Rahul Gandhi and the politics of disappearing acts

Does he run away on result day, avoiding his hapless regional ally because he already knows what the outcome will be? Rahul Gandhi, former Congress president, was apparently in the Gulf when the Bihar election results — a landslide for the Nitish Kumar–Janata Dal United (JDU) combine — came in.

Tejaswi Yadav, Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) chief, was left facing a family blow-up and rebellious workers after the Congress crashed to six seats despite contesting 61. Last time around, it had won 19 seats, while the RJD fell to its lowest ever: 25 seats, down from 75.

Similarly, after a disastrous result in Uttar Pradesh following a failed tie-up with Akhilesh Yadav of the Samajwadi Party, Gandhi had vanished, leaving a forlorn Yadav to face a press conference alone.

During the Bihar campaign, Gandhi inexplicably went on a long trip to South America. “When he should have been campaigning in Chapra, he was meeting people in Columbia. How many seats did we win in Columbia?” asks a bitter Bihar Congress leader who lost his seat.

Gandhi, 55, is an heirloom dynastic politician — son of former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, grandson of former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, and great-grandson of India’s first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru. His political trajectory mirrors India’s steady disenchantment with inherited privilege and “nepo babies”. Once seen as a shoo-in for PM — an automatic choice, with the late Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh saying he would step aside anytime for Gandhi — he didn’t join the Singh cabinet because “Gandhis only became PM”, as an adoring Congress durbari explained to me when I asked.

It’s been steadily downhill from there, with Gandhi losing three general elections on the trot while increasing his iron grip on the Congress party, even as a trickle of talent continues to bleed from India’s oldest political organisation.

Gandhi is an election tourist who hops from issue to issue, never quite sticking with what he raises. His rage at Modi is real and ensures he makes personal attacks such as the failed “chowkidar chor hai” and now “vote chori” (vote stealing). The trouble this time is that rather than accepting the landslide verdict humbly, Gandhi and his party are in denial — blaming the Election Commission for “stealing the vote” rather than accepting that even a crooked poll panel can’t manufacture the largest voter turnout in Bihar’s history and a landslide win. When not alleging “vote chori”, the Congress makes bitter digs at “revdi” (welfare measures) such as the Rs10,000 promised to every woman in Bihar. Actually, all parties should introspect on the deep crisis of jobs and the economy, which makes people crave such doles.

The Congress has now lost Maharashtra, Haryana (both it was expected to win), and now Bihar — all on the trot. It does not exist in Delhi now. Except for Himachal Pradesh, the Congress has no government in any state in the North. In Uttar Pradesh, which sends 80 MPs to the Lok Sabha and is the gateway to power in Delhi, the Congress has withered away and eroded its own vote base. A senior UP leader who quit the Congress and joined the BJP said it exists as a “zombie in UP, after a long period when the Gandhi family acted as absentee landlords”. The Congress is in power in only two states — Karnataka and Telangana — yet it still commands a loyal 20 percent vote share across India, which is why we are talking about it in this column.

Without the Congress and its pan-India footprint, there can be no national opposition to Modi’s BJP, because the other parties the BJP contests against are regional outfits led by satraps like Mamata Banerjee in West Bengal and M.K. Stalin in Tamil Nadu. The BJP gets a tough fight from Banerjee and Stalin yet gets a walkover from the Congress in a straight contest.

Gandhi supporters and the durbar around the family now resemble the twilight zone of the later Mughals — “Sultanat-e-Shah Alam, Az Dilli ta Palam”, a couplet that mocks the diminished authority of the seventeenth Mughal emperor Shah Alam. It’s truly apt for the Congress today.

So, leaving aside the durbar loyalists, what should the Congress do if it doesn’t want its 20 percent vote share cannibalised every election? After all, a political party only exists to win elections and get into power, and the old compact the Gandhi family had with Congress leaders was that it would win elections and they, in turn, would be the supreme arbiters of the party. That is no longer true.

Let me offer Gandhi some unsolicited advice: perhaps it’s time to step aside from politics and let the party throw up organic leadership. It’s clear Gandhi does not enjoy politics, and India simply does not connect with him. The only time he made a difference was during the Bharat Jodo Yatra — and the BJP has now grabbed the initiative back.

India has a crisis of governance and a multitude of issues — poverty, unemployment, the world’s worst pollution, hostile neighbours, a foreign policy crisis, a security crisis — yet Gandhi doesn’t raise any of these, preferring personal attacks that don’t resonate with people looking for jobs and opportunities. Gandhi needs to end his relentless negativity and offer solutions if he wants to continue in politics. You can’t tire the voter out into eventually voting for you. Bihar saw no anti-incumbency after 20 years because people were terrified of the alternative.

Both Tejaswi Yadav and Gandhi need to introspect on why this is so. Why can’t Tejaswi add to his Yadav–Muslim vote base?

Unfortunately, Gandhi will not retire, and his coterie will continue calling the shots and blaming everything — even the voters — for defeats. Please allow me a rare historical indulgence again from the later Mughals:

“Like an imperial corpse

In its dread and seclusion

Armed and crowned

And still majestic,

Fell to dust at the mere breath of heaven —

So fell the Mughal empire.”

— Elizabeth Barrett Browning, from the poem Crowned and Buried, referring to Napoleon.