Makeover at 44

Whatever Rahul Gandhi was doing during his sabbatical, he has rid himself of fatal flaws for a mass politician: shying from eye contact and building an image of flightiness.

Rahul Gandhi | Photo: Suraj Singh Bisht | ThePrint File photo

On the eve of the day when Rahul Gandhi was rumoured to return to Delhi, the Wall Street Journal carried a cheeky piece with a graphic. It showed how Rahul got more media time in his two-month disappearance than in the weeks when he was physically here. It was on the spot because, in his self-exile, Rahul may have been as incommunicado as when present here. But at least now there was a deep curiosity about him.

His return, however, has not been the non-event you would have expected when he quietly got into a car with rolled-up windows and drove home in the company of his doting Jack Russells. He led his party’s first post-2014 challenge to Narendra Modi at a choreographed farmers’ rally at Ramlila Maidan, where the “managed” crowds didn’t quite match in their enthusiasm the passion in his short speech. In fact, the only time they showed emotion, and it was a negative one, was when they spotted the young, JNU-ite Haryana Pradesh Congress Committee chief Ashok Tanwar. Most of them, in pink turbans, were brought in by former Chief Minister Bhupinder Singh Hooda and were angry with Tanwar for having stated, somewhat unthinkingly, that real Congress supporters should not wear turbans. Of course, the affection between Tanwar and Hooda is best described in a Haryanvi expression that would lose its nuance in translation and sound crude, so let’s use the old no-love-lost line. Rahul, therefore, was also given a quick display of the defeatist, fractious state of his party. Even his speech, though angry, was neither newsy nor would it stir his loyalists or shake his rivals. If anything, Modi’s homily to his party MPs just before the Congress rally seemed more headline-worthy and passionate.

It all changed rather dramatically in the Lok Sabha the following afternoon. And then again, as Rahul returned to the Lok Sabha on Wednesday, home-worked and war-gamed on one more set-piece. The question is, why? Why was the same Rahul whose fire had left his own partymen cold at Ramlila Maidan now able to rouse the entire opposition? Why had he, the butt of so many jokes, pushed the BJP on the defensive, at least for that first afternoon? And, in a supreme test of what works or fails these days, why was he trending on Twitter last Monday evening, ahead of the IPL, the first time in the two weeks since the season began?

You have to be careful to not over-interpret this, so I won’t go so far as to call it a turning point for Rahul or for his party, particularly as he is now seen as perfectly capable of scooting again. But for the first time in six years, and only for the second time in his political career (besides his score of 21 in Uttar Pradesh in the 2009 Lok Sabha election), he had made an affirmative impact.

 

I used the expression set-piece because both moves, on the land acquisition ordinance and net neutrality, were planned, thought out, predictable. That the Congress was going to make land acquisition the key to its counterattack on the BJP was obvious on the afternoon Sonia Gandhi led the protest march to Rashtrapati Bhavan. Rahul said nothing particularly new either. The charge of a Modi-corporate conspiracy he had already made at Ramlila Maidan. Again, Congress people knew it was coming. Several of them had gone to meet him one-on-one after the May 2014 defeat and Rahul’s story to them had been consistent: the two factors to blame for the defeat were the Manmohan Singh government, which didn’t listen to him or the Congress president, and the corporates, who bought out the election and presented it to Modi.

His Parliament performance – more on Monday than on Wednesday – made impact because for the first time he was speaking like a genuine, and cynical, parliamentarian: witty, with well-timed pauses and delivery, a calculated punch here, a jab there and of course many jibes, including the most news-making of all, suit-boot ki sarkar. And the most notable change: Rahul has now started to make eye contact with the audience and also with the cameras, which he didn’t in the past, even in election meetings. The Nehru-Gandhi DNA never had oratory scripted in it. But it was loaded with conviction, the ability to look your audience, the voter, in the eye with that “look into my eyes, read my lips, don’t you think you can trust me” look.

Whatever Rahul was doing in the course of his sabbatical, he has rid himself of that most fatal flaw for a mass politician: shying from eye contact and building an image of flightiness, lack of responsibility, escapism. I have often highlighted the same flightiness in the way he appeared in a tribal village one day, Dalit home on another, or in a commuter train, at a land acquisition site, never to return. On each occasion, he introduced himself as a soldier of the tribal, Dalit, farmer, migrant worker, commuter etc. This is disastrous, even as – or particularly because – he is assured the ownership of India’s oldest and most pan-national political party. I have also said, facetiously as I often do, that if Rahul is indeed a soldier, he must be a soldier of the parachute regiment.

 

For Congressmen, this change means Rahul is finally delivering. Many of them – in fact, most of them who contest elections – have serious doubts on the line he has chosen, reminiscent of Rajiv’s back-to-the-wall, “nani yaad dila denge” days (under pressure over Bofors, etc, at a Delhi rally, Rajiv had used this heartland metaphor for teaching a lesson, alluding to foreign powers, namely America, destabilising his government). In his net neutrality intervention, Rahul also mocked Modi for preening at Obama’s praise for him in Time magazine. The insinuation was that US presidents only praised those foreign counterparts who acted as lackeys. They hailed Gorbachev because he allowed the Soviet Union to break up, and Yeltsin because he privatised much of Russian industry. These are Cold War, even mid-seventies formulations. Today, these are dated and ridiculous. In a changed world, where old, ideological foes like America, Cuba and Iran are warming up to each other, and most important, where a Congress government signed India’s first strategic treaty with the US (the nuclear deal) and had conviction to risk its survival, this is much too cynical.

In fact, it was the UPA that made its most sizeable military purchases from America, using the government-to-government (or FMS, foreign military sales, as Washington calls it) route. It is one thing to mutate from a diffident, flighty inheritor to a communicator, but nobody wishes the Congress party’s latest proprietor to be a polemicist or rabble-rouser more in the nature of his late uncle.

Congress leaders, however, think it is early days and the new Rahul has to take extreme positions to draw attention when reduced to 44 in Lok Sabha, and zero in the assemblies of two states where they were traditionally the strongest, Andhra Pradesh and Delhi. The inevitable yet hesitant succession in the Congress seems complete now. One direct gain is for the party’s new generation, mostly scions of mini-dynasties who, despite being two- or three-term MPs already, had to keep a low profile, even continue serving as MoS in the UPA government rather than rise to cabinet rank, waiting for Rahul to raise the glass ceiling. It’s a succession for them too, as the veterans are sidelined. Sachin Pilot, Deepender Hooda, Jitin Prasada, Gaurav Gogoi, R.P.N. Singh, Sharmishtha Mukherjee, Milind Deora, Praniti Shinde are enormously better defenders of the party’s cause than Renuka Chowdhury, Shakeel Ahmad, Meem Afzal or Sanjay Jha.

Most important, for the moment, Rahul has answered the most devastating question that confronted the Congress in May 2014: do we have a future? Practically, and psephologically, it seems hopeless. Yogendra Yadav has maintained convincingly that once a party slips below 15 per cent vote share in a state, it is almost impossible for it to revive. If you colour-code the map of India on that basis, it looks grim for the Congress, as it is reduced in many more states below that level. On the other hand, it also had about 20 per cent of the national vote and, as Rahul’s key new advisers maintain, you cannot write off a party that retains that much vote share in a landslide defeat. What is the difference between Modi being the prime minister or not, they ask, but another 5 per cent of the vote. If the Congress, with other anti-BJP forces, can take away just 5 percentage points from the BJP, reducing it from 31 per cent to 26-27 per cent, the picture alters. The target is now not so much return to power but to diminish Modi. And if in that campaign corporate India and America policy are collateral damage, hamaare baap ka kya jaata hai, or, as they prefer to say in Doon School lingo, what goes of our pop’s!