New Delhi: When Union Defence Minister Rajnath Singh made a veiled dig about Priyanka Gandhi Vadra being a “seasonal Hindu”, some Congress leaders were secretly chuffed. They saw it as an acknowledgement by the BJP high command of Priyanka’s growing political presence, according to sources.
Rajnath’s comments came on 13 June, a day after Priyanka Gandhi had kicked off the Congress’s Madhya Pradesh election campaign, instead of MP stalwarts like Kamal Nath or Digvijaya Singh. At a Jabalpur rally, she announced five guarantees of the party in the state and during her visit also performed a puja on the banks of the Narmada.
Thus, when the Defence Minister mentioned seasonal Hindus “suddenly remembering the Narmada” during his public meeting with farmers in MP’s Rajgarh, the Congress interpreted it as a signal that she was being taken seriously.
Ever since Priyanka resigned as the party’s Uttar Pradesh general secretary in-charge last October, months after the Congress’s dismal showing in the UP assembly elections, she seems to have been pushed forward in all poll-bound states as a ‘star campaigner’.
In February, after the party’s plenary session in Chhattisgarh’s Naya Raipur, it was Priyanka who had addressed a public rally while Sonia and Rahul Gandhi returned to Delhi.
In Karnataka, she was leading the charge against Prime Minister Narendra Modi during the campaign for the election that saw the Congress emerge victorious last month.
Then, right after her work in Karnataka was done, she was in Telangana to kickstart the party’s poll campaign in the state with a rally in Hyderabad. Her next stop was Madhya Pradesh. All three states— Chhattisgarh, Telangana, and MP— will be voting in the coming winter.
Other than these states, Congress sources said she will play a major role in the upcoming Rajasthan polls as well. They claim that her campaigns in Karnataka and Himachal Pradesh before that were “effective” and helped the party register much-needed wins.
“People were very affectionate towards her. People have a lot of love for her,” said senior Congress leader Ramesh Chennithala.
Chennithala also accompanied Priyanka and her brother Rahul Gandhi, to the latter’s constituency Wayanad in April. The visit came soon after Rahul’s disqualification from Parliament after he was convicted in a defamation case.
“I was there in Wayanad and people were mesmerised by her. Whenever people see her, they see Indira Gandhi,” Chennithala said. “She will definitely be an important campaign face of the party in the days to come.”
The Congress seems to be deploying a double-barrelled strategy when it comes to the Gandhi siblings, according to political analyst and professor of political science at Delhi University Dr Chandrachur Singh.
While Rahul talks about issues like corruption, price rise, and policy matters, Priyanka tries to build a more emotional connect.
“There is a lot of ‘meri maa’ or ‘mera bhai’ in her speeches. If you see it from an average middle-class perspective, the over-arching theme seems to be that the siblings were raised by a widowed mother and that the two have great camaraderie. This builds a lot of connect with people, especially women,” said Singh.
While a women-centric approach led by Priyanka in UP did not see the party gaining electorally, Congress sources say that they have come away with valuable lessons to engage with voters.
Fighting a ‘strategy war’?
When ThePrint reported last week that Priyanka Gandhi had quietly tendered her resignation as the Congress’s in-charge for UP last October, it led to several questions about her future role in the party.
Will she become the general secretary in charge of another state? Will she contest the Lok Sabha elections in 2024? Or will she focus on campaigning without an organisational role?
“One role of hers is very clear, which is that she will campaign extensively in election-going states,” said an All India Congress Committee (AICC) functionary who works closely with Priyanka.
“Her focus has expressly been on winning elections since Uttar Pradesh. She believes that while there is an ideological war, there is also a strategy war at play — and that war needs to be won in order to beat the BJP,” the functionary added.
According to a senior Congress leader, Priyanka Gandhi’s “realpolitik” approach to elections appeals to many in the party, especially those who are disgruntled with her brother.
“People who don’t like Rahul Gandhi gravitate towards her. She’s also the more accessible of the two and is not wary of ambitious people,” he added.
This leader claimed that Priyanka contesting the Lok Sabha elections was a possibility and if she did so, it would be a “boost” to the party.
“A lot will depend on Wayanad,” said the source working with Priyanka, when asked about her contesting the polls. The Lok Sabha seat in Kerala has fallen vacant after Rahul Gandhi’s disqualification from the Lok Sabha. Whether he will contest from Wayanad again or not will depend on whether he gets judicial redressal.
“It is unlikely that she will be contesting from either Amethi or Raebareli (the two family bastions of the Gandhis in Uttar Pradesh). If she contests, it will be from a state like Karnataka or Chhattisgarh or some such, where apart from the seat she’s contesting, she can also influence results in the adjoining five to six seats,” he said.
According to analyst Singh, Priyanka is very “deliberate” in her strategy to connect with women during campaigns.
“It is deliberate optics to show her as Rahul’s kavach (talisman) against the BJP,” he added.
Since 1962, when the Election Commission started breaking down voter data according to gender, the Congress party always cornered a larger share of women’s votes than other parties. But this pattern was broken in 2019 when the Modi-led BJP government got the greatest share of women’s votes.
Further, in the 2022 assembly polls to five states, more women reportedly voted for the BJP than men.
Headline moments, but no big wins
As general secretary in-charge for UP, Priyanka fronted the Congress’ campaign in the 2022 state elections with her “Ladki Hoon, Ladd Sakti Hoon (I’m a woman, I can fight)” pitch.
In the polls, in which Congress decided to go solo, 40 per cent of its tickets were given to women. This strategy, however, did not help the party win seats. The Congress sent only two MLAs to the assembly and as many as 97 per cent of the party’s candidates lost their deposits.
But in the two months that Priyanka camped in the state, she did manage to generate many headline-grabbing moments.
One notable incident was when she, accompanied by Rahul, visited the family of the Hathras rape victim. Then, when several farmers were run over in Lakhimpur Kheri by a convoy of cars, including one allegedly driven by BJP minister Ajay Mishra’s son, Priyanka made news when the police stopped her from reaching the spot. She was subsequently detained at a guest house. In a viral video, she was seen sweeping the floor of this building.
Similarly, when her car was involved in a minor collision in Uttar Pradesh, a video of her personally cleaning the windshield also gained media coverage.
“She likes building a personal connect. During the CAA-NRC protests, she built a relationship with a little girl from Azamgarh. The girl had started crying when Priyankaji met her during the protests and they exchanged numbers. Even now they keep in touch. In fact, when it’s the girl’s birthday, Priyankaji asks me to ensure that a gift and a note is sent to her,” said Shahnawaz Alam, head of Uttar Pradesh Congress’ minority cell, the team for which was appointed by Priyanka.
Why did UP experiment fail?
Priyanka’s team created a “barrier” between her and other leaders and restricted who she could interact with, according to two ex-Congress leaders from UP who worked with her before they quit the party.
This left many leaders disgruntled and her tenure in UP saw many big names in the state like Jitin Prasada, RPN Singh and Lalitesh Tripathi quit the party.
“Priyanka used to give a lot of time to the organisation, but her team did most of the political liaising for her. We would be given work but our decisions would not be taken based on our feedback,” said one of these leaders, now a Samajwadi Party MLA in UP.
According to the MLA, only a rarefied circle had any access to Priyanka, while others were not given much consideration.
“She would only end up meeting a couple of people. There are workers even now who have cases against them from rail roko protests and other such things, but the party has done nothing to help them,” he alleged.
Another former Congress leader, now in the BSP, was a little more charitable.
“Priyanka and her team were all very hard-working and she herself is very brave,” he said, adding that she wasn’t afraid of facing a lathi-charge or other harsh situations.
However, this leader too said that access to Priyanka and Rahul was an issue.
“The only feedback that I’d given to both Rahul and Priyanka while I was in the party is that they should develop a mechanism of meeting people directly, without an appointment,” the leader said. “Now they only meet people cleared by their teams.”
Learnings from UP
One of the lessons from the UP loss that Priyanka took to Himachal Pradesh first and then to Karnataka was the importance of establishing direct connect with the electorate, according to party sources.
“She is charismatic and puts in a lot of effort to connect. She even learns the local lingo and peppers it through her speeches,” said a Congress functionary working with Priyanka in Karnataka.
“Even after a day of campaigning, when she comes back to the hotel, she will meet people at the lobby and take pictures with them. There is still a mystique around the Gandhi family, and such efforts help the party,” added the functionary. “She also applies her mind to what is given to her and is flexible while working. She does her homework and is prepared at most times.”
Congress MLA from Himachal Pradesh and head of the Himachal Pradesh Tourism Development Board, Raghubir Singh Bali, who worked with Priyanka during the state campaign, mentioned similar traits.
He recounted an incident that took place during his campaign.
“She was to come and campaign in Nagrota Bagwa and the road to the rally venue was chock-a-block. We were waiting for the rally to start and were getting late. I requested her to get off and walk the rest of the distance. At the time, her security personnel, the state in-charge and even the Chhattisgarh Chief Minister advised her against it. But she got out of the car to walk the distance amidst the crowds,” said Bali.
He claimed that while Priyanka was walking to the venue, she saw an old woman whose chappals had come off in the rush.
“Priyanka Gandhi stopped, bowed down, and placed the chappal on the woman’s feet. It was a spontaneous reaction. Neither the woman’s chappals falling off or her stop was staged,” he said.
Bali said that Priyanka was also involved in monitoring the design and execution of the Himachal campaign.
“Her follow-ups are what set her apart. Once she’s assigned work or has floated a scheme or a policy, she will follow-up on what’s happening to it. She takes decisions quickly and sticks to them, but also introspects later to see what could have been done better,” he added.
The source who works closely with Priyanka, quoted earlier, said that when it came to the decision of promising the Old Pension Scheme in Himachal Pradesh, Priyanka was present in each meeting.
“She was clear that we should only announce schemes which we can implement, else it’ll have an adverse impact on other states that are going to polls,” he said.
Priyanka held 36 rallies in Karnataka — more than Rahul’s 32, according to AICC sources, she has a “strike rate” of 72 per cent, a reference to wins registered in the places where she campaigned.
Taking on Modi
While Prime Minister Narendra Modi usually avoids bringing Priyanka into his line of fire, she has been increasingly taking him on.
In the Himachal Pradesh and Karnataka election, while the BJP heavily relied on Modi as its campaign face, the Congress positioned Priyanka Gandhi as its star campaigner.
However, the approach she took in the two elections differed.
“In Himachal, the feedback that she received was to stick to local issues and talk about badlav (change). It was thought-out strategy to stay away from naming Prime Minister Modi. Instead, the focus was on the then incumbent Jai Ram Thakur government and how they didn’t fulfill their promises”, said the AICC functionary quoted above.
In Karnataka, though, Priyanka was more adversarial towards Modi.
When he complained at a rally in Bidar that the Congress had hurled gaaliyan (insults) at him “91 times”, Priyanka took him on in a speech at Jamkhandi. She noted that if the BJP’s insults against her family were listed, several books might be filled.
She marvelled that she was seeing a PM “crying” in front of the public for the first time. “Rather than hearing your problems, he talks about his complaints,” she said.
In another scathing speech in Vijayapura district, she asked how it was that the “omniscient and omnipresent” PM couldn’t see the corruption in Karnataka or the actions of the “40 per cent commission government”— an oft-used slogan by the Congress to denote the alleged demand by BJP leaders of a 40 per cent commission to clear bills for government tenders.
“She used to monitor Modi’s speeches and take notes. When he started playing the victim card, we knew we had to step in. That was also the time when the BJP was desperately banking on the PM. We saw that the attacks had resonance,” the AICC functionary said. “More importantly, Modi did not go after her like he would go after Rahul.”
This is an updated version of the article.
(Edited by Asavari Singh)
Also Read: Behind Congress’s Karnataka win, state chief, ‘organisation man’ & now ‘Vokkaliga face’ Shivakumar