#dnaEdit: Rahul on stilts

Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi is an aspiring mass leader. He feels that he should connect with people, and he thinks that is the way to revive the party that had sunk to the nadir after last year’s Lok Sabha election.

There is therefore an attempt now underway to retrieve the party’s lost ground. The Congress has tasked its vice-president to get into the act of political revival. We know that there is some kind of Rahul cabal, which comes up with ideas for Rahul to do and say. The names of Rahul’s team members are not known, and they are even deliberately kept secret and vague. So there are all kinds of rumours about the members of the team and the ideas they throw up. By now it is amply clear that the Rahul team/cabal does not have any new or innovative ideas. The Congress’s slightly outdated yuppies are taking a leaf out of Indira Gandhi’s political tactics which she adopted when she was politically down and out.

The inspiration for Rahul, his ostensibly sophisticated aides and other clueless apparatchiks of the party, seems to come from the tactics Indira Gandhi adopted when she was thrown out of power unceremoniously in 1977.

Gandhi went to Belchi deep inside Bihar, travelling on an elephant in the last stage of that journey. There was a massacre of Dalits in that village and Indira Gandhi sensed the political opportunity in reaching out to the most dispossessed of Indian society in their hour of dire need. From then on, all the wise men and women of the Congress think that the ready-made recipe for resurrecting themselves from political oblivion is to go out and meet the suffering masses.

We are aware of the familiar Karl Marx observation made in his popular pamphlet, 18th Brumaire, that history occurs twice, first as a tragedy, and the second time as a farce. Indira Gandhi, reaching out to harried Dalits in Belchi, was political and opportunist. In the case of Rahul, the contact-the distressed-farmers programme cannot even be dignified with the criticism of being opportunistic as in the case of his grandmother. Rahul’s ill-conceived and faltering mass contact exercise takes on the shape and tone of low comedy. The tragedy is that Rahul and his Sancho Panzas are not aware that they are staging a farce.

Rahul and aides need to realise that their staged roadshows are a political embarrassment. They might be sincere in what they are doing but they are going about in the most puerile manner. And the act evokes nothing but laughter and ridicule even from Congress-friendly bystanders and observers. The times have changed. Common people, however poor and distressed, are quite aware of the ways of wily politicians. They are not impressed by mere gestures or the vulgar sales pitch of overconfident market managers. Photo-opporunities are seen just for that — photo opportunities. Kalavati, the woman whom Rahul Gandhi made famous in his rather un-memorable intervention in Lok Sabha during the no-confidence motion against the Congress-led UPA government in 2008, is aware that her famous Rahul-connect has not changed a whit her dreary life.

Rahul cannot hope to build his political image based on the faltering and stumbling attempts to meet common people. The people are not able to take him seriously because the Congress vice-president lacks the gravitas that is expected of a man who is struggling to become a national leader. He will have to think harder, say things which are not meant to be sound bites. He has to realise that there is no easy way to the top.