Rahul Gandhi’s resistance needs a plan

WHEN I read Rahul Gandhi's latest speech to Opposition leaders, I was reminded of Karl Marx. The revolutionary socialist wrote: "Don Quixote long ago paid the penalty for wrongly imagining that knight errantry was compatible with all economic forms of society." Rahul appears to have the same problem when it comes to his politics.

This is because the bulk of what Rahul Gandhi said harks back to the political practices of the Gandhian Congress during the Raj, when India was ruled by an extractive and alien colonial state. Rahul Gandhi seems to think that there is a parallel today in the nature of the Indian state, because it is no longer neutral. According to him, all its institutions have been subverted to keep the BJP in power.

So, it follows that if the INDIA partners — the Samajwadi Party, All India Trinamool Congress, Rashtriya Janata Dal and others — believe that the old "political instruments" can work any longer, they are living in a "dreamland".

Rahul seems to be suggesting that the standard methods of parliamentary democracy — legislative debates, floor management and electoral campaigns — are worthless now, because the BJP "even controls the Election Commission," and "100% the elections are being stolen."

So, what is Rahul Gandhi's solution to this problem? The answer, he says, is resistance. "Resistance works... You don't need political architecture... You need the act of resistance." Apparently, this is what worked for the Congress 100 years ago — "We were a political organisation before 1927. The day Gandhiji said we want independence, we became a resistance movement."

Forget about the historical inaccuracy here — Gandhi was actually greatly miffed when Nehru and Bose piloted the call for ‘purna swaraj’ in the 1927 Madras Congress, calling it "hastily conceived and thoughtlessly passed." The bigger point is that Gandhian resistance was not some spontaneous personal act; it was carefully planned and executed by the party's organisation.

What organised action does Rahul have to offer? In his speech, he pointed to the protests against the mishandling of NEET and CBSE exams, the Great Nicobar campaign and his own Bharat Jodo Yatra.

In the exam scandal, Rahul did stand next to the key faces of the protest, but it was the Cockroach Janta Party that got most of the attention. Now, the Congress has announced a series of student conventions to take up the NEET and CBSE issues. In the Great Nicobar case, we saw a two-minute video of Rahul Gandhi's visit, a couple of Op-Eds, and speeches in Parliament. All of these are standard old-school "political instruments" that Rahul Gandhi claimed don't work anymore.

The Bharat Jodo Yatra is the only concrete example of a sustained campaign of connecting to voters that operated outside the traditional modes of political organisation. But that too ended in early 2023. We saw nothing like that ahead of the recent Assembly elections.

There are several important state elections coming up over the next year — Uttar Pradesh, Punjab and Uttarakhand. Yet there are no concrete plans outlined for how the Congress intends to convince people to vote for it, or its allies.

In fact, the AAP government in Punjab has indicated that it might bring the elections forward to this winter. The Congress is widely perceived to have got off on the wrong foot here. Instead of trusting the local leadership, the party has appointed three 'outsiders' — Ajay Maken, Meenakshi Natarajan and Bhajan Lal Jatav — as observers to assess the state's political situation.

Some are unhappy with what they see as feelers sent to Capt Amarinder Singh by the Gandhis to return to the Congress. Even former Amarinder loyalists are uncomfortable about the mixed messages emanating from New Delhi.

It is possible that Rahul Gandhi feels that none of these organisational issues really matter. As he told his INDIA allies, "the next election is already won." Senior journalist Aadesh Rawal has posted on X that Rahul has reportedly told party general secretaries and state presidents that the Congress is the only party moving ahead rapidly, and they can sit back and enjoy.

Can a party really come to power in this manner? The Indian National Congress of yore definitely did not leave things to providence. Rahul Gandhi's great grandfather spearheaded the party's mass contact programme, while Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel managed the organisational structure. This was a strategic choice Gandhi made to organise the 'resistance movement' effectively — with Nehru as the popular face and Patel as the man who held the party's structure together.

Most importantly, the Congress leadership of that time recognised that there could be no resistance without funds. Even the austere Gandhi, for all his opposition to industrialisation, had an overt alliance with India's entrepreneurs of that time. These entrepreneurs, in turn, ensured the Congress got enough money to sustain its campaigns.

The most famous of these was GD Birla. Gandhi acknowledged his friendship with Birla, and even stayed at various Birla Houses when he was in Delhi, Calcutta, Bombay or Pune. Another industrialist very close to Gandhi was Jamnalal Bajaj. The Tatas maintained an arm’s-length distance, but were seen to be sympathetic to the national movement.

Rahul Gandhi, on the other hand, has no clear programme to reach out to India Inc, even when there is significant disquiet among them about the state of India's economy. Until now, India's big business houses have been wary of Rahul because of the public positions he has taken against monopoly capital and neoliberal economic policies.

His slogans, like 'Suit-Boot ki Sarkar', have painted the government as pro-big business and, in turn, marked him as anti-business. And his recent Gandhian image-making will not help matters much.

Winning elections anywhere in the world requires tactical alliances between the powerful and the disempowered. The BJP has done that by simultaneously catering to the ultrarich and the poorest Indians.

There is a vast middle class, ranging from lower-middle to upper-middle-income voters, waiting to be tapped. Rahul Gandhi hasn't shown any signs that he has a strategy to win them over.