The scion’s stories... ends up being just terrifying

IN THE PAST month, Rahul Gandhi addressed campaign meetings in Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Delhi, Chhattisgarh and Mizoram, the quintet of states that saw elections. He brought up a whole range of issues— his mother, father, grandmother, the assassinations of 1984 and 1991, religious violence and terrorism, the Muzaffarnagar riots and the allure Pakistan apparently holds for sections of Muslims in UP, the BJP’s alleged commitment to “capitalism”, the Congress’ solidarity with the poor, mosquitoes, infections and so on.

Before moving into an assessment of Mr Gandhi’s speeches and his possible motivations, it has to be made clear that his interventions were largely irrelevant to the state elections. They were on a tangent to immediate currents and political discussion and debate. Quite frankly, to use a colloquial expression, he was on his own trip. What was and what is Rahul Gandhi’s trip? An analysis of Mr Gandhi’s references to the assassinations of his grandmother and father, and to his recollections of October 31, 1984, and the run up to the murder of Indira, would suggest he was trying to garner sympathy before the coming Lok Sabha election. This may be unfair and untrue. Nobody believes, and certainly Mr Gandhi and his political confidants would be strange to believe, that a tragic event in 1984 will lead to an outpouring of sympathy and overtake all public issues in 2014. Politics doesn’t work like that.

What Mr Gandhi was perhaps attempting to do was introduce himself to his voter, or would-be voter, with the 2014 election in mind. Of course, it is possible his timetable is different. Admirers of Mr Gandhi and sections of the Congress helpfully point out that, “He is focusing on the election after the next one. That is what he is playing at.” If true, this is mystifying. The general election after next may come in 2015 or may come in 2019; before that, there is a big, challenging electoral battle in 2014. If Mr Gandhi is not concentrating on this task, as some of his acolytes argue, then it defies logic.

Why is Mr Gandhi trying to introduce himself to the voter? He recognises he is the face of the Congress in 2014, even if not declared prime ministerial candidate. He sees himself as someone who is in politics for the long haul. He sees it as useful and even imperative to establish a connection with his voters. As such, he wants to tell them about his thoughts and feelings, his emotions and inspirations, his hopes and his fears, his personal background and his social experiences. Inevitably, family memories come into the mix. As a template, this is unexceptionable. Take a parallel political phenomenon. Narendra Modi is travelling around the country, introducing himself to voters. He too is talking of his hopes and fears; he too makes references to his personal background, the struggles of his childhood, the fact that he sold tea in railway compartments as a young boy. So what then is wrong with Mr Gandhi taking a leaf from Mr Modi’s book and making emotional references to his adolescent years? The problem lies elsewhere. At a stage in Mr Gandhi’s narrative, his story stops being interesting and mildly emotive or even cringing and banal. It ends up being just terrifying. That stage is reached when the listener realises Mr Gandhi has almost nothing to say between the bookends of his engagement with India: between the stories of two assassinations and a boyhood full of innocent of not eating spinach; and the top-down poverty tourism of the past five-odd years that reveals itself in homilies—“There are two Indias, rich and poor”; “I met a poor woman, she wanted her son to become an IAS officer”; “I met a young man on a train, he had dreams”; “I slept in a village”; “I drank water from a well”. When Mr Gandhi resorts to simplistic axioms— “India is a country of inequality”; “A few hundred people run political parties in India”—he actually says nothing that this listeners don’t already know or that isn’t already patently obvious to them. Presuming Mr Gandhi means well and genuinely wants to be liked and understood, why is this happening?

The roots of the problem go back perhaps to the tragic assassinations of his early life. It is never easy to lose a loving grandmother and a father in the manner in which Mr Gandhi did. One would not wish that grief and trauma upon one’s worst enemy. Those events left Mr Gandhi with a sense of legacy and duty to the Congress and to India as he imagines it. Paradoxically, they also created circumstances that left him unprepared for public life. The assassination of 1984 ended all hopes that Mr Gandhi had of a semblance of a normal life in India. Security concerns shut him in an ivory tower, surrounded by a small peer group, many of whom were children of his parents’ friends. The paranoia of his grandmother—one that defined her politics and was born of her conflict with her aunts, and memories of the condescension with which Nehru’s sisters looked upon his wife Kamala—sublimated itself, in Mr Gandhi’s case, into an ivory-tower aloofness. As a result, he perhaps honestly believes his grandmother and father were spotless politicians and victims of conspiracies, and that Kashmir and Sri Lanka and Punjab were not of their making. This could well be his heartfelt perception, a centrepiece of the part-paranoiac, partepic family legend he has embraced. To add to this is a long absence from India, from the time he left to study abroad to his coming into politics in 2004. It is not that people who study abroad don’t understand India. Yet, in Mr Gandhi’s case his engagement with India was peripheral between his childhood–when he was engaged with a small aspect of India–and his recent political ventures. The latter have amounted to a rapid-speed attempt to come to grips with and sort of ‘invent’ an engagement with India. This engagement has obviously not been organic. At its best, this ‘invented’ engagement can be charming; at its worst it can appear stilted and artificial. In a nutshell, that is Mr Gandhi’s principal handicap.