In the 2019 Lok Sabha election campaign, Rahul Gandhi would stand on the stage and ask, “Chowkidar?” The crowd would say “Chor hai!”
This was, perhaps, the first time in his political career that Rahul Gandhi had managed to find a way to create an interactive connect with the rally crowd. He was clearly excited about it — he insisted the slogan was ‘working’. As surely after a survey showed that Rafale or corruption were non-issues, Rahul Gandhi thought he was able to read ‘the people’ when they responded to his slogan.
Even a novice politician would understand that the rally crowd are your own supporters and they will respond to whatever call they have been asked to respond to. It does not reflect public opinion.
There is a liberal echo chamber around Rahul Gandhi that constantly assures him that everything he’s done is a great act of moral righteousness. Not since Mahatma Gandhi have we had a leader who has the courage to say what is morally correct. This liberal echo chamber performs the same role as the rally crowds of 2019 — they mislead Rahul Gandhi into thinking he’s doing what he needs to do, instead of telling him that he’s actually committing political suicide.
This liberal herd of sheep would go after the naysayers. If you said Rafale wasn’t working, they’d say you were a Hindutva supporter. If you said NYAY was launched too late, they’d ask you how much money you’ve taken from the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). If you said NYAY wasn’t being explained and communicated well to voters, they’d say you deserve Narendra Modi.
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The more he loses, the more they support him
These liberals basically perform the same function as Rahul Gandhi’s data analyst Praveen Chakravarty who designed an app that was mistakenly using the feedback of Congress workers to think this was broader public sentiment — and many of those Congress workers on the app were fake.
Contrast this to how Democrats in the United States are behaving right now. Joe Biden has a comfortable 10 percentage point lead over Donald Trump in myriad surveys. He’s leading even in most swing states. And yet, Democrats are so afraid of becoming complacent that they are not believing these surveys. “For the Democratic operatives who lived the Clinton disappointment up close, even the slightest flicker of positivity can cause them to recoil,” reports CNN.
In India, we’ve seen quite the opposite. The more Rahul Gandhi fails, the more love and support he gets from his liberal echo chamber, like a mother getting over-protective about her bullied child.
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The last refuge of the loser
Ideology is the last refuge of the loser. Since the 2019 defeat, when it became clear that 2014 was no black swan event, Rahul Gandhi has decided to use ideology as a cover for his political failures. He can’t win elections, his liberal echo-chamber says, because he doesn’t pander to majoritarian instincts. In other words, all electoral politics is majoritarian. The people are evil, they don’t deserve Rahul Gandhi.
It must be stressed that this is a post-2019 phenomenon, because Rahul Gandhi was very happy to try realpolitik before that. Since 2016, he had made it a practice to visit one temple after another before every election. He was positioning himself as a “janeu-dhari” “Shiv bhakt”. Now, suddenly, realpolitik is bad.
“The shameful truth is that many Indians don’t consider Dalits, Muslims, Tribals to be human,” tweets Rahul Gandhi. No politician who wants to win people’s votes tells them they are bad. Certainly not at a time when the people are swept away by a nationalist upsurge. Modi tells people they are great and Rahul tells people they’re bad. Who’s likely to win votes?
This is not to say that the Congress shouldn’t fight caste or communalism. But the way to do it in electoral politics is persuasion. Electoral politics — if not all politics — is about persuading people to agree with you. Even a social reformer has to persuade. And you don’t persuade anyone by saying they’re just bad people. This is like Hillary Clinton’s “Basket of deplorable” mistake.
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Rahul Gandhi’s Lefticide
Rahul Gandhi’s echo chamber is instead comparing him — with a straight face — to Mahatma Gandhi. They’re praising his courage to speak the truth no other politician will. This is why no other politician is doing as badly in politics as Rahul Gandhi.
With due apologies to Bertolt Brecht, the Rahul Gandhi fan club is basically saying, ‘The people don’t have faith in Rahul Gandhi. Let us change the people.’
It is true that some of the most influential leaders in Indian politics spoke the truth to the people about their own ills: Mahatma Gandhi and Jayaprakash Narayan are two names that come to mind. They saw themselves, for the most part, as social reformers. They could afford to do this because they didn’t contest elections. Rahul Gandhi can’t become a new-age Baba or Guru and also want to do well in electoral politics. The two don’t go together. Electoral politicians present themselves as being representatives of the masses. Only if you are an activist, NGO-wallah, a serial PIL filer or a social reformer can you afford to posit yourself as standing against the people.
But Rahul Gandhi won’t see this. He will point you to this liberal echo chamber, just as he did to the 2019 rallies, and say, look, it’s working. When asked about votes, his liberal echo-chamber will tell you it is more important to be morally correct than to win votes. It is best not to win votes if you have to be communal and casteist and pander to the base instincts of voters, they say. This is an example of Leftist suicide. May we call it ‘Lefticide’.
‘Lefticide’ is an old habit of Indian Leftists. For decades, they have tried their best to pursue ideological purity at the cost of establishing a mass connect. This is why Leftists have become irrelevant in electoral politics. Rahul Gandhi’s liberal echo chamber is taking him in the same direction. These liberals who lead Rahul Gandhi away from mass politics should be held responsible for enabling Hindutva.
The author is contributing editor to ThePrint. Views are personal.