2014: The Election That Changed India (12 page)

The former Bihar chief minister had enjoyed an
excellent equation with Sonia Gandhi. He was the one politician who had stood by Mrs Gandhi when she
had been targeted for her foreign origins. In 2004, the Congress–RJD alliance had won
twenty-nine of the forty seats in Bihar, and Lalu Prasad was made railway minister. By 2009, the
alliance was finished. Lalu was kept waiting for weeks, but the Congress leadership did not
oblige—Rahul wanted to strike out on his own.

The experiment of going alone would prove
disastrous. In the 2009 general elections, the Congress won just two seats in Bihar. In the 2010
assembly elections, the Congress won just four seats, the RJD (allied with Ram Vilas Paswan)
twenty-five. The Nitish Kumar-led Janata Dal (United) JD(U)–BJP alliance was swept to power by
a record margin. As Lalu Prasad wistfully remarked,
‘Woh doob gaye, hamein bhi dooba
diya!’
(The Congress drowned, and took us down with them).

The double blow of failure in
UP and Bihar affected Rahul. The political confidence generated by the 2009 election win was ebbing
away. ‘I think the self-doubts that were always lurking in the shadows began to take over. He
felt and looked like a loser, like someone who felt he wasn’t really cut out for this. It
almost seemed as if he had lost the appetite to fight back,’ says a senior Congressman. Rahul
withdrew into his shell and became almost risk-averse. He had promised to travel extensively through
UP and rejuvenate the cadres. He did no such thing. At a time when the Congress was looking for
leadership, the leader went missing.

Former Israeli prime minister Abba Eban once said,
‘The Palestinians never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity.’ Much the same could
be said of Rahul Gandhi in 2011 and 2012, two crucial years ahead of the 2014 elections. In 2011, an
agitation led by social activist Anna Hazare, demanding the setting up of an anti-corruption
ombudsman, called the Lok Pal, shook the nation. For two weeks in August, a seventy-four-year-old
Gandhian from Maharashtra became a symbol of the growing public disgust with corruption. Hazare had
vowed to go on a fast from 16 August if the Jan Lok Pal Bill was not passed. Sonia Gandhi had gone
abroad for surgery for an undisclosed medical condition. Before leaving, she had set up a
four-member committee to look after the daily affairs of the Congress. The committee had veteran
leaders A.K. Antony, Ahmed Patel, Janardhan Dwivedi along with Rahul as its members. This was
Rahul’s moment to take charge. Instead, the committee did not meet even once. (See chapter
3.)

On 16 August, when negotiations on the Lok Pal
failed to achieve a breakthrough, the government went ahead and arrested Anna Hazare as he was on
his way to the fast site in the national capital. Rahul was informed about it only two hours later
by fellow Congress MP Sandeep Dikshit, via a short email and SMS. ‘As the East Delhi MP, I was
very worried about Anna being arrested in a
locality in my constituency. I
knew it was a mistake and asked Rahul to intervene,’ Dikshit told me later. Rahul, who was in
Parliament, acted immediately, ringing up the home minister P. Chidambaram to have the arrest order
revoked. The damage, though, had been done. Anna Hazare had been transformed from a relatively
benign social activist into a heroic figure of national significance. Support for him began to swell
as he shifted his fast site to the Ramlila Maidan. For the next thirteen days, Anna Hazare became a
Mahatma Gandhi-like larger-than-life figure dominating television screens and the national
discourse. The government was on the mat.

A week into the agitation, with no sign of a
breakthrough, the government was getting increasingly desperate. A back-room negotiation team led by
Pranab Mukherjee, which included Union minister Salman Khurshid and the Delhi MP Sandeep Dikshit,
was attempting to broker a settlement with Team Anna. At one of the meetings between the two sides a
suggestion was made—why doesn’t Rahul Gandhi come to Ramlila Maidan, go on stage, meet
Anna Hazare and offer him a glass of juice to break his fast? An assurance from Rahul that a Lok Pal
legislation was to be enacted would be enough for Anna to end his fast. Rahul, the negotiators were
assured by Team Anna, could take all the credit.

An excited Dikshit, who had played a key role in the
negotiations because of his previous links with members of Anna’s inner circle, promptly sent
another email to Rahul detailing the possible compromise solution. Only this time he got no
response. ‘It could have been the biggest moment of Rahul’s political career, when he
could have claimed a major victory,’ says Dikshit today, a touch wistfully. Adds another
Congress leader, ‘Think about it, the image of Rahul giving juice to Anna would have been
plastered on every newspaper and television screen. It would have been the most enduring image of
the times and would have established Rahul’s credentials as an anti-establishment
crusader.’

So why did Rahul not bite the bullet? Some Congress
leaders claim that the idea of Rahul visiting Anna Hazare at Ramlila Maidan was fraught with risk.
‘The atmosphere there was anti-Congress.

What if the crowd had turned
hostile?’ Another senior leader claims that Team Anna could not be trusted to keep their word.
‘They had betrayed us on more than one occasion. How could we risk sending Rahul to Ram Lila
Maidan with no guarantee of a final solution?’ In the end, former Maharashtra chief minister
Vilasrao Deshmukh was sent to end Anna’s fast. Rahul stayed at home.

Rahul did speak in support of the Lok Pal in a
Parliament debate on 26 August, calling for the entity to be given constitutional status similar to
that of the Election Commission. ‘Madam Speaker, why not elevate the debate and fortify the
Lok Pal by making it a constitutional body accountable to Parliament like the Election Commission? I
feel the time has come to seriously consider this idea,’ he said. The Congress cheered, even
called Rahul’s ‘idea’ a ‘game changer’. The reality was that the game
had already changed. Rahul’s brief intervention in a Parliament debate was lost in the din
over corruption. At a time when the country was looking for visible and concrete action, Rahul was
giving a sermon. Where he could have seized the moment, he was reduced to a bit player. Anna Hazare
and his team, especially a short young man with a toothbrush moustache, had become the real stars of
the show. Rahul’s loss would be the gain of a certain Mr Arvind Kejriwal.

The Lok Pal Bill was finally passed in Parliament on
17 December 2013, just months ahead of the general elections. Congressmen cheered yet again, giving
the credit to Rahul’s commitment to weeding out corruption. No one really bought the claim. It
was simply a case of too little, too late.

In December 2012, Rahul had another opportunity to
position himself as a politician connected to the anxieties and aspirations of a young India. On 16
December, a young woman was brutally beaten and gang-raped on a moving bus in the heart of the
national capital. Crimes against women are not unusual in Delhi. In fact, the city has acquired
notoriety as a place where women are highly
unsafe. Yet, the sheer
gruesomeness of the rape appeared to shake the city from its stupor. The fact that it happened in
close proximity to the headquarters of most national television channels gave it an instant profile
as the big breaking news story of the moment. Silence was no longer an option. Rape could no longer
be just a statistic.

Three days after the rape, as the girl battled
bravely for her life in a hospital (she would die of her injuries thirteen days later), the anger
spilled out onto the streets. A frenzied crowd, mainly youngsters, began marching along Rajpath
towards Rashtrapati Bhavan demanding answers. Some of them even tried to climb the walls of North
Block. A rattled police force used tear gas and water cannons to disperse the agitators. The crowds
only grew. Gender justice campaigner Eve Ensler, on a visit to India for her One Billion Rising
campaign, said she felt India was in the midst of a women’s revolution.

I was at India Gate where hundreds of men and women,
mainly college students, had assembled. The protests were peaceful. The demand was for justice,
tougher laws and security for women. While interviewing people on the spot, someone in the gathering
spoke out. ‘Where is Rahul Gandhi, why doesn’t he come here and talk to us? If he can go
and meet farmers in Bhatta Parsaul, can he not come and meet us also?’

It appeared a perfectly legitimate question. After
all, Rahul Gandhi had been projected by his party as a youth icon. He was meant to represent a
generational shift in Indian politics. He himself had spoken out about the need to energize the
youth and encourage new voices in public life. Here was an ideal opening for him to walk the
talk—to embrace a spontaneous, public spirited movement for gender justice that was driven by
a younger, impatient India hankering for change. But Rahul was nowhere to be found.

Congress spokespersons initially claimed that Rahul
was out of the country when the story first surfaced. When he returned, he did meet a handful of
agitators at 10, Janpath, but away from the glare of the camera. Apparently, a section of the party
was keen that Rahul engage in a more direct manner, but he vetoed the idea. ‘He was
concerned, understood the emotions of the protestors, but didn’t want to
create a tamasha by going to India Gate to meet people,’ was the explanation offered. A few
days later, he quietly went and met the family of the Delhi braveheart. A few months later,
Parliament passed a strong anti-rape legislation.

Should Rahul have been at India Gate expressing
solidarity with the protestors? When I asked this question to the home minister Sushil Kumar Shinde
in a live television programme, he controversially answered, ‘You cannot expect us to go
everywhere to meet protestors. Next you will ask the home minister to go to India Gate if Maoists
are demonstrating there!’ A more rational explanation was provided by Shinde’s deputy,
R.P.N. Singh, who was tasked with handling the crisis. ‘I don’t think we can reduce a
serious issue to a photo op. If Rahul had met the agitators, news channels will get a photo op, but
how will anything have changed on the ground?’

Ironically, in February 2014, when a young Arunachal
student Nido Tania was beaten to death in mysterious circumstances in a Delhi marketplace, Rahul did
go to Jantar Mantar to meet the protestors who were seeking greater security for north-east
students. He promised to take up their cause. The incident took place just ahead of the Lok Sabha
elections. Nido’s father was a Congress legislator from Arunachal. The timing and context, it
seems, were suddenly very different. Opportunistic, the critics alleged, not without
justification.

Politics in India is often about symbolism. Indira
Gandhi on elephant-back crossing floodwaters to reach the village of Belchi in Bihar, where Dalits
had been attacked, became an enduring symbol of her fighting spirit that eventually catapulted her
back into power after the Emergency. Had Rahul realized the power of political symbolism, he may
well have won the perception war when it really mattered. Had he used either the Anna agitation or
the anti-rape protests to mobilize public opinion, he might well have been seen as an intrepid young
leader ready to break new ground. The anti-rape protests in Delhi were a defining moment for gender
equality that
cut across the political divide. The Anna agitation was equally
an expression of rising public anger with corruption. Both movements had a strong connect with the
youth, especially in urban India, a natural political constituency for Rahul to identify with. Yet,
he chose to play safe. It was almost as if he was in power but still didn’t know how to use it
effectively. It was a tentative approach to politics that he needed to jettison if he wanted to be
taken seriously as a leader.