Despite its defeat in Gujarat, the Congress has a lot to smile about, for which it can credit Rahul. However, the road ahead holds tougher challenges.
New Delhi: The much-improved performance of the Congress in the Gujarat assembly elections comes as an endorsement of Rahul Gandhi’s transformation from a “part-time politician” to a serious leader and campaigner.
The result has much for the Congress to feel good about, given how many seats it has gained from its 2012 tally of 61, despite losing 14 MLAs to the BJP in August this year. Gujarat is a state where the Congress has a low cadre base, and its strategy to make a caste coalition seems to have worked in its favour.
When counting was completed Monday, the party and its allies had won 80 seats against 99 for the BJP.
In the past three months, Gandhi campaigned extensively in the state, leading to a close contest between the Congress and the BJP, a rarity since 2014. In other states, wherever the BJP and the Congress were in direct contest against each other, the Congress was almost wiped out.
Single-handed fight
“Everyone saw Rahul-ji worked very hard and was focused on issues which concern the people of Gujarat. As a party leader, he has proved himself,” Ashok Gehlot, Congress’s in-charge for Gujarat, told ThePrint.
Gujarat was a challenge Gandhi had to fight single-handedly. Congress insiders said he had given his best—he addressed 69 rallies across the state, focusing on issues that concerned the masses, and managed to silence his critics, who had called him a ‘reluctant prince’.
His emergence as the leader of the Congress, they said, is the biggest gain for the party in Gujarat – a leader who ran a near error-free campaign, and was quick to rectify his mistakes, something not seen from him in the past.
If the election results are anything to go by, Gandhi also managed to strike a chord with rural voters of Gujarat even though the overall impact was not good enough to dislodge the BJP from power in the prime minister’s home state.
“Our campaign was issue-based, and the BJP was playing on Gujarati asmita. We may have lost the election, but we have got success,” Gehlot said.
Miles to go
To be sure, the results in both Gujarat and Himachal Pradesh, coming two days after Gandhi formally assumed the role of party president, are also a reminder to Rahul that the road ahead is steep.
In a sense, the failure of the party in winning elections continued and the party is now in power in only four states—Punjab, Karnataka, Meghalaya and Mizoram. The Gujarat campaign has also raised questions about Rahul’s strategy and leadership.
Critics say that under him, the Congress adopted ‘soft Hindutva’ to improve its seat tally in Gujarat. The party chief himself visited more than 25 temples during his campaign, but that didn’t seem to work in the Congress’s favour.
“Going forward, Rahul Gandhi will have to explain how he is going to appeal to other parties to put up a united fight against the BJP if he continues to adopt a soft Hindutva approach,” said A.K. Verma, a Kanpur-based political analyst.
Since January 2013, when Gandhi became vice-president of the party, the Congress has won just two state elections – Karnataka and Punjab. If the party loses Karnataka next summer, the morale of its workers will crash again.
As the leader, the real challenge before Gandhi is to keep party workers motivated with regular communication and hard work on the ground, Congress insiders said. Another big challenge is to win hearts in urban areas, especially among the youth, who have constantly given the thumbs down to him and preferred Modi.
The battle for 2019 is still some way away, and the real question is whether Gandhi will be able to inject life into the moribund party by then and keep the morale of its workers high.