On the first Sunday of November, the road from Minto Road to Delhi’s Ramlila Maidan vanished beneath flags. Beside the Congress tricolour fluttered the red of the communists, the green of the Samajwadi Party, and the lantern of the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD), a census of anti-government India in cloth. At the head of the procession, standing in an open jeep in his trademark white T-shirt, rode Rahul Gandhi. Behind him came the regional chieftains who had spent the better part of a decade declining to call him their leader: Mamata Banerjee, Akhilesh Yadav, Tejashwi Yadav, Farooq Abdullah, Mehbooba Mufti, and assorted grandees of the Left. His sister, Priyanka, rode with them rather than ahead of them; his mother, Sonia, once the most powerful person in India, waited at the venue. At one point, cameras caught Mr Gandhi handing Mr Yadav a chocolate. It was the gesture of a host, not a supplicant.
The crowd’s placards read “Vote Bachao, Desh Bachao” (“Save the vote, save the country”). Their target was less Narendra Modi, the Prime Minister, than Gyanesh Kumar, the Chief Election Commissioner, whose nationwide revision of the electoral rolls has given the Opposition its most potent grievance in years. Mr Gandhi called the 2024 general election stolen and promised to see Mr Kumar jailed for treason. Amit Shah, the Home Minister, had recently declared that Mr Modi was not going anywhere. Mr Gandhi agreed, after a fashion: the Prime Minister, he said, would not be allowed to escape.
It was theatre, but effective theatre: the largest Opposition rally in the capital in the last 10 years. It also revived a question that has hung over Indian politics for two decades. Can a dynast become a leader of the people in his own right?
The Family Firm
For most of India’s independent history, Congress was less a party than a family house with an enormous waiting room. Jawaharlal Nehru ran the country for 17 years. His daughter, Indira, split the party twice and, when the old guard resisted, built a new one around herself: Congress (I), for Indira. Her son Rajiv rode a wave of grief after her assassination to 414 seats in 1984, a record no one has matched.
After Rajiv’s murder in 1991, his widow, Sonia, declined the crown. The party muddled on under PV Narasimha Rao and then Sitaram Kesri, until Mr Kesri was ousted in 1998 in a manner that still makes veterans wince and Mrs Gandhi took over. She became the longest-serving president in the party’s 140-year history, from 1998 to 2017, and returned as interim chief from 2019 to 2022. In 2004, she turned down the prime ministership in favour of Manmohan Singh, creating an awkward arrangement: the prime minister sat in South Block, but power resided at her home at 10 Janpath.
Today, Mallikarjun Kharge is the first non-Gandhi to lead the party in a quarter of a century. Nobody in Delhi is confused about where its compass points. The cut-outs outside Ramlila Maidan showed Mr Gandhi, his sister, and Mr Kharge, in descending order of size.
The Prince of Amethi
Mr Gandhi’s story begins in 2004, when, aged 33 and armed with a Cambridge MPhil and a stint at a London consultancy, he stood for the family seat of Amethi and won by nearly 3,00,000 votes. Congress surprised everyone by returning to power, and he entered Parliament as Prime Minister-in-waiting, though without a date.
He declined ministerial office in both governments led by Congress’s United Progressive Alliance (UPA), preferring in 2007 to run the party’s youth and student wings, where he introduced internal elections and talent hunts. That was a reformer’s experiment in a party built on patronage. When Congress rose to 206 seats in 2009, including 21 in Uttar Pradesh, he took much of the credit. He spent nights in Dalit homes in Bundelkhand, backed tribal villagers at Niyamgiri against a mining giant, and rode pillion on a motorbike to Bhatta-Parsaul to support farmers resisting land acquisition. His office became a rival power centre with grievances against the very government his mother had built.
The defining moment came in September 2013. The Cabinet had approved an ordinance shielding convicted legislators from immediate disqualification, in defiance of the Supreme Court. Mr Gandhi walked into a party press conference, called it “complete nonsense” and said it should be torn up. Manmohan Singh was in Washington; within days, the government withdrew it. Admirers saw a conscience at work. Critics saw a man with no government job humiliating his Prime Minister. Both were right. The episode set a pattern: Mr Gandhi is most alive in a fight, even when the enemy is his own side. Months earlier, on being made the party’s vice-president, he had recalled his mother weeping in his room. Power, she told him, was poison.
The Descent
Then came Mr Modi. In 2014, with Mr Gandhi as the face of its campaign, Congress fell from 206 seats to 44, its worst result since Independence. A rambling television interview had already handed his opponents a caricature; the Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) social-media machine supplied the nickname “Pappu”, a clueless overgrown boy. It stuck.
A brief recovery followed. Mr Gandhi became party president in December 2017, and a year later Congress won Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, and Chhattisgarh. His slogan, “Chowkidar chor hai” (“The watchman is a thief”), mocked Mr Modi’s self-description as the nation’s guardian against graft, over the purchase of Rafale fighter jets. It filled rally grounds but not ballot boxes. In 2019, Congress won just 52 seats. Mr Gandhi lost Amethi to the BJP’s Smriti Irani and resigned as president with a four-page letter rebuking colleagues who had failed to stand by him.
An exodus followed, much of it from his own generation. Jyotiraditya Scindia left in 2020, toppling Congress’ government in Madhya Pradesh on his way out. Jitin Prasada, RPN Singh, Hardik Patel, Milind Deora, and Ashok Chavan, once hailed as “Team Rahul”, joined the BJP. Kapil Sibal walked out; Amarinder Singh was pushed and duly jumped. In 2022, Ghulam Nabi Azad left with a scorching letter accusing Mr Gandhi of running the party through a coterie. The “G-23”, senior dissenters who had asked for a visible, full-time president, were treated as traitors. The man who preached democracy within the party could not persuade its ablest managers to stay in it.
The Walker
The revival began on foot. In September 2022, Mr Gandhi set out from Kanyakumari on the Bharat Jodo Yatra (“Unite India march”). By the time he reached a snowbound Srinagar in January 2023, he had walked some 4,080 km through 12 states and two Union Territories in about 136 days. His beard grew wild, and the T-shirt he wore through Delhi’s winter became a uniform his opponents struggled to ridicule. A 6,700 km march from Manipur to Mumbai followed in 2024, then a 1,300 km tour of Bihar in August 2025. Together the marches cover some 12,000 km. They gave Mr Gandhi something his surname could not: a reputation for endurance.
The establishment hit back. In March 2023, a court in Surat convicted him of criminal defamation over a 2019 jibe about Mr Modi’s surname. He was expelled from the Lok Sabha, and evicted from his official bungalow. The Supreme Court stayed the conviction that August, and he returned to the house with a martyr’s glow. In the 2024 election, Congress almost doubled its tally to 99 seats, while the BJP slipped to 240 and lost its majority. Mr Gandhi won Raebareli by nearly 4,00,000 votes, and also Wayanad, which he gave up to his sister. In June 2024, he became Leader of the Opposition, with Cabinet rank and a seat on the panels that choose the heads of the Central Bureau of Investigation, the Election Commission and the anti-corruption ombudsman. The post had been vacant for a decade.
Yet the recovery is partial. Congress remains 46 seats short of the 145 that carried it to power in 2004. When Mr Gandhi entered Parliament, the party had 11 chief ministers; today it has four, in Himachal Pradesh, Karnataka, Kerala, and Telangana. The BJP has 17.
His new office gave him a pulpit, and the electoral-roll revision a cause. Through 2025, he staged elaborate presentations alleging “vote chori” (vote theft) in Maharashtra, Haryana, and Karnataka, under the slogan “Vote chor, gaddi chhod” (“Vote thief, give up the throne”). Bihar’s voters were unmoved. In November 2025, the BJP-led alliance took 202 of 243 seats; Congress won six of the 61 it contested. The BJP, which keeps count, called it Mr Gandhi’s 95th defeat. The 2026 state elections were mixed. A Congress-led front took Kerala from the Communists, installing VD Satheesan as Chief Minister. But the BJP captured West Bengal, routing Ms Banerjee’s Trinamool Congress and leaving Congress with two seats. Assam stayed with the BJP, and in Tamil Nadu actor Vijay’s TVK broke the Dravidian parties’ duopoly. Last week, Congress drew a blank in 28 legislative-council seats decided by paper ballot, which was awkward for a party that blames tampered machines and rolls.
Undaunted, Mr Gandhi has turned to the young. His “Chhatron Ki Goonj” (“Voice of Students”) tour took him to Pune, Kota, Dehradun, Prayagraj, Indore, and Chennai to rail against leaked exam papers, rising fees, and joblessness. At Ramlila Maidan, a student leader shared the stage with the veterans, a sign that Mr Gandhi is hunting for supporters beyond his party’s ageing base.
Pappu or Prime Minister?
Few Indian politicians attract such violently opposed descriptions. In Parliament in July 2024, Mr Modi called him “balak buddhi”, a man with a child’s mind, and borrowed a film line, “Tumse na ho payega” (“You just can’t pull it off”). On the stump he prefers “shehzada”, the prince. Mr Shah’s “Rahul baba” is a rally staple. A BJP leader in Karnataka calls him the party’s jinx, and JP Nadda, the BJP’s former president, has gloated over Congress’s zero in the council polls.
The praise comes mostly from allies who once kept him at arm’s length. MK Stalin, of Tamil Nadu’s DMK, was the first to propose him as the Opposition’s prime-ministerial face, in 2018. In August 2025, Tejashwi Yadav told a crowd in Bihar that the alliance would make Mr Gandhi Prime Minister after the next election. Shashi Tharoor, no family courtier, called him the star of the 2024 revival. And Ms Banerjee, who only two years ago offered to lead the Opposition herself, now drives behind his jeep. The truth lies somewhere between: a conscience and a serial loser, a little of both.
Rebel Without a Machine
Mr Gandhi is, above all, a rebel. Indira bent institutions; Rajiv managed them; her grandson attacks the system itself. In 2013, his target was his own government, in 2019 his own party’s old guard, and now the Election Commission, which he accuses of serving the government. He seems most comfortable without the burdens of office and its compromises. He disarms as often as he attacks. In 2018, he crossed the floor of the Lok Sabha to hug a startled Mr Modi, then winked at a colleague: endearing and gauche at once, and quintessentially Rahul. He practises aikido, preaches a “mohabbat ki dukaan” (shop of love) and avoids the politics of hatred. Opponents call this naivety; admirers call it decency. He has also learned. The faltering interviewee of 2014 is now a sharp parliamentarian and a combative street speaker. The trouble is that his strengths are personal and his weaknesses organisational.
Indian leaders are remembered by a phrase. Indira had “Garibi Hatao” (“Abolish poverty”); Rajiv promised to carry India into the 21st century; Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s “India Shining” failed, but is not forgotten. Mr Modi has moved from “Achhe Din” (“Good days”) to “Modi ki guarantee”. Mr Gandhi has coined slogans aplenty: “suit-boot ki sarkar” (government in suits), “chowkidar chor hai”, “jitni abadi, utna haq” (rights in proportion to population), a copy of the Constitution waved like scripture in 2024, and now “vote chor, gaddi chhod”. Each caught a mood; none built a majority. His most substantive idea, the NYAY scheme of 2019, promising Rs 72,000 ($810) a year to India’s poorest families, was drowned out by his own noise about Rafale.
A coherent creed does exist. Mr Gandhi opposes the concentration of wealth in “two or three” hands, wants a caste census and social justice, defends federalism and independent institutions, and offers a gentle, plural Hinduism against the BJP’s muscular Hindutva. What holds him back is not ideology but delivery. He tells voters what is being stolen from them, not what he will build for them. Nor has he remade his party. Indira, thwarted, built a new Congress; Rajiv imported technocrats. Mr Gandhi’s youth wing has withered and “Team Rahul” has mostly defected. His 2025 drive to empower district chiefs remains a work in progress while feuds smoulder in Rajasthan, Karnataka, Punjab, and Haryana.
The Challenger
At 56, Mr Gandhi is no longer “Pappu”. He has outlasted the ridicule, walked the length of the republic, survived disqualification and, as of November 1, become the undisputed standard-bearer of a fractious opposition. His detractors spent a decade underestimating him. But acceptance is not authority, and authority is not power. Mr Modi still commands a devoted following and a disciplined, election-hungry party. Congress governs four states and has never beaten Mr Modi in a straight national contest.
Mr Modi rests on four pillars: a name that has become a brand, a charisma that holds crowds, an idea of India his followers believe in almost religiously, and a governing record he can parade from Gujarat to Delhi. Above all, he has a colour. Saffron is not merely the hue of his party’s flag, but a cultural, civilisational and political identity that tells voters who he is and where he is going. Mr Gandhi is still defined by what he opposes: Mr Modi, crony capitalism, vote theft, Hindutva. The politics of negation, however righteous, has never toppled an Indian colossus.
He needs a colour of his own, a positive promise that voters can take home to the dinner table, and a disciplined party to deliver it. His surname won him a seat at the front of the jeep; only voters can hand him the keys. State elections in 2027 and the general election in 2029 will show whether he has found them. Until then, he remains what he has been for most of his career: the most formidable challenger of his age, and still only a challenger.