Rahul Gandhi instils hope in Congress

With the coronation of Rahul Gandhi, 47, as the president of the party on Saturday, Indian National Congress has indeed turned a new leaf.

After 19 years at the helm, when Sonia Gandhi stepped aside for son Rahul to accept the stewardship of the Congress, it marked the anointment of the fourth generation of the Nehru-Gandhi clan to lead the oldest political party in the world’s largest democracy.

Starting with independent India’s first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru, followed by Indira Gandhi, Rajiv Gandhi, Sonia and now with Rahul, Congress and its grassroots workers have reposed their faith repeatedly in the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty to lead the party through its many trials and tribulations spanning 132 years.

However, what makes Rahul’s emergence immensely significant is the changing socio-political and economic contours in the world’s second-most populous nation.

Coming out of the cocoon of a socialist mould, post-liberalisation India has seen aspiration levels of its masses shoot up exponentially.

If that is one side of the coin, then on the other side there is a very regimented mindset that has come into play recently, as manifest in Bharatiya Janata Party’s rise to power and with it, the rising clamour among rightist fringe groups to replace India’s multicultural mosaic with a monochrome of conformism to a very rigid interpretation of Hindutva (Hindu nationalism).

With India standing at this existential crossroads, emerges Rahul Gandhi. To counter the growing spectre of majoritarian absolutism and in order to be better-attuned to the changing mindscape of an ambitious nation, where 65 per cent of the 1.25 billion-strong population is aged below 35, the Congress needed to hit the reboot button soon enough.

A confident, no-holds-barred Rahul during the just-concluded Gujarat and Himachal Pradesh assembly election campaigns is an indicator of India’s principal opposition party finally turning the corner.

Having seen from close quarters grandmother Indira and later father Rajiv martyred by forces intent on destabilising India, Rahul knows it better than perhaps anyone else that his surname bears the burden of deliverance like no other in contemporary India.

His speech at his coronation ceremony – “Like many Indians across the country, I am an idealist” — bore a strong echo of what Rajiv had once said: “I am young. I too have a dream.” Firing up the dream of a modern, more inclusive India with an idealist, secularist leader’s zeal is what not just an average Congressman, but the vast majority of Indians will now be expecting from Rahul.