A British Conservative Party leader is probably the last person an Indian opposition leader like Rahul Gandhi would like to listen to today. After all, the Tories turned prime ministership into a game of musical chairs until they were voted out in July.
As they proceed to elect a new party leader to replace Rishi Sunak, they get a piece of advice from William Hague, the former Leader of Opposition who had led the party from 1997 to 2001. I am tempted to borrow some of his ideas as they seem relevant to the principal Opposition leader in India, Rahul Gandhi.
Hague had taken over the Conservative Party’s reins after its crushing defeat in the 1997 general election only to lead it to another debacle in the next election four years later. One can trust him on what an Opposition party mustn’t do. In an article titled “Tories will find great dangers in opposition”, published in The Times on 3 September, Hague said that the next Tory leader must resist a host of temptations.
Unmindful of unintended consequences
First, he wrote, is the temptation to sound decisive by making policy commitments when it’s either rash or too early to do so. “The next election is 4-5 years away. By then the economy, Europe and indeed the world might have changed,” he argued. Essentially, he suggested, although not in as many words, that an Opposition party that hopes to be in power in future should be circumspect while making commitments. That’s something Rahul Gandhi needs to think over. If the Congress had come to power in 2024 and implemented its manifesto, the total cost, as estimated by economists in a Business Today report, would have been Rs 22 lakh crore per annum — that’s around 85 per cent of estimated net tax receipts of Rs 25.83 lakh crore in 2024-2025.
It would have been a prescription for fiscal mess. Any party that hoped to form the next government wouldn’t come out with such a manifesto – that is, if it also hoped to get more than one term in power. The Congress party’s manifesto obviously had defeatism written all over it. With a coalition government in place and the gap between Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s and Rahul Gandhi’s popularity ratings shrinking, the Congress must listen to Hague about not making rash policy pronouncements. For instance, the Congress that was initially criticising the faulty rollout of the goods and services tax (GST) is beginning to sound like a GST sceptic, promising GST 2.0 and one exemption after another.
The Congress and its allies are gung-ho about the caste census. It has certainly put the Narendra Modi-led government on the backfoot and prompted the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) to endorse it. But the Opposition should desist from projecting caste census as a panacea for all socio-economic inequalities. So far, as we know about the Congress’ plan, it entails reservation in proportion with the population, breaching the 50 per cent ceiling, ensuring representation to underprivileged communities at the highest echelons of power—say, as Secretaries to the government of India. We don’t know any further.
Is that good enough, given how the Congress is promising the moon to the other backward classes through the caste census? Would the Congress, when in power, start allocating resources for each caste and sub-caste? Will it implement private sector reservation? What else? In its haste or desperation to counter Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his politics, the Opposition looks unmindful of the unintended consequences of conjuring Mandal-II. That’s just one example. A party that aspires to return to power and rule the country for long has to have a plan to deal with such consequences while presenting an alternative agenda of governance to the people.
Also read: Why PM Modi has staked claim for a fourth term so early in his third
More ground to cover
William Hague said that if Labour’s poll ratings languish, it’s Reform UK, a right-wing, populist party, that will, for the moment, flourish. He, therefore, cautions the Conservative Party leadership against the other temptation—strong urge to ape its policies, adopt its assertions and indulge in populism. “But that will not bring the rebuilding of a competent party of government with broad appeal to a new generation of voters,” wrote Hague.
In the context of a third alternative in India, one can think of the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), although it doesn’t necessarily fit in the Right-wing category – in terms of its stated policies, at least. Hague’s advice has come a wee bit late for the Congress though. The party has already fully adopted the AAP’s politics of freebies. So much so that even Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has avidly embraced what he used to denounce as revdis. Rahul Gandhi must pay attention to Hague here: This is not the way to rebuild a competent party of government.
The former Conservative Party leader mentioned a few other temptations that he said Rishi Sunak’s successor must resist but they might not be very pertinent to Rahul Gandhi. I would rather draw up a list of other temptations that the Congress leader shouldn’t yield to.
To start with, Gandhi should not look at Lok Sabha results as a thumping endorsement of his politics. The Congress has regained some ground in some states but it should also thank the BJP’s politics and governance for this. The Congress and its allies gained 41 seats along Rahul Gandhi’s Bharat Jodo Yatra routes, as per an analysis by The Indian Express. His Kanyakumari to Kashmir Bharat Jodo Yatra covered 71 Lok Sabha seats across 12 states and two Union Territories. The Congress won 23 of the 56 seats it contested along this route in 2024 polls—as against 15 out of 65 in 2019.
The INDIA bloc allies won six out of 14 seats they contested in 2024 as against two out of four in 2019. The Bharat Jodo Nyay Yatra covered 82 Lok Sabha seats. The Congress won 17 of the 49 seats it contested along its route—as against six out of 71 in 2019. The INDIA bloc won 18 out of 33 seats they contested in 2024.
Evidently, Rahul Gandhi’s two yatras did pay electoral dividends and he has reasons to be pleased with their success. But he still has a lot more ground to cover. A closer look at The Indian Express analysis offers a reality check. The yatra didn’t have any impact in Andhra Pradesh and Telangana. The Congress lost the two seats that the yatra covered in Andhra Pradesh. It covered seven seats in Telangana, out of which the Congress had won one in 2019. The result was the same in 2024, too. Similarly, the two yatras had no electoral impact in Delhi, Gujarat, Himachal Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, West Bengal, Odisha, and Chhattisgarh in terms of gains in seats compared to 2019.
The states through which the yatras passed and where the Congress did well were Maharashtra, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, and Bihar, among others. But these states were also the ones where many other factors were working, ranging from the Opposition’s solid alliance to the ruling party’s coalition troubles, internecine wars in the BJP, and lack of support from the RSS on the ground for ‘turncoat-candidates’, among many others.
The fourth temptation Gandhi needs to resist is to look at the results as the success of his social engineering politics, especially the push for caste census. Even Yogendra Yadav, a big advocate of the caste census, has conceded that the 2024 election “did not see any major shift in the voting preferences of major social groups at the national level”. On the other hand, the BJP retained its core vote among the upper-caste and middle-class Hindus, and Extremely Backward Classes (EBCs) and added to its lead among the Adivasis, Yadav wrote in ThePrint.
It’s also validated by the fact that the Congress’ vote share has remained virtually constant in the last three Lok Sabha elections. It secured 21.19 per cent votes in the 2024 general election, an increase of 1.7 percentage point compared to 2019. Chest-thumping and back-patting in the Opposition camp is, however, way out of proportion to this increase.
The fifth temptation Gandhi should resist is to treat the INDIA bloc partners as permanent friends. The fact is that most of them have come up and grown at the cost of the Congress. A common enemy, the BJP, has brought them together but they are Rahul Gandhi’s friends only as long as the BJP remains a big threat. The Congress still remains Enemy No 2 for most of them. If the Congress aspires to regain its old glory, it has to come at the cost of these INDIA bloc partners, sooner than later.
DK Singh is Political Editor at ThePrint. He tweets @dksingh73. Views are personal.
(Edited by Aamaan Alam Khan)
Another unpaid consultant from The Print with unsolicited advice. Maybe The Print needs to stop calling itself as a journalism endeavour and label itself as a consultant to RaGa, so it gets paid for it’s efforts and doesn’t have to seek subscriptions.
Rahul knows everything. He is a certified intellectual now. There is nothing left for him to learn in the world.
Raga will learn nothing. He only cares to win the election atleast for one time and sit on the throne. He doesn’t care for this country. His senseless ideas will rip this country apart.