The Congress’ “Bharat Jodo Yatra”, launched on Wednesday, is clearly intended as a Rahul Gandhi showcase. Apart from generating a buzz around the party, the objective is to establish him as the once and future leader of the GoP (and by extension, of the opposition).
The 3,500-km march is the first large-scale public event helmed by Mr Gandhi since Lok Sabha 2019. What served to galvanise him? Could it be the upcoming Congress presidential election, or the larger fear that the party may be marginalised within the opposition space? Is it the rise of AAP, coupled with its own steady attenuation? The dissenting voices within and the challenges without are enough to spur any leader into action.
But we know Rahul of old. The Gandhi scion has displayed flashes of energy in the past, only to lapse into insouciance and disappear to an unspecified location abroad. This time may be different, thanks to the sheer scale of the party’s problems and the opportunity afforded by a fresh push for opposition unity, in tandem with the ruling BJP’s perceived setbacks. That said, it’s hard to assess Mr Gandhi’s future trajectory.
The trouble is that after 20 years in active politics, two biographies, multiple hagiographies and four Lok Sabha terms, Rahul Gandhi remains an enigma. Our picture of the former Congress chief is fuzzy. We have no notion of his vision for India. His ideas lack consistency, his activity graph is a roller-coaster and he is hidden from public view behind an impenetrable wall of privacy.
A rank-and-file member of the BJP can give you chapter and verse on Narendra Modi (albeit with a mix of fact and fable). Many of them knew him intimately as a youth, as a pracharak, as a key functionary of the Gujarat unit, as national general secretary and as state chief minister — or at least know someone who did. By contrast, the average Congress worker has a lot less to say about his fearless leader. Mr Gandhi didn’t come up from the grassroots, and had an ivory tower upbringing. And he has not gone the extra mile to make up for it.
For some, Mr Gandhi is the arrogant, entitled dynast who grants an audience to a party MP only to spend the entire meeting texting on his phone. For others, he is a courteous, sanskari individual who personally fetches a glass of water for a senior functionary and ushers him to his car. He displays a marked preference for overseas-educated, jargon-spouting professionals, but also handpicks favourites from among party workers (although he tends to lose interest in them after a while).
His commitment to inner-party democracy is questionable. As vice-president, he emphasised the need for an organisational shake-up and free and fair elections, but took offence when the G-23 raised the very same issues several years later. After Mr Gandhi quit in 2019, he declared that it wasn’t necessary for a member of his family to become Congress president, but made no objection when Sonia Gandhi became de facto chief, a post she has held for three years.
On issues of public concern, too, his stance is unclear. On one occasion, he might be on the right side of the environment versus development debate. On another, it might be the other way around. As for the thorny question of the Congress' stand on secularism and how nuanced it should be, no answer is forthcoming.
Without a wider and deeper interface with party functionaries and the public, it’s difficult to see how he will convince voters that he – or his nominee - could do a better job of containing inflation, creating employment, tackling poverty and delivering services. Mr Gandhi appears to be in default protest mode on just about everything, but fails to provide an alternative vision. Merely trashing Atmanirbhar Bharat, Make in India and Digital India doesn’t cut it; he has to come up with effective counter-narratives.
The padyatra may well be more of a “Congress jodo” exercise, as one-time family loyalist Ghulam Nabi Azad observed. But it is an opportunity for Mr Gandhi to move beyond his legacy and make a genuine connect with his own party and with voters, just as the late YSR Rajshekhar Reddy did back in 2003. Jagan Mohan Reddy reprised the march 15 years later, and leveraged his father’s legacy to prove himself a mass leader. Mr Gandhi has been unable to do the same.
The result is that while opposition leaders know they cannot challenge the NDA without the Congress, they are wary of uniting behind Mr Gandhi. Small wonder that Nitish Kumar, having recently ditched the NDA and returned to the fold, is emerging as the potential “face” of an anti-BJP alliance. A grassroots politician with a clean image, he has the gravitas that Mr Gandhi lacks, despite his several flip-flops.
Mr Gandhi may well “find” himself in the course of the gruelling 150-day trek across 14 states. More importantly, we the people may finally find out who he really is.
Bhavdeep Kang is a senior journalist with 35 years of experience in working with major newspapers and magazines. She is now an independent writer and author
