Anyone who saw or heard Rahul Gandhi’s speech in Parliament on Wednesday must be asking the same questions: Is this the man the BJP used to dismiss as a joker? The man who it said would never amount to anything? The guy who it hoped would always lead the Congress because, under him, the latter never had any hope of revival?
It is nobody’s case that Rahul is now a great orator. Or a master politician for that matter. But it is hard to dispute that he made an extremely effective intervention, tearing into the Narendra Modi government with intelligence and vigour. What’s more, even the rest of the opposition, which had once privately joined the BJP in sneering at him, seemed thrilled and enthused by his frontal attack on the government.
Joker? Buffoon? Pappu?
Hardly. The BJP will have to think of new insults.
So what has changed? Why did Rahul Gandhi seem more effective in Parliament on Wednesday? Why does he seem much more like a substantial opposition leader now than he ever did before?
I reckon that Rahul has turned his image around and grown in genuine confidence (not the stubborn bravado that marked his early years in opposition) because of a variety of factors. Here, in no particular order, are some of them.
Also read: BJP has done a huge favour to Rahul Gandhi — gifted him his lost credibility
Stepping down as Congress president
As we all know, Rahul resigned as Congress president shortly after the party’s defeat in the 2019 Lok Sabha election. But then, instead of letting somebody else take over, he hung around as an extra-constitutional authority. Further, his sister Priyanka Gandhi also joined him as co-boss. All it did was lend substance to the BJP’s claim that the current generation of Gandhis had turned the Congress into a family party, one that was no different from, say, the Shiv Sena or the Akali Dal. (Both parties, ironically enough, were among the BJP’s earliest allies.)
You could argue, in the Congress’s defence, that the Covid-19 pandemic made it difficult to hold organisational elections sooner. But now that these elections have finally been held and Mallikarjun Kharge elected as Rahul’s successor, the family-party charge has been much weakened.
Moreover, it is also now clear that Kharge is actually better at running the organisation than Rahul ever was. There is hardly any simmering dissent and the charge frequently levelled against Rahul by Congressmen — that he was inaccessible — now matters much less. Kharge meets everyone and makes decisions. The days of waiting months for an appointment with the party president and then hanging around at Tughlaq Lane for hours on end because Rahul’s on-time performance has always been terrible are now long past.
Most important: Rahul Gandhi himself seems freer and much more his own man now that he has been rid of the organisational responsibilities he was never very good at.
Bharat Jodo Yatra
This was the turning point. One of Rahul’s problems was that he had lost control of his own image. How he was perceived was largely a function of how biased news channels portrayed him and how the BJP’s social media glove puppets and two rupee-wallahs made fun of him.
The Bharat Jodo Yatra gave people a chance to see Rahul Gandhi as he really was. No matter what government-approved scripts the anchors in the Noida studios were made to read from, the reporters on the ground were all uniformly impressed by Rahul’s dedication and faithfully reported the good response to the Yatra.
The sight of Rahul walking for thousands of miles also killed off the BJP-created caricature of him as a spoilt brat who made guest appearances in India before taking a private plane to his next foreign holiday.
Also read: BJP is obsessed with Nehru, freedom struggle. This keeps Rahul Gandhi in the news forever
Love is the issue
Until the Bharat Jodo Yatra, Rahul had not really found an issue to make his own. He lost the 2019 general election by trying unsuccessfully to prove that Prime Minister Modi was a crook even as the latter shrewdly focussed on drumming up a threat to India from its so-called enemies, both internal and external, and how he alone had the ability to protect the country. (The Pulwama-Balakot combination.)
In the initial years of the BJP’s second term, Rahul floundered. But in the run-up to the Yatra, he finally found an issue that resonated with people: India is being divided by hate; let love be the answer.
That’s what the Bharat Jodo Yatra was about and Rahul has stuck to that message, hammering away at it again and again, most recently on Wednesday when he spoke about the government’s attempts to create two Manipurs and PM Modi’s unwillingness to even visit the state and offer succour to those who so desperately needed it.
As communal tensions rise, there will be more violent incidents that no central government can control. The Gurugram riots showed us how the BJP’s associate organisations can cause havoc without any permission from the Centre. The railway constable who went looking for Muslims to kill on a train in what, even the government now accepts, was clearly a hate crime, did not act on any central directive.
As hate spreads, its manifestations and consequences become harder and harder to control. And even those Hindus who don’t particularly like Muslims become perturbed by the violence, the tension and the atmosphere of instability and uncertainty.
So Rahul’s message that India needs more love and harmony and less hatred has a certain resonance.
Also read: If Manipur was on fire for 6 weeks under UPA, would Manmohan Singh have kept quiet?
Parliamentary disqualification
It’s not easy to make people feel sorry for Rahul Gandhi, with all his advantages of birth. But the BJP has managed it, nevertheless.
The defamation case filed against him by a BJP supporter in the party’s stronghold of Gujarat over remarks that were made thousands of miles away was crucial in evoking sympathy for Rahul. So was the jail sentence: the maximum possible in a case of criminal defamation. As the Supreme Court has pointed out, if the jail term had been for even a day less, Rahul could have kept his Lok Sabha membership.
I would never dream of questioning the wisdom and judgment of the Gujarat courts but we now have the Supreme Court’s view that the sentence was much too harsh. Which is why it has been stayed.
When Congressmen say that the whole idea was just to disqualify Rahul from Parliament, people ask: why do they need to do that? If he is as much of a buffoon as the BJP claims he is, why go to such lengths?
Judging by the speed with which the Speaker’s office has restored Rahul’s membership of the Lok Sabha along with such perks as his official residence, perhaps there is a recognition that a tactical mistake was made in filing the case.
For whatever reason, the case and the unprecedentedly harsh prison sentence have made Rahul seem like a man who was victimised.
And now to work!
Now begins the hard part. Most people believe that the BJP has the next election sewn up, so the most Rahul can hope for is to reduce the BJP’s majority and emerge as the moral and political centre of the opposition.
Even that won’t be easy. Over the next few months, we shall see if he can manage to turn the conventional wisdom around and restore the Congress to its historical primacy in Indian politics.
Vir Sanghvi is a print and television journalist, and talk show host. He tweets @virsanghvi. Views are personal.
(Edited by Prashant)