A defence of Congress (still) president Rahul Gandhi, particularly after his petulant outburst at the Congress Working Committee meeting last week, has proved beyond the talents of the so-called liberal consensus. Some have already abandoned the ship and are desperately seeking a spot on the Modi juggernaut. Others are pleading that he remain, in extravagant terms, as if his exit heralds the apocalypse. Still, others have attacked him for letting them and the country down. To be fair, many of his erstwhile supporters are too busy blaming the gods, the voters and the Election Commission for the Congress debacle. Among them is Nobel laureate Amartya Sen, who took the view that since the system did not return a verdict against the Modi, the system itself must be broken and needs fixing.
A few things must be said in the fifth-generation Gandhi’s defence. First, he threw everything he had into the campaign. He yelled himself hoarse at public meetings, tried desperately to imbue his troops with a fighting spirit, came out with a fairly decent election manifesto and brought out his biggest gun, that is, Priyanka Gandhi Vadra. Those who believed Gandhi was a dilettante politician incapable of hard work were pleasantly surprised. Second, his motives are prima facie purer than those of other dynasts. Certainly, there is an urge to power, but it is leavened by a desire to shake things up for the better. He wants to be what Modi is, what his grandmother Indira Gandhi was and what his father Rajiv Gandhi tried to be: a disruptor and an innovator.
His big failing is a limited capacity to learn. It took him an inordinately long while and the shock of 2014 to understand the virtues of hard work, flexibility and shouldering responsibility, but he eventually got there. He still didn’t get it right, but it wasn’t for lack of trying. It was simply a lack of understanding. The fault lies not in him, but in his stars. An unnatural upbringing has left him out of step with 21st-century Indian politics. A life of privilege engenders an entitled mindset. A life of relative isolation makes it hard to read and empathize with other people. And the burden of legacy is just that – a burden. He cannot outrun the sins of his forefathers, as long as he enjoys the fruits of their labours.
His appetite for risk is limited because unlike Modi, he has never known what it is to have nothing to lose. His disconnect from the voter is so absolute that he couldn’t gauge their response. The erroneous assumption that self-interest dictates voting choices shaped the Congress campaign. “It’s the economy, stupid!”, works only in the absence of emotional triggers. Balakot was one such trigger and by dubbing it a lie, the Congress robbed the voter of vicarious pride in India’s military strength. To be fair, most of the opposition also aligned itself with Pakistan’s stance that the air strike was a dummy and paid the price at the hustings.
For this, the so-called liberals are wholly responsible. They dubbed nationalism a bad word and the Congress totally bought into it. They have mocked Modi’s relentless foreign tours and jhappis with other heads of state, not realizing that the voter is buoyed by India’s growing importance in the world. Suffixing an ‘-ism’ to a trend – nativism, majoritarianism and so forth – doesn’t mean anything to the voter. The average Indian – indeed, the average Hindu – is no longer self-conscious of his beliefs and identity. Minority vote bank politics worked beautifully for the Congress, as long as there was no political force to mobilise the majority. Today, it serves to alienate the party all except the minority. Gandhi had some sense of this, hence the Gujarat temple run and the pragmatic stand on Sabarimala, without which he would have found himself with no more than 30 seats in the Lok Sabha. Liberals believe the Congress ought not to alter its Nehruvian stance and focus, instead, on reviving a coalition of the minorities and have-nots.
Will Gandhi take vanvas and plunge the Congress into an existential crisis? The irony of his lashing out at dynasts during the CWC was not lost on the public. Nor was his rant against the Congress netas for having failed him. He is convinced that his “chowkidar chor hai” slogan would have had traction, if only they had adopted it. Astonishingly, Gandhi still does not understand that he, courtesy his legacy, cannot allege corruption with any degree of credibility. And by dubbing Modi a chowkidar, he rallied blue-collar workers to the BJP’s cause. This lack of insight argues that Gandhi is still a work in progress. He may choose to stay and evolve, or opt out and create space for his sibling, or a non-dynast who will hopefully not be a rubber stamp.
