Depending on how badly you have been behaving on the internet, you will have been served the Rahul Gandhi edits by now. One, which has been viewed 3.5 million times, begins with a simple caption, “Things I like about BJP,” before offering the big reveal: “Their Opposition”. One after another, photos of Rahul Gandhi – from his public life during his twenties to a bearded shot from his Bharat Jodo Yatra to the famous white shirt clinging to his defined abs – form a carousel set to an earwormy Guru Randhawa track.
A similar one is set to Boney M’s Rasputin, a song about “Russia’s greatest love machine”, a classic firmly lodged in the fancam lexicon. Yet another thirst-trap is labelled “The only propaganda I fall for” and has clocked 1.5 million views. Populating the comment section of these videos are young women – and a great many young men – none of whom is pretending to be talking about politics. Zaddy, they call him, and my favourite, “the Indian Christian Grey.”
Gandhi might have always been in the public eye, but rarely has he been rewarded with people’s attention. However, something has shifted over the last month, and for the first time, we are not automatically scrolling past him. Of course, he is also one of the only men in Indian politics who can lose this consistently and still be around to be rediscovered.
Which other Indian politician has undergone as many rebrands as Rahul Gandhi? From “Prince” to “Pappu” to “senior citizen youth leader”, the Gandhi scion seems to have ticked every box. Two images from Indian public life bookend Gandhi’s own journey.
Think about the Press Club of India press conference, on the afternoon of 27 September 2013. Cabinet minister Ajay Maken is defending an ordinance his government has just cleared. Gandhi, who holds no office in that government and is not on the schedule, walks in. He takes the microphone off Maken and tells the room that the ordinance is complete nonsense and ought to be torn up and thrown out. There is no argument in the performance: the ordinance is wrong because he has said so, and the government will now withdraw it, which it does.
This happened while the Prime Minister was in New York. Everyone around looked a little ill at ease. But not Gandhi, then 43, who appeared with the cocky air of a young entrepreneur just handed the reins of the family business.
It was one press conference, but it had enough spark to ignite a campaign that would continue for the next 12 years. The shehzaada accusation would be followed by Pappu, an insult that encapsulates a certain kind of effete incompetence that needs no corroboration. Scams make you a pappu, education makes you a pappu, any show of inherently unmasculine vulnerability makes you a pappu. Everyone from BJP (and some Congress) politicians to the mainstream media to the IT Cell will speak in the same tongue.
Over the intervening 12 years, though, there was one inconvenience: the Bharat Jodo Yatra. In September 2022, Gandhi started walking from Kanyakumari to Kashmir, meeting regular people—carpenters, porters, vegetable vendors—along the way. When he noticed them, he would pull them inside his security circle and listen to them. At one of the events, a young girl walked beside him for a few minutes, kissed his hand, and melted back into the crowd. At another, he met Kavita Lankesh, sister of murdered journalist Gauri Lankesh. He asked her whether she had forgiven the men who shot her sister, and then told her how he had found his own peace forgiving the men who killed his father.
The mainstream media might have had a soft blackout of the yatra, but the Congress’s own machinery broadcast it over Twitter and Instagram, releasing pithy videos of Gandhi hugging the old and the infirm. Former Union minister Jairam Ramesh told reporters: “This is not the new Rahul Gandhi, this is the real Rahul Gandhi… He is not a product to be repackaged.”
Back then, outside of the Congress’ immediate audience, there weren’t too many takers for the gentler alternative politics that Gandhi was offering. Four years on, though, there are.
The second image – of Gandhi with a bloodied nose, looking disoriented – is from last month’s youth protests. While he maintained his distance from the Cockroach Janta Party stage, Gandhi led a march to the Prime Minister’s residence a day after the Delhi Police’s brutal lathicharge on the students protesting at Jantar Mantar. He was stopped midway, lifted off by his arms and legs, and carried away by four men in uniform.
Also read: You saw a new Rahul Gandhi in Parliament. I saw the change in Kashmir itself
Rahul Gandhi’s audience
Thirteen years – and a humbling – lie between these two afternoons. A good number of the edits now going around are cut from that evening’s footage. The symbolism of a sweaty, dishevelled, bleeding Gandhi willing to side with a young population is the hero’s arc he has waited over a decade for. That image is legible in a way that a 4,080-kilometre, 136-day foot march across India wasn’t – and it has kindled a politics that can only be understood through the language of desire.
After the BJP’s mixed results in the 2024 Lok Sabha elections, filmmaker Paromita Vohra described the thirst for Rahul as the force “eros” that goes beyond sexuality. “This eros, of humour and sexual-ness, of connection and co-creation, brought to the surface what had been subterranean and scattered. It is an eros of diverse aspirations, a definition of Indian-ness which has been invalidated by Hindutva, a re-centring of the poor made vulnerable by the development so beloved of elites, and a new, non-technocratic imagination which must be co-created, not handed down; something porous and fluid, not intact and hermetic,” Vohra wrote in Frontline.
That non-hermetic imagination reached its apotheosis this past month. The qualities that Gandhi has been relentlessly mocked for over the last 12 years – the kindness, the ability to listen rather than hold forth, the softness – are the very things that are now working in his favour.
A generation of young women, having had enough of being infantilised as “shararti bachhe” (naughty children) and abusive, errant betiyan (daughters), now want to be recognised as full citizens: Women who “talk back”; women who reject unsolicited demands of patriarchal honour placed upon them; women in no need of saving, if they can be ensured their rights; and women who want a conversation, but do not wish to be addressed in a one-way transmission.
So, on 6 August, Gandhi sat down for an Ask Me Anything on Instagram and took questions on whatever came in: education, his fitness routine, an appearance from Noorie, the Jack Russell terrier, and the persistent question of when he was getting married. Gandhi responded with a simple, “There have been a lot of questions on this topic. I think it’s time I answer…” Of course, there was no answer. It was a gentle flirtation, and it was treated as one. The other side, meanwhile, scrambles to make new reels and understand the workings of Snapchat.
That said, millions of Instagram views indicate a sentiment, not an electoral advantage. Affection is cheap, but personality is no substitute for ideas. Nobody making fancams can tell you what the Congress really stands for. But at least the ‘Pappu’ spell has broken. Gandhi finally has an audience that isn’t laughing at him. What he does with it might prove harder than the last 12 years.
Karanjeet Kaur is a journalist, former editor of Arré, and a partner at TWO Design. She tweets @Kaju_Katri. Views are personal.
(Edited by Prashant Dixit)