It is being widely believed that a national security crisis will ensure a second term for Narendra Modi. But just as tensions with Pakistan have been a godsend for Modi, so they have been for Rahul Gandhi too. After a poor performance in the Lok Sabha elections, the Congress supporters will be able to say ‘we were going to win, but Pulwama happened’.
No guys, you were never going to win. The “improvement” in Rahul Gandhi as a leader was more imagined than real, more incidental than substantial.
The 11th of December 2018 was a turning point when the BJP suffered a shock defeat, losing three crucial states in the Hindi heartland. The political momentum, the national narrative began going against Modi. This was the big opportunity for Rahul Gandhi to strike.
Here’s what Rahul Gandhi needed to do between 11 December and the Pulwama attack on 14 February.
First, he should have waged a nationwide campaign on unemployment and farm distress.
Second, he should have forged pre-poll alliances with regional parties across the country.
Third, he should have launched Priyanka Gandhi to make up for the absence of Sonia Gandhi from active campaigning, and to make up for the lack of his own political charisma.
He bungled up on all three fronts.
These three things together could have helped the Congress project a national alternative to the Narendra Modi-led BJP. They could have made voters feel that there is a viable national alternative to Modi and no, it won’t be a hotchpotch, unstable Third Front lasting two years.
Also read: Pulwama changed election game for Modi so much it needn’t worry about EVM tampering charges
Selling oranges when people want apples
If Rahul Gandhi were a fruit seller, he would sell people oranges when they want apples. As a politician, he’s offering people an anti-corruption narrative when they want an anti-unemployment narrative.
The message from the three states was clear: development, governance, economic issues, farm distress were the things voters were concerned about. What did Rahul Gandhi do to take forward the momentum from there? Rafale, Rafale, Rafale.
If you are a real politician and not a Supreme Court lawyer, your job is to keep your ear to the ground and be the voice of the people. Your job is to reflect people’s concerns, and confront the government on those issues. challenging the government about them.
Rahul Gandhi kept harping on Rafale because he felt it could help build his brand and bring down Modi’s. He felt he could do a David upon Goliath Modi. But in politics, there’s only one way to defeat your opponent: by having public opinion on your side.
People have been waiting for a leader who can talk about their woes regarding unemployment, low farm incomes and shrinking real wages. The Congress can say it has been raising these issues, but then it has been raising all issues anyway. What you choose to elevate to the level of a campaign is the real question. If one closes one’s eyes and tries to recall what Rahul Gandhi has been saying over the last few weeks, one can only think of Rafale and ‘Chowkidar chor hai’. Rahul has failed to give any such slogan on the issues foremost on people’s minds – unemployment and farm distress.
While Rahul failed to build upon the 11 December momentum, Modi addressed these issues with a job quota for upper caste poor and a scheme to give small farmers Rs 6,000 a year.
Also read: BJP has a poll strategy for Priyanka Gandhi — ignore her
A failure at alliance-making
Rahul Gandhi may be poor at figuring out the right political narrative but perhaps he knows how to do pre-poll alliances.
At the time of writing this article, it is 7 March. Election dates are going to be announced anytime now. The Congress has finalised pre-poll alliances in only two states, Tamil Nadu and Jharkhand. The alliance with DMK in Tamil Nadu was announced only on 5 March. The Congress is yet to finalise its alliances in Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Karnataka, Maharashtra or any other state. The failure to stitch an alliance with the Aam Aadmi Party will make the voters in Delhi see the Congress as irrelevant in the capital’s seven seats.
By contrast, the BJP has sealed its alliance even in a state like Tamil Nadu where it hardly has a presence. The only major state where the BJP is yet to seal a pre-poll alliance is Uttar Pradesh, where it is going to contest most seats anyway.
The Congress was edged out of the SP-BSP-RLD alliance in Uttar Pradesh partly due to Rahul Gandhi’s arrogance. What explains the lethargy in other states? Certainly not the events in Pulwama and Balakot. If anything, the national security crisis gave the Congress free time to finish the backroom work since a lot of their public programmes were suspended.
In January, Rahul Gandhi took two holidays. He went to Goa in January-end. Perhaps, he really needed to interact with the NRIs in Dubai to win the election but from there he just disappeared into nowhere for several days. Rahul Gandhi’s supporters call it work-life balance but the work is far behind Narendra Modi’s efforts.
Also read: Rahul Gandhi, share your foreign policy ideas beyond closed-door meetings
Wasting your Brahmastra
Only the Congress could be so smart at political communication that it announced Priyanka Gandhi Vadra’s entry into formal politics while she was still in the United States. Only the Congress could be so shrewd as to not make Priyanka Gandhi give a speech at a Lucknow roadshow, which marked her plunge into public life.
Rahul Gandhi should have launched Priyanka long ago, but perhaps he was insecure that she might overshadow him. After winning three states on 11 December, he felt less insecure. He should have immediately roped Priyanka in, because the Congress desperately needs a big star campaigner. The Congress desperately needs someone who can speak well and energise the party cadres and take on Narendra Modi.
Instead, the Priyanka card was played in a way that made sure it wouldn’t work. Perhaps, this wasn’t a deliberate attempt by Rahul Gandhi to end the clamour to replace him with Priyanka. Perhaps, it was just about giving political cover to Robert Vadra’s corruption allegations. Any which way, the Priyanka card has been wasted for now.
The responsibility for wasting the Priyanka Brahmastra has to lie more with the party president than with her. The siblings can now blame their poor performance on Modi making it a national security election. Doing so would be a dog-ate-my-homework excuse. Truth be told, the Congress has lost the plot because Rahul Gandhi remains India’s most pointless politician.
But it could cost the Ghandis their freedom as Modi has a long term plan to squeeze them out of politics and in jail for the corruption. Political power is their only protection.
Biased and unfortunate. Don’t know why congress should build up strategy in accordance to great journalists
So strange to see an anti Congress article from you. Is this the one odd article you wrote for “neutrality” purposes?
Bashing BJP mindlessly had so far been the only content in your articles up till now.
If Rahul is really serious about prosecuting BJP leaders on Rafale, he must study the systematic way in which Swamy did his homework to bring the Young Indian crowd to the courts. Just making a bi g fuss in election meetings and foaming at the mouth cannot get him anywhere. If he and his legal eagle colleagues in the COngress are incapable of making a case out of Rafale they must just stay silent and focus on other matters.
“shrinking real wages”
No Sir, that’s not a true statement. Real wages have been increasing in India since the 1947, never have they dipped.
The rate of rise in “real” wages may have slowed or dipped, emphasis rate of rise – but never has the rise of “real” wages dipped since independence. That’s one silver lining for India. I will hope that you’ll make this minor correction in your article.
Unemployment and farm distress are fake issues manufactured by the Lutyens lobby. This lobby got so taken in by its own fakery that it is perplexed that these issues have not caught on.
1. Rahul Gandhi became president of Congress and his only qualification when he was ‘elected’ as President was that he is grandson of late PM Smt Indira Gandhi and son of late PM Rajiv Gandhi. 2. We should not overlook fact that if Rahul Gandhi wishes to defeat BJP, he has to defeat RSS on ideological grounds, and doing that is not as easy as becoming head of the grand old party called Congress. 3. Let us see some recent political developments. (a) AAP has made announcement of six candidates in Delhi for ensuing Lok Sabha (LS) polls. (b) SP & BSP, two big regional parties of Uttar Pradesh (UP) have already announced their pre-poll alliance for LS election. 3. In the current scenario, one need not be a political analyst to say that in the coming Lok Sabha election, there will be multi-cornered contests in many States. Thus, it will be anti-BJP, anti-Congress fight in Delhi, West Bengal, Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Andhra, Odisha, and perhaps a few more States too. 4. Question that arises then is this: who will be the beneficiary of division of votes which cannot be avoided when there are multi-cornered contests? It will be worth watching.
I feel people will vote for congress this time. Don’t underestimate the power of common man.
It is amusing to see how the trolls start gloating the moment we have anyone writing Anti-Rahul articles and adding to abuses that the authors of these articles hurl on him.
Mr Vij is creating false illusions – that the fight is between Rahul’s incompetence (guise for stupidity, even though it has now been proved that he is not as stupid as he was made out to be) and Modi’s brilliance (which has proved to be a disaster in more than one area – DeMon, Growth, Jobs, Social Divisions, Self over the Country and so on).
We forget the voters who are the final decision makers. India Shining and Kargil did not get the BJP the required seats – Vikas did get them, Since Modi has buried Vikas, I am confident that the average voters knows what to do. Modi’s half-clever dialogues has been seen through by a vast majority of people. We are all forgetting that Modi and company managed only one-third votes at their peak (peak is visibly gone post Dec 2018).
it serves the media, which has largely become Darbari, to create the narrative around Modi’s cleverness, everyone else’s stupidity and lack of judgment, as the BJP/Modi are ensuring their existence by dumping public money plus the money from unknown sources.
my own sense is that people of India our cleverer than our politicians and our darbaris. May the God give our darbari media some sense to highlight what matters for people rather than how one fellow is very clever and the rest are all stupid.
A very apt and correct summing up of Raga’s blunders. Actually, it adds up to just one blunder: his inexplicable obsession with Rafale, and his conviction that it will succeed in doing to Modi what Bofors did to his father. The ad nauseam repetition of Rafale coupled with the demonising of Modi has not impressed even his own party, simply because his rants totally lack any solid evidence or material but are only a concoction of assumptions and innuendos. Above all, his campaign so far has only cemented the suspicion that he lacked leadership qualities and a rapport with the voters. He has immensely helped Modi in the BJP’s campaign to return to power smoothly.
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Will this be a National Security election ? One is not sure of that fact at all. Balakot did not quite go as planned. Too many loose ends, lack of clarity on what was achieved,
The opposition can only hope to do well by maximising the number of one on one contests, the Mamata Banerjee formula. That is not exactly the same as stitching up formal alliances, for that might involve incompatible forces like the Left and the TMC in Bengal. As far as the Congress is concerned, it has natural allies like the NCP in Maharashtra, JDS in Karnataka, RJD in Bihar. No justification for leaving the modalities for so late. Had these been tied up earlier, the strong candidates would already have been in the field, doing a soft campaign, as the PM has been doing. 2. As far as the issues in the general election are concerned, they will be no different from those that won the Congress the three states of R / M / C. Even God cannot create ten or twenty million jobs in Indis each year, but for what it is worth, the Congress needs to create a smart campaign around economic issues, at least hammering away at the lack of delivery. 3. Colin Powell once said, I don’t want to run for President; a man cannot even take a leak in peace, without ten people keeping track of him. PM banna chahte hain toh phir balance sirf work – work hi ho sakta hai.
Does Priyanka have a vision for India? Can she speak two sensible words on what India needs at the moment besides tolerance and women empowerment? India needs NOT a star campaigner but a visionary, hard working, decisive leader. Now please don’t suggest Sonia Gandhi as the alternative.