Rahul Gandhi: His four major flaws

Politics is a cruel business. As news of the Congress debacle spread, the clamour for Rahul Gandhi becoming Prime Minister died down. No longer was there any pressure on the reluctant prince to replace the apolitical and visibly tired Manmohan Singh.

Sister Priyanka Gandhi nervously waited in the shadows at 10 Janpath as her brother owned up his responsibility before an unforgiving media.

All in all, the Congress defence of Rahul, mounted by an unembarrassed Digivijay Singh, lacked conviction. It was as though the party was suddenly at a loss, not knowing how to keep the Rahul-mania alive. After all, in the Congress culture and in its atmosphere of competitive sycophancy, there was no question of evaluating the performance of dynasts.

But nobody knows more than Rahul Gandhi what it is to be the inheritor of a complex political legacy. He has made Uttar Pradesh his office, his workstation. And it is here that he is learning his political lessons the hard way. That explains the first of his four major flaws. It looks as though he has over-identified his profession with his passion. Uttar Pradesh overwhelms his emotional universe. Occasionally, he needs to move away from the province and focus elsewhere.

From the beginning, Rahul has been making a monumental effort to recreate the ancient Congress bastion of Uttar Pradesh. The logic is simple. If one doesn’t conquer India’s largest province, one doesn’t have a clear edge in the formation of the union government. He has been trying to revive that old magic formula whereby Brahmins, Muslims and Dalits will vote together for the Congress. In the 2009 parliamentary polls, he created a ripple by winning more than a fourth of the seats but, looking back, that performance was more of a fluke with individual candidates delivering on their own without organisational backing.

It is indeed heartening to see that Rahul has finally outgrown his obsession with the Gandhi pocket-boroughs of Rae Bareli and Amethi. But if he is to be projected as a national leader, he can’t go on targeting Uttar Pradesh alone. His ambition must embrace the myriad political cultures in other parts of the country. True, he discovered Kalavati in Maharashtra but he has always given the impression that his soul resides in the sacred workplace of his forebears, in the squalor of Uttar Pradesh.

The young Gandhi’s second flaw is his apparent political innocence which remains even after several years of active politics. He believes that mass contact through speeches delivered from sanitised podiums can take him closer to the voter. Those days of distant vote-catching through personal charisma — of the kind his grandmother Indira Gandhi possessed — are over.

Now, you have to rely on an ever-vigilant grassroots organisation which will stay in touch with the electorate.

Rahul Gandhi has also been naive in relying on regional satraps — the likes of Beniprasad Verma — in choosing nominees on his behalf. The Congress selected a number of political rejects from other parties hoping they would have adequate organisational clout. For a party whose support base had been completely wiped out by mandal and kamandal politics, it isn’t the ideal way to rebuild an organisation.

Quite unlike Akhilesh Yadav, Rahul hasn’t also been able to reach out to his mother’s colleagues, the people she trusts. Rahul has created his own parallel political structure where his cohorts operate with power dynamics of their own, cut off from the reality which the elderly politicians experience. He hasn’t taken any active interest in governance and infuses too much management science in his art of vote-gathering.

No doubt, there is suspicion or even a shade of unstated hostility between the Sonia Congress and the Rahul Congress. The established Congress politicians are wary of Rahul and his friends, afraid that they may be eased out once Rahul comes of age and is crowned the unquestioned leader of the party. With Sonia suffering from an undisclosed ailment, the possibility of Rahul taking over soon has become quite real. And he is doing nothing to reassure party stalwarts that he means no harm.

Last, but not the least, Rahul appears to be somewhat of a misfit in the coalition era. His focus is on reinvigorating the party — not to forge alliances with likeminded, secular entities. Rahul doesn’t lose sleep over keeping a Mamata happy or a Karunanidhi satisfied. In fact, he is so burdened with his dream of improving the party’s future that he has no time to exchange pleasantries with the coalition partners. It is time Rahul grew out of these fixations which hold him back.
diptosh.majumdar@dnaindia.net

Diptosh Majumdar is national affairs editor of DNA