Battlelines were drawn. And a very loaded allegory was evoked—that of a dharm yuddh, no less. Workers were told that, in this moral war, the party resides in them and not in the leaders. That the stage has been emptied of the aging warriors of the past for them to fill it with new vigour. An Obamaesque slogan—‘Change is Now’—has been coined for the purpose. But to Rahul Gandhi’s Arjuna, there is no Krishna in sight.The one who would spell out the ideological, philosophical perspective to war. Rahul trained his gun, or should we call it astra, directly at Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Navjot Sidhu (yes, he’s batting on this side these days) had already set the rhetorical pitch for ‘Rahul bhaiya’ unfurling the tricolour at Red Fort—and received massive applause for the suggestion.
Rahul himself, through an anecdote, underlined he was not averse to becoming the prime minister. His pincer attack was not an abstraction, it was personalised. It touched upon crony capitalism, upon turning yoga into sustaining PR at a time of farmer suicides, upon a string of broken promises. As for what he wanted for India, his own “vision”—taking on China by linking MSMEs and skilled labour to the digital platform and better financial support and market linkages to farm products—it was lost in the length and bitterness of the exposition.
What stood out was his reiteration of binaries. Of what made the Congress different from the BJP. No clear policy matrix. It was more or less left to the old warriors, the Ghulam Nabi Azads, Anand Sharmas and Chidambarams, to peddle the Congress as the only party capable of governance and policy-making. To assert, essentially: “We have done it before and we can do it again”. Sonia Gandhi made the subtle point that Indira Gandhi too had to do it—turn around the party from a bad patch; and, what’s more, despite her own initial unwillingness to join politics, she too did it. That once you play the game, there will always be a way to end electoral droughts.