal, but some outline questions have already formed. Is the Congress under Rahul caught up in its long-term plans instead of dealing with the pressures of the present? Is it missing the knife-edge tactical vigour needed to win the little battles, so that it doesn’t haemorrhage from a thousand cuts? Gujarat was a good fight. Rahul stayed in the game, chose “the right team”, and displayed killer instincts. But the wipeout in the minority-dominated North-East has kept the sceptics in business. Is the new party prez prone to abdicating political space when he feels he can make little difference? Otherwise, why would he leave 11 states under one absentee general secretary (C P Joshi), including the crucial N-E states where the BJP had its field marshal and generals and signal corps—Amit Shah, Ram Madhav, Himanta Biswa Sarma and Sunil Deodhar—working 24x7 for two years?
People often make the mistake of judging the BJP only by its contentious political stances, not accounting for the serious action it can generate, always held aloft by optics around. Look at the Assam investor summit—the electrifying effect of Mukesh Ambani talking of creating lakhs of jobs with Jio in a depressed region. Smaller things also affect the mood. Central ministers Ravi Shankar Prasad and Prakash Javadekar visited schools and colleges in the region to help foster BPOs in towns like Jorhat, and the BJP regime in Assam backed actor John Abraham’s North-East football academy—all ideas with tremendous resonance across the region. Contrast these with an absentee C P Joshi, not even a Rajya Sabha MP, dependent on party funds to buy flight tickets, and setting foot in Tripura for barely three days.
Why this utter lack of political investment in the Congress? “We’re focusing on Karnataka, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, and Chhattisgarh,” young Assam leader Gaurav Gogoi admitted, candidly. Meghalaya got some attention after a former general secretary called up Rahul and told him of serious concerns about the BJP, “a scare about its Hindu identity politics”, and a fear that Mukul Sangma may not be able to hold it off. The young brigade close to Rahul—referred to as ‘Rahul Congress’ behind their backs—was convinced that Conrad Sangma, former Speaker P A Sangma’s son, would win single-handedly. So? “Well, Rahulji sees Conrad as a member of the extended Congress family,” says an aide.
Rahul has an unstressed take that makes light of Saffron’s spectacular growth with some double-edged wit. The full story offers a perfect screenshot of his attitude towards the state of play—disarming self-irony accompanied by quiet confidence and lack of distress: he evidently does not share the panic narratives everyone peddles about the Congress. He laughs at Amit Shah’s “uchhal kood” (elation) over the oft-repeated trope of a “Congress-mukt Bharat”, says the aide. Rahul had told a few young leaders, “The more BJP says mukt, the more they fill their party with Congressmen and women to win elections. They are all our people who’ve matured and fine-tuned their politics on the Congress platform, made a connect with the people using the Congress symbol and ideology…. Where are the deep roots of the RSS and its unshakeable ideology if they have to depend on us for political incubation and resource management?” One of the youngsters replied, joking they have enough Trojan horses now to “do a political coup”!
But the depletion of party resources is serious. Bengal CM Mamata Banerjee, who fits the description of a leader who honed her politics in the Congress, has a quotable quote on the art of political warfare: “A leader has to either cut with sharpness or overwhelm with weight.” The reason she’s exploring options for a National Front for 2019 that is obviously anti-Modi but not pro-Rahul. For the first time, the non-Congress Opposition is talking of coming together without the attendant talk of a likely role for the Congress—outside support or inside participation. Not quite the script the GOP wanted.
Rahul’s surname is both the USP and albatross around his neck. The Gandhi label gives his party high brand recall. There’s no part of India, no village or kasba, where the surname will not be recognised. On the flip side, it makes it easy for the BJP to use the overall fatigue and familiarity with the Congress to breed contempt. Rahul is being made to account for everything that may have gone wrong in 70 years before getting a chance to prove his credentials; every mistake a former PM may or may not have committed. “He’s not yet blamed for the failure of the Agra summit or the Kargil war, other than that he’s hauled up for everything—Nehru’s Kashmir policy, Indira’s bank nationalisation, Emergency... a hyperbolic TV anchor blamed him for 1984,” says a top Supreme Court lawyer and Rajya Sabha Congress MP.
Rahul is where he is today also because he’s a Gandhi, so it comes with the territory. From the time he watched a documentary about India on Discovery channel where an old lady in the boondocks of Odisha, on being asked who the PM of India was, had replied: Indira Gandhi. That was of course before the proliferation of mobile telephony (and the 2G scam), prime-time inquisitions and social media storms. In those pristine days, Rahul’s first yatras as an elected MP were to the interiors of India, a Bharat darshan of sorts, to see for himself the time-warp in which much of India lived.
What he discovered left him truly aghast—rampant disparity, starkly uneven growth and the fruits of liberalisation reaching only a few. This left strong traces on his political make-up which, over time was bolstered by the larger critical narrative about the rich getting richer, capital fleeing the country and the bourses instead of being ploughed back into the soil to create more holistic growth.
Soon, what liberalisers derisively called a ‘povertarian’ tilt was creating a wedge within the UPA, a difference of opinion on which way the economy should go: welfarism or an aggressive manufacturing policy, SEZs and FDI in multi-brand retail. Whether Rahul shared the instincts of his mother on these or was instrumental in her developing it, his views were not just a result of the long addas he had shared with Sitaram Yechury at the latter’s residence or his evening visits to Pranab Mukherjee, but of what he had seen in the hinterland of Odisha, Bihar, Madhya Pradesh and his own backyard in UP. Intense discussions on the impact of liberalisation ensued within the Congress, with the likes of Jairam Ramesh and A K Antony, even to some extent Sonia, who backed Rahul’s angry questioning of the system whether the benefits of an open economy were being cornered by big business, which didn’t even have a Rockefeller- or a Ford-like character, with a sense of social responsibility.
When the UPA government was not quite listening, Rahul would hold forth before his core team. Much of how he tried to develop MSMEs and create digitally enabled networks of women’s self-help groups, or the idea of a cycle manufacturing unit were part of what he felt India needs: micro-level, area-specific planning to make the rural economy self-sustaining and forward-looking. “He feels strongly that it’s the MP’s job to make people aware of their rights and entitlements, help them plan, get them the benefits of education, help connect the varied existing skills to jobs through digital economic networks and not to build roads or dig borewells in his/her constituency—that’s for the state government and the Centre to do,” a former Rahul aide shares. Despite that, he did get hands-on in Amethi to prove a point.
As a place that tested his budding vision, and that of his father and mother before him, it is a good place to look. Going by Smriti Irani’s harangue, “nothing has been done, nothing has moved, the youth are disillusioned”. However, older voters who have seen Amethi before Rajiv Gandhi became their MP speak about the “fallow land… poora banjar zamin tha”. One of the first things Rajiv did was tour the entire constituency and get experts to advise on making the land verdant and productive. “People have not forgotten all that... political opponents can and will criticise, but that won’t make Rahul shift out of Amethi to anywhere else”, whether in UP or Karnataka, says the aide. “He’s totally adamant on this...” the aide adds.
A close-up of Amethi’s electoral map is revealing. The Samajwadi Party holds a few of the Assembly seats. The BJP has made some micro inroads at the local body level, but a Lok Sabha poll’s dynamics is seen differently from an Assembly perspective. If a non-BJP front does come up, the safety net should extend to this prestige seat. And yes, Rahul did hold his own against the Modi wave in 2014. So at a time when the BJP is a tad weary, keeping Amethi may not be that tough.
The Amethi model, which is a more elaborate, evolved version focusing on micro-economic development, MSMEs, connecting traditional Indian skills to digital networks, came up at Rahul’s National University of Singapore interaction—a model decidedly more Gandhian than the macro-economic vision of a Manmohan Singh or P Chidambaram. But its less-than-fashionable status meant Rahul had to face unkind jibes about the “Nehru-Gandhi family-led economic stagnation”—the Hindu rate of growth. Yet, there’s no doubting his belief that a government’s primary focus has to be on those who need hand-holding.
This is one reason why K Raju, one of Rahul’s close aides who quit the IAS to become a Congressman, is convinced Rahul will induct Dalits, OBCs, women and minorities in all party structures, from the booth-level to the CWC. “He feels the structure must reflect the party Constitution. He’s also determined to revive front organisations like the Seva Dal, with ideological grooming, debate and discussion at all levels,” says Raju, himself a Dalit from Andhra Pradesh.
The last time such doubts on reforms arose led to decisions such as retrospective taxation, on which the BJP, then in the opposition got its first chance to work on the fault-lines within the UPA. Arun Jaitley, then LoP, cornered Jaipal Reddy at a private wedding and mockingly asked: “Who is in charge of the government, Jaipalji?” That, Jaipal says, was the beginning of the ‘diarchy’ allegation. “In reality, a party has a say, and should have a say, in policy-making because the mandate is won by it,” adds the former UPA Cabinet minister. But this was projected as a subversion.
The subtle differences between party and government, between welfarism and market, where Rahul was seen to be firmly on one side, became a point of vulnerability. A heavyweight ally even instigated a campaign through a much-respected agriculturist to try and scuttle the Food Security Bill. But the high command, Rahul included, was determined to push it through. The bill was meant to offset the fallout of rising prices and scam allegations. But neither was there time for a proper rollout, nor were people really interested anymore. By then, Narendra Modi’s job-driven growth campaign had seized the popular imagination.
The redux was felt in Tripura this time, says Congress MP Sushmita Dev. A tired debate failing against what seemed like an energetic vision. “Sitting in Silchar, my constituency bordering Tripura, I saw 250 youth riding brand-new motorcycles with BJP flags on them. I knew it was over for us... a few days ago, our strongest Congress candidate had switched over. We did not abdicate. It simply wasn’t our time. The BJP’s ‘Chalo paltai’ had caught on. Neither the Left nor we could match their money power.”
The party had begun to fumble way back in 2012-14 itself, when reports on presumptive losses were being tabled in Parliament, and the Congress did not defend the government as vigorously as expected. It was left to Kapil Sibal to float his ‘zero loss’ theory. The party only swung in to insulate Rahul from the corruption taint. His relations with Manmohan were strained to the extent that the then PM was ready to resign over public humiliation by Rahul Gandhi—the famous ordinance tearing.
It took Modi’s “disastrous” demonetisation policy to bring Rahul close to Manmohan and later Chidambaram—though he and fellow young Turk Akhilesh Yadav could do precious little in UP despite DeMo. DeMo’s scorched-earth effects showed him how MMS and PC were better macro-economic managers. Now, with several Congress leaders under the agencies’ scanner, a common existential purpose has helped paper over dissent and infighting. Jyotiraditya Scindia and Kamal Nath have patched up in MP (though no one knows who’ll be projected CM). In Rajasthan, even if Sachin Pilot and Ashok Gehlot have not settled into bonhomie, they at least do not have a Digvijaya Singh in the mix. Speaking of whom, the former mentor has little or no access now to the Congress president, in whose making he had a big hand. Once expected to be his political secretary, the irony is that Rahul has decided to not fill that all-powerful post. He would rather have a string of general secretaries with their ears to the ground, backed by an ideologically driven rank and file. Will it help Congress in the states or in 2019? Unless it does, Sam Pitroda won’t get his Rajya Sabha seat.
The Congress has, by definition, a dual nature. It was born as a ‘big tent’ for all strands. The word ‘congress’ itself implies a kind of conversation between contrasting ideas. On the other hand, it has over the decades become an organism unto itself with definite traits—a centrist, progressive, statist ideology, with a remote but live link to Gandhian humanism. The BJP has tremendous behavioural range. Has it usurped the Congress’s big tent? Perhaps only for tactical purposes—at its core it remains proudly right-wing, socially and politically. One of Rahul’s biggest challenges will be to wrest back that central hall of dialogue.