READYING FOR RAHUL 2.0
There’s both hope and doubt in the Congress as the ‘reluctant’ dynast overhauls his image before taking over as party president
Immersed in a bunch of legal papers in his tastefully furnished office in one of Delhi’s leafier neighbourhoods, a high-profile lawyer, who also happens to be a Congress leader, offers a simple diagnosis of what ails the party—an overdose of democracy. He calls it the biggest irony of Indian democracy. “We are a party run by dynasts who practise too much democracy in taking decisions in an attempt to please and accommodate everyone, and end up taking no decision at all,” says the Supreme Court advocate. “In contrast, the BJP is a democratic party where two men autocratically take all decisions—right or wrong—that are followed by everyone. This difference explains the success and failure of the two national parties of India.”
Like in court, he offers evidence. Just before the Uttar Pradesh elections earlier this year, the Congress spent three months deciding where and how Priyanka Gandhi would campaign. In the end, after several rounds of deliberations, it was decided she would campaign only in Raebareli and Amethi. “So much time was wasted just to decide that she would continue doing what she has been doing till now,” says the party leader. And many such decisions are still being awaited. Himachal Pradesh is going to the polls later this year. There is a demand that the ailing Virbhadra Singh, who also faces corruption cases, not be given another chance to lead the party. In Madhya Pradesh, where assembly polls are due next year, both veteran leader Kamal Nath and Jyotiraditya Scindia, the party’s Lok Sabha chief whip, are hoping to be the chief ministerial face. It is not clear even now who will lead the party in the Gujarat elections scheduled for the year-end.
The Congress’s national roadmap, too, remains vague. Almost every leader india today spoke to said that the party must first be revived in the states, where future leaders with mass appeal will be nurtured. That can happen only when the Congress is strengthened at the grassroots, with the empowerment of block and district units and booth committees. Just before his famous Vipassana break in 2015, Congress vice president Rahul Gandhi had submitted to his mother a blueprint for the party’s revival. It mostly revolved around these suggestions, but has been gathering dust. Most leaders perceived to be close to party president Sonia Gandhi claim decisions are pending because of Rahul. Seventy-year-old Sonia, who has reportedly been in poor health of late, has delegated most of the authority to Rahul. “He must take decisions,” says veteran party leader Digvijaya Singh, who was once considered Rahul’s political mentor. “People loved Indira Gandhi because she was decisive. Narendra Modi takes decisions—good, bad or indifferent. Not taking a decision has hurt the party most.”
There have been some decisions every now and then, though. Digvijaya was removed as general secretary in-charge in Goa and Karnataka after the Congress failed to assume power in the former this year despite winning more seats than the BJP. In Karnataka, the largest Congressruled state, 55-year-old Kerala MP K.C. Venugopal, who is often seen sitting next to Rahul in the Lok Sabha, was appointed general secretary in-charge. Mohan Prakash, one of Rahul’s favourite number-crunchers,
has been removed as general secretary in-charge of Madhya Pradesh, much to the delight of Digvijaya, Scindia and Nath.
If those rumoured close to Rahul are to be believed, more radical decisions will follow once he becomes party president. It’s almost certain Rahul will contest for the position in the Congress organisational polls scheduled next month—he said as much during his speech at the University of California, Berkeley. Sonia, says a source close to her, is against Rahul contesting elections. She fears someone else may throw their hat in the ring, causing embarrassment since Rahul’s popularity among the cadre is suspect. A Congress general secretary, however, says Rahul is adamant on taking the chair through an electoral process, and any challenge to his candidature is highly unlikely. Adds Abhishek Singhvi, a Rajya Sabha MP of the party, “The Congress must bite the bullet and decide on Rahul as the president. Irrespective of the reasons, there must be no further delay.”
Another general secretary in-charge of several states, claims the pace of decision-making and the party’s core structure will change once Rahul takes over. The process, he says, has already begun—young leaders such as A. Chellakumar and Venugopal are being given charge of states in place of veterans who once handled multiple territories. But even this process lacks consistency. Two Rahul favourites, Mohan Prakash and Madhusudan Mistry, have got the axe for ‘non-performance’, whereas former Union minister C.P. Joshi, who remained a mute spectator to his party losing power and several leaders in Assam, Bihar and Manipur, still holds charge of the entire Northeast, Bihar and West Bengal.
Joshi claims it’s unfair to evaluate Rahul’s performance since he is yet to assume the top post. “Sonia took charge in 1998 and the party came to power (at the Centre) after six years. Rahul has not even started yet,” he says. Joshi forgets that Rahul has been part of the decision-making process for over a decade, as he admitted in Berkeley. In an attempt to take credit for bringing peace in Jammu and Kashmir, he revealed that he had been working closely with the UPA governments—a clear departure from his earlier stand that he had been blamed for government decisions he was not a part of.
Several Congress leaders say Rahul’s speech in Berkeley lays bare his revival plan for the party and also indicates his changed approach to the rhetoric against him. For the first time, he did not defend his dynast tag, instead putting it as an integral part of Indian politics. But he underscored that he would take the democratic path to the top—by contesting elections. To the relief of party veterans, Rahul indicated that his probable core team would be a blend of the old and the young. He candidly admitted that though he used to push for younger leaders, he now needed the “talented old brigade” to run the organisation. There have been several indicators of this already—most significantly the resurgence of Manmohan Singh, who is being fielded to attack the Narendra Modi government on multiple issues, from GDP to Kashmir.
In what was perhaps Rahul's first attempt to directly counter his
INSIDERS
SAY SONIA IS OPPOSED TO RAHUL FIGHTING PARTY POLLS, IN CASE A CHALLENGER SPRINGS A SURPRISE
AWARE HE IS NO MATCH FOR MODI, RAHUL PREFERS TO HIT WHERE IT HURTS THE GOVERNMENT THE MOST: ON JOBS, ECONOMY
image as a reluctant politician, as publicised by “1,000 BJP men, sitting on computers”, Rahul challenged the UC Berkeley students to judge his intellect on the basis of what he said. “He needs to do many such mass contact programmes in India,” says Digvijaya. Rahul appears to have also woken up to the power of social media in today’s politics.
Most significant is his emerging strategy against PM Modi for the 2019 Lok Sabha elections. He has accepted that he can’t match Modi’s oratory. He understands that attacking the PM over initiatives such as Make in India in an environment high on nationalistic rhetoric will backfire. Instead, he is choosing to hit the government where it hurts the most—on the economy and jobs. Post-demonetisation and the Goods and Services Tax (GST), Rahul talked of reorienting Make in India to benefit small and medium entrepreneurs. He reminded the youth that the government has been creating 500 jobs a day instead of the required 30,000. He mentioned growing communal violence and intolerance, knowing it would resonate with Muslims and Dalits. Rahul started his speech by equating liberals like him with the tribal people whose wisdom saved them from the 2004 tsunami in the Andamans—a reach-out to another core constituency.
Avoiding a direct battle with Modi, Rahul has picked another enemy—the RSS. With two defamation cases slapped on him by RSS activists, his focus on the organisation is understandable. Also, the RSS’s nationwide grassroots network has been helping in the BJP’s expansion. “It’s an ideological battle as he thinks the RSS is against what India stands for,” explains Digvijaya. Some party leaders, however, find it foolish to target a cadre-based organisation like the RSS with just ideological noise. “If he doesn’t strengthen the party at the grassroots, forget the RSS or BJP, you cannot fight even the AAP in Delhi,” says a Congress leader from Delhi.
But does he have an election strategy for 2019? Joshi makes it sound pretty simple. Get the non-BJP parties that did well in the 2014 Lok Sabha elections on board. “The Bihar (assembly election) experiment proved that the BJP can be defeated,” says Joshi. However, getting parties like the SP, BSP, RJD, TMC, Left, BJD and DMK under one umbrella could prove to be too big a test for Rahul’s leadership. “That’s why Sonia Gandhi will continue as UPA chief even after Rahul takes charge of the Congress,” says a young Lok Sabha MP.
For now, Rahul has waved the white flag to the veterans, got ready to take the plunge, demarcated his constituencies and identified his main enemy. A big handicap remains, though. He needs an issue to win polls. At Princeton University, he declares his issue—joblessness which brought Modi to power will also bring his downfall. In Berkeley, the Congress vice president said he would engage in more such conversations to make people understand who he actually is. Now, he must tell people how he will give them jobs and his party leadership.