Rahul Gandhi should either take charge or get out of the way
positioning. The party has grown defensive on both nationalism and secularism.and the pragmatic alliance with the Shiv Sena in Maharashtra has blunted its claims on ideological purity. Above all, the party has no political narrative. Gandhi’s video series may tell us that he is quite a thoughtful, wellread and reasonably bright and engaged individual, unlike what his detractors in the BJP claim. But after years in politics, your messaging cannot be about what you are not; there has to be something you represent that captures the imagination of the people.
Above all, the dissonance is not dynasty alone. After all, Pilot too is a dynast. It’s the growing perception that the Gandhis want power without earning it or without taking on the responsibility of wielding it. Rahul Gandhi cannot remain de facto head of the Congress, using his mother as a placeholder till he makes up his mind on his next steps. His sister cannot invoke Indira Gandhi yet again, while a raging debate on nepotism occupies the debate in middle-class households. The exit of Jyotiraditya Scindia and Sachin Pilot cannot be framed in terms of legalities, technicalities or even public morality. Politics is Darwinian. Individuals will prioritise their future first. A growing number of Congressmen and women believe the party offers no future to them. And its leadership continues to treat the country’s oldest political party like a mom and pop store instead of a professional, modern organisation.
Rahul Gandhi should either take charge or get out of the way. (UK), Japan, South Korea, and Asean are all suspicious of China while its relationships in Africa have been dubbed “neocolonial”. Thus, when the border clash occurred, antichina global sentiment, already heightened by the pandemic, was almost uniformly negative. US secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, called China’s actions “disgraceful”. The Chinese government is aware of this fact, and has moved, for example, to rein in the social media posts of domestic nationalists making aggressive territorial claims, which could further damage its reputation.
Finally, China is not a monolithic government. While Xi Jinping is an extremely powerful leader, and has moved to sideline critics with a ruthlessness that has been compared to Mao, the Chinese State remains fragmented. Even its assertiveness is not monolithic — research shows that a strategy such as the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) has no coherent central ideology, and it is left to individual provinces to improvise with flimsy central directions. This means that even with regard to border transgressions, it is difficult to say with certainty when directions have been centrally coordinated in advance as opposed to being the responses of local commanders or even senior army leaders.
There has not been a Nixonian moment in the Sino-indian bilateral relationship since 1962. In the absence of such a game-changing breakthrough, India needs to formulate a long-term strategy keeping these nuances about China’s behaviour in mind. Failure to do so will be costly.