Senior Congress leader Digvijaya Singh has been one of the greatest political survivors of all time. An Arjun Singh acolyte when he first became chief minister of Madhya Pradesh, he survived a split in the Congress when Singh rebelled against the then prime minister P V Narasimha Rao and continued to be CM, performing a balancing act between Singh and Rao.
He lost Madhya Pradesh to the BJP during every parliamentary election (three) between 1996 and 1999 and yet remained the CM until being finally dislodged in 2003. During that time, his political obituary was written many a time, but even as he bounced back each time he warned against writing the political obituary of any leader unless you had to write a real obituary of the person—a politician is never dead, until he is really dead. So do not celebrate his terahnvi (13th day ceremony) until you really have to celebrate that terahnvi, he had said.
I was always reminded of his political philosophy when Congress President Rahul Gandhi was dismissed by political rivals as inconsequential. BJP leader Subramanian Swamy began labelling him a “buddhu” (dumb) in his references to Rahul and it was not long before right-wing social media trolls had taken over and given him currency as “Pappu”.
What surprised me was that what is famously known as the Lutyens media of Delhi perpetrated the myth until even Congressmen across the country began to believe in the legend of the country bumpkin. Very few Congress workers even spotted that Rahul could have been ahead of everybody else—like when he had warned about a drug menace in Punjab that was eating into its youth. He was then crucified for being so spaced out himself that he only saw drugs in every corner. When he spoke of escape velocity needed to pull people out of poverty, very few Indians even knew or bothered to find out that “escape velocity” was the current term used by Western economists in the very context of alleviating world hunger and poverty.
Not until the Gujarat elections in December 2017 when the BJP sunk below the three-digit mark in the Assembly, giving a fright to PM Narendra Modi and BJP President Amit Shah in their home state, did anyone even begin to look at Rahul with some degree of awe and respect.
But much before that Rahul, on a visit to Mumbai, had proved he could be a chip of the old block (his grandmother Indira Gandhi) when he left his party leaders, awaiting him by helicopter at a Mumbai suburb, stranded, and reached the venue of a meeting by a suburban train.
The Shiv Sena then had been agitating against North Indians and had threatened to prevent Rahul from putting even a foot in Mumbai. Rahul not only did that but like every other commuter bought tickets at the counter, boarded a train on the western line, changed trains at the arterial Dadar station, walked across the foot overbridge to the Central line and reached Ghatkopar, his venue, even as the then Maharashtra Chief Minister Ashok Chavan and the local police were palpitating about his safety.
That incident reminded many of Indira Gandhi’s train ride in Tamil Nadu at the height of the anti-Hindi agitation as well as her elephant ride in Belchi in Bihar when she was out of power to reach a basti of Dalits through squelchy territory.
That spark seemed to have gone missing from Rahul in the intervening years but there were some dogged journalists like Kumar Ketkar (now a Congress Rajya Sabha MP) who continued to hope and believe he would be a late bloomer like his grandmother, who was dismissed as a goongi gudiya (dumb doll) by her rivals at their own peril.
Those prophecies—that of Singh and Ketkar—finally seem to have come true after the elections to the three Hindi heartland states of Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan where the Congress was locked in direct and bitter fights with the BJP and Rahul the sole combatant against the formidable Modi-Shah duo. The faction fights within the Congress in Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh brought down the party’s victory margins in the two states. But where there was no leadership at all, in Chhattisgarh, and therefore hardly any factions, the Congress won by such a huge margin that devastated not just the BJP but stunned most of the Congress leadership itself.
Before the results to these polls, an RSS ideologue from Nagpur had told me gleefully that they had Rahul exactly where they wanted him—in a one-to-one fight with Modi wherein he could not hope to best the PM and could only be the loser. Now there is a certain amount of dismay among those ideologues as most data show that Rahul has closed much of the gap between him and Modi. While the gap was 56 per cent soon after the 2017 elections to the Uttar Pradesh Assembly (where neither the Congress nor Rahul were really in the reckoning), the gap has narrowed down, according to surveys by both C-Voter and Lokniti Centre for Study of Developing Societies (to
10 per cent in the latter). However, despite drubbings in Telangana and Kerala, Rahul’s popularity has soared more in the South than in the North, and he has much catching up to do in the West and the East.
Whatever the outcome of the 2019 polls, Rahul and the Congress are now in the reckoning and rivals can dismiss them, as they did Indira, only at their own peril.
Sujata Anandan
Senior journalist and political commentator
Email: sujata.anandan@gmail.com