Rahul has laid 3 painful questions to rest. If he doesn’t shoot & scoot now, he can revive Congress

Congress party's score of 99 in the Lok Sabha elections has vaporised three painful questions dogging Rahul Gandhi for two decades. His record so far deserves a closer look.

Illustration by Soham Sen | ThePrint

As Rahul Gandhi heads for the first full Parliament session of the third Narendra Modi government, he can feel comforted that three painful questions dogging him for two decades have vaporised.

First, does the BJP — or should it — take the Congress seriously? Second, does it — or should it — take Rahul Gandhi seriously? And third, can you bring back to life a party as nearly dead as the Congress?

The answers to all three came by the afternoon of counting day, 4 June. Not only must the BJP take the Congress and Rahul seriously, his party also sees a realistic route to power in 2029. At the very least, it has sprung back to life and is back in the fight. You will see it through the monsoon session beginning next Monday.

This session will have the added tadka (seasoning) of the Union Budget as well. The difference a rejuvenated Congress makes will also be evident from how the rest of the Opposition conducts itself. Read the op-ed that Trinamool MP Derek O’Brien wrote in The Indian Express this Friday.

He opens his argument by asking who benefits more from parliamentary adjournments now. The obvious implication is that it’s the treasury benches.

When the Opposition was in a hopeless minority, outshouted, outnumbered and further squashed by the chair, adjournments and walkouts were desperate escape measures. Now, they’d rather be on the wrestling mat — or in the akhara if that sounds more apt — and wrestle.

O’Brien’s party, the TMC, has done brilliantly by itself in West Bengal. Would they, however, be so upbeat if the Congress had not come back to life this time? No opposition alliance can be credible without a strong core. That’s the expectation on which the Congress had been failing so far. Now, this has changed.

Even as I write this column late Friday afternoon as usual, I see on my television screen J.P. Nadda, still the BJP president in his super-extended term, speaking in Odisha and focusing mostly on the Congress and the Gandhi family, especially the siblings.

He calls them the educated illiterate (‘padhe likhe anpadh’). This, in a state where the Congress doesn’t count for one bit. At least not yet. This leaves no doubt about the answers to the first two of the three questions we posited from Rahul’s point of view. For the BJP, the Congress and the Gandhi trio matter.

The answer to the third question will need to come from Rahul himself. Since he was first elected an MP in 2004, he has built a political image he’ll need to get rid of. This is the image of shoot-and-scoot politics.

Don’t blame social media or the BJP/RSS’s formidable whisper machine for it. Two decades in public life is long enough for reputations to be built, for better or worse. Until the 2024 elections, his reputation was one of uncertain commitment. If he moves on from it now after this summer’s success, he’ll change not just that image, but also answer that most important question: Does the Congress have a chance to win back power?

So far, he had had two-and-a-half major successes. In the 2009 Lok Sabha elections, he electrified his party by winning 21 seats in Uttar Pradesh. Almost all these candidates were his choices, several from the Youth Congress, which he then helmed.

The second was the 2018 winter victories in Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh. The half was the Gujarat assembly election of 2017 when he ran the BJP close. It was an astute campaign, built on a coalition of rebellious young caste leaders. It gave the BJP a scare.

Modi had to carry out a humongous rearguard campaign to salvage the state for his party. How close this election had been, and how sweet his victory, showed in his speech to his party after the results. Cameras caught tears in his eyes, not something you see often, and we took note of it in a National Interest column on 30 December, 2017.

The important thing is that after each one of these, Rahul didn’t stay back to build on what had been achieved. The post-2009 period saw his somewhat curious evolution into a dissident within his party, culminating in that infamous public rejection of his own government’s ordinance on convicted politicians, something he has regretted multiple times in interviews subsequently.

After the state victories in December 2018, no attention was paid to building a coalition or rejuvenating his party. He seemed distracted and disconnected. As he did after Gujarat, 2017. Each of these moments could have been a turning point for his politics.

That’s why even his revival in this general election has drawn scepticism from his supporters. Their scepticism is his rivals’ hope. That one job done, even if successfully, he will lose interest again. Shoot and scoot.

That he hasn’t done so yet, and has continued to be active on the political street, in public debate and on social media, signals an important change. It will give his party hope. Maybe the achievement of reducing Modi well below the majority mark will now motivate him to stay committed.

Or maybe a decade of Modi, setbacks, humiliation, insults and ridicule, as well as the targeting of the party and its key people by the ‘agencies’, have collectively brought in a new resolve. If he does stay on and focused, the third question is answered. The Congress can realistically hope for a return to power.

At which point I can bring to your attention two National Interest articles on Rahul written a decade apart. The first, on 6 April, 2013 when he took over as Congress vice president and made his ‘power is poison’ speech in Jaipur, listed what we saw as three fallacies or errors in his politics.

The first two pertained to his flawed understanding of Indian inequality, and then aspiration. The third was simply about his belief that power is poison. We had then written that he had better reflect on it. That in a democracy, power is no poison. It is a wonderful gift, an honour, and a cherished privilege the voters give you. Good leaders embrace it with joy, gratitude and humility. That power is poison, we had written, is a feudal proposition, not a democratic one.

The next article, on 24 December, 2022, came in the midst of his Bharat Jodo Yatra and raised some of the same questions. We noted then that he seemed to be enjoying the attention, the crowds and the argumentation more than before. He was building a campaign on ideological terms — Bharat Jodo versus Bharat Todo, love versus hate, secular versus communal, Gandhi versus Savarkar — and seemed to be enjoying it.

While noting this, we had raised two more questions. One, what does the Congress want? The answer was easy: power. The next was trickier: what does Rahul want? Does he also want what his party does? In which case, has he changed his mind on power being poison? Has a decade in wilderness and ridicule persuaded him to see the virtue in power? Only if the answer is yes can the Congress party ever hope to return to power.