Call it the second coming of Rahul Gandhi. The 44-year-old Gandhi scion, currently the vice president of the Congress party and tipped to be the president of India’s oldest political party next month, has been in the news for all the wrong reasons for a couple of years at least.
Rahul is known for being soft-spoken and mild-mannered. He proved his worth when in the May 2009 general elections he was single-handedly responsible for winning 21 Lok Sabha seats out of 80 in India’s biggest and most politically volatile swing state — Uttar Pradesh. That performance was indeed impressive as the Congress party had been out of power in UP for three decades. Finishing number two from the state in the 2009 general elections was no less than a miracle and signaled an uptick in the Congress party’s electoral fortunes overall.
But that was not to be. In fact, shortly thereafter his political clout started diminishing as his party lost a number of assembly elections in key states.
The Congress party too started going down the hill rapidly in terms of popularity as the second tenure of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh got embroiled in controversy after controversy and scam after scam started tumbling out of the Congress-led coalition government’s closet.
First Gandhian socialist Anna Hazare and his then aide Arvind Kejriwal made a huge dent in the popularity of the Congress government. Then a series of big ticket scams broke out like 2G spectrum licenses, auctioning of coal blocks, corrupt practices in Commonwealth Games, Adarsh housing society, to name a few.
On the foreign policy front China and Pakistan made things difficult for the Manmohan Singh front. The economic front was even more punishing for the government as global recession combined with the tumbling of Indian Rupee (INR), skyrocketing of international fuel and gold prices and the domestic prices of the humble but commonly used vegetable onion all teamed up to put the Congress-led government on the back foot.
Rahul Gandhi was still going strong within the Congress party though the ruling party was increasingly getting discredited and isolated from the masses for the government’s perceived sins of omission and commission.
But the biggest setback for the Congress party’s crown prince came in September 2013 when the Bharatiya Janata Party declared Narendra Modi, then the chief minister of Gujarat, as its prime ministerial candidate for the upcoming general elections.
Modi’s anointment as the BJP’s prime ministerial candidate proved to be the proverbial last straw for the young Rahul. The shrewd Modi lost no time in targeting Rahul and his brother-in-law Robert Vadra (whose various allegedly questionable land deals had just surfaced) in his over 400 public rallies in the run up to the April-May 2014 general elections.
The mild-mannered Rahul was no match for the fire-spewing Modi and the latter succeeded in mesmerizing the Indian electorate. The election results proved this as the Modi-led BJP won a clear majority on its own with 282 seats, nine more than the magic number required in the 543-member Lok Sabha.
The Congress fell by the wayside with its worst ever performance as it could muster only 44 seats. BJP leaders twisted the knife into the hapless Congress by joking that just one bus was enough to bring all the Congress Lok Sabha members to Parliament.
Rahul Gandhi’s Congress continued to turn up a dismal performance in assembly elections in Maharashtra, Haryana, Jharkhand and Jammu and Kashmir. BJP formed government in all these states, in Jammu and Kashmir as a junior coalition partner of People’s Democratic Party.
But the worst for the Congress party in general and Rahul Gandhi in particular was yet to come up: Results of Delhi assembly elections. The Congress failed to even open its account in the 70-member Delhi assembly. The fact that the Modi-led BJP too faced its worst humiliation winning just three seats and India’s youngest party Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) won 67 seats or 96 per cent of the total seats were no compensation for Rahul.
Weeks after the Delhi results, Rahul Gandhi chose to go on a “leave of absence” and returned last week from his sabbatical only after 56 days. But since then Rahul’s political graph has been going up. He gave a reasonably good performance while addressing a rally of farmers in Delhi on April 18 against the Modi government’s land acquisition bill. Two days later he came up with his maiden speech in the 16th Lok Sabha and launched a frontal assault on Modi calling his government as “a suited-booted government,” a jibe aimed at Modi wearing a highly expensive suit with his name written over it during his meeting with US President Barack Obama in New Delhi in January this year.
Forget the fact that his 21-minute speech in the Lok Sabha on April 20 was only his fourth in his decade-long parliamentary career. Forget the fact that Rahul left much to be desired and fumbled many a time. But the fact is that he succeeded in paying back Modi in the same coin and came up with catch-phrases like “suited-booted government” which struck a chord with the people and were lapped up by the media.
The political wheel seems to be coming full circle. Then it was Modi who dominated the Indian psyche at the expense of Rahul. Now Rahul has started clawing his way up at the expense of Modi. Time is a great leveler, after all.
