RAHUL FOCUSES ON STRATEGY FOR A NO NAMO 2019

The Congress vice president’s objective is not to become Prime Minister, but to somehow stop Narendra Modi in the next elections.

Sources involved in planning the political strategy of soon-to-be Congress president Rahul Gandhi say that the 45-yearold Congress heir’s objective is “to ensure that Narendra Modi become a single-term Prime Minister”, rather than Rahul himself becoming the fourth member of his family since 1947 to become Prime Minister. A key adviser said, “Rahul has age on his side, he can wait till 2024 before taking over the government.” His strategists say that “the willingness to hand over the baton (of Prime Ministership) to another leader from a different party will give an advantage to the Congress in the post-poll negotiations likely to follow the 2019 ver- dict”. What has changed for Rahul Gandhi is that “The CP (Congress president, i.e. Sonia Gandhi) has finally woken up to the fact that the veterans advising her are out of tune with the times”. These sources claim that “during 2013 and in the run-up to the 2014 elections especially”, Rahul Gandhi was “deeply frustrated by the adherence of his mother to the counsel of the traditional politicians surrounding her”. Things began to change after the May 2014 defeat, “the scale of which convinced Sonia Gandhi that it was time to divest the traditional politicians in the party of their power” and trust Rahul Gandhi. “The rise of Modi showed that the culture of politics in India has changed, yet throughout the rise of the Modi phenomenon (during 2011-2014), the Con- gress functioned as though it were back in the 1970s”. The party organisation therefore “failed to connect with the aspirational middle class voter, while the Manmohan Singh government was in their perception disconnected from the poor”, thereby losing out on both voting blocs.

Rahul Gandhi’s strategists believed that the party’s preelection focus on Modi was a “mistake”, and that it was done to “consolidate the minority vote”, which instead went in several states to other parties. However, they feel that a concentrated focus on the Prime Minister will now pay dividends. “The goodwill for the BJP is concentrated on Narendra Modi, and if this goodwill disappears, so will that for the party”, said a key strategist, who pointed to the