Rahul redefining his politics through the yatra

Amistake we have made in the case of former Congress president Rahul Gandhi is that we assume he is a Congress politician like any other, and that when he says he won’t, he would. So, when he resigned as Congress chief after the 2019 Lok Sabha election defeat, we assumed that it was an empty gesture, and that he would resume office under pressure from party members.

It was, indeed, the case that he was pressured to take back his resignation. At that time, he said something quite significant. He said neither he nor the members of his family would take up the office of party president. Everyone, including the Congress watchers in the media, brushed it aside as fluff of no significance. And when Sonia Gandhi was made the interim president, it seemed that he was proved wrong. Rahul did not say anything further.

After Mallikarjun Kharge’s election, he said he would follow Kharge’s decisions. Again, it was seen as a hypocritical statement. It is now reported that he refused to meet Rajasthan Chief Minister Ashok Gehlot and Chhattisgarh Chief Minister Bhupesh Baghel, making it clear that the head of the party is Kharge and there is no separate power centre.

A situation is now emerging where Kharge will have to manage the party on his own and he cannot any more refer issues to the Gandhis. And it might turn out to be challenging for Kharge because this is something that has not been done for more than two decades.

Rahul is determined to cut the umbilical cord between the Gandhi family and the party in terms of power and domination. This is still at a very nebulous stage, and until it takes a definite form, people would not believe it. And there would be many camp followers of the Gandhis in the party who would want Kharge to toe the imagined Gandhi family line. But Rahul is not likely to encourage any more this shadow power play.

The effort of Rahul Gandhi to displace himself and the family from the power equation in the party seems a little too good to be true. But he is trying hard to achieve it and it may take a long time before the Congress will learn to stand on its own feet.

In the meanwhile, how does Rahul want to define his own political role? His Bharat Jodo Yatra is becoming a largely his own effort to bring people together, which seems to have had a good response in south India, and it is to be seen whether it would mean anything in the north. The yatra is his own outreach programme, and what he is doing benefits the party as well.

It may sound laughable but what he is trying to do is what Mahatma Gandhi did. He remained outside of the Congress because he did not want his political and personal views to be that of the Congress, but the respect he commanded and the goodwill he generated was transferred to the Congress account. The respect that Rahul is able to command in his own way and the goodwill he is able to generate will redound to the Congress.

Rahul seems to have realised that one way of fighting a political rival like the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the populist authoritarianism of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, which has gained traction among large sections of the Hindus in the Hindi heartland, cannot be countered through strengthening the Congress party.

The majoritarian politics and the religious polarisation in the name of nationalism that the BJP and Modi are flaunting needs a people’s response and the response has to be more than political. The success of the BJP in spreading Hindu communalism in large parts of north India has gone beyond mere politics. It has poisoned the social and cultural atmosphere.

There is not much of a guarantee that Rahul’s mass contact programme through the yatra and his attempt to bring people at large into the political dialogue will succeed. He has refused to play the soft Hindutva card, which he may have had to play as party president in the context of elections.

He is now free to express a broader view of communal amity, and criticise the BJP in terms of its economic failures. He has still not succeeded in articulating a stronger message against Modi’s economic populism. But Rahul has sensed rightly that things are quite bad on the economic front and people are feeling the pinch. He has to drive home the point. This is indeed the difficult part of his intended programme because Modi is mimicking all populist measures that the Congress party would have taken had it been in power. He has to think hard to look for an economic programme which is in step with the changing needs of the people.

The people in the country do not need doles. That is old welfarism, and the Congress practised it in a limited way. The Modi government has made doles in different guises the main plank of the economic policy because it is not able to innovate or create new jobs. Also, for Modi and the BJP, the freebies that they roll out is a secondary aspect of their agenda though Prime Minister Modi claims that the freebies are the sin of opposition parties and not that of his government. The main thrust of the BJP is Hindu communalism in the name of Hindu nationalism.

The Hindutva drive will run out of steam sooner than later, but it is necessary for the Congress and other opposition parties to pinpoint the folly and immorality of communalism in a country like India.

Rahul has adopted a subtle campaign strategy of bringing people from different communities together through the yatra, while he hits out at the economic malcontents of Modi’s India. Rahul faces an uphill task because he is running against the zeitgeist — communalism, not just in India but across the globe. Educated middle class Hindus think that there is nothing wrong in hating people of other faiths and other nationalities. To breach this wall of solid prejudice and hatred is a hard task for anyone.