2014: The Election That Changed India (9 page)

While Mrs Gandhi continued to wield enormous power
as the UPA chairperson, Rahul did a disappearing act of sorts. Between 2004 and 2007, he was hardly
seen in and outside Parliament. In the fourteenth Lok Sabha, Rahul participated in just five
debates, asked just three questions, did not present a single private members’ bill, and
attended only 63 per cent of the Lok Sabha proceedings, well below the average attendance. In an
interview to
Tehelka
magazine at the time (the Congress later denied that any interview was
given, saying it was only a ‘casual conversation’), Rahul was quoted as saying, ‘I
don’t ask questions in Parliament because I like
to think things
through. Just look around at the questions that are asked in Parliament and you will know why I
don’t ask questions!’ Sounding condescending and arrogant in equal measure, Rahul even
controversially claimed in that interview, ‘I could have been prime minister if I wanted at
the age of twenty-five years!’

The one memorable Rahul intervention in Parliament
came in 2008 during the Indo-US nuclear debate. Linking poverty to energy security, Rahul invoked
the hardships of a Dalit woman Kalavati whom he had met during a tour of Maharashtra’s
drought-prone Vidarbha region. Kalavati’s husband had committed suicide like hundreds of other
farmers, and Rahul spoke passionately of the need to empower Kalavati. In a foreign policy debate on
nuclear energy, Rahul had struck an emotional chord. But the moment remained typically fleeting
because there was no sustained follow-up action to alleviate agrarian distress.

I met Kalavati a few years later when an NGO brought
her to Delhi for a ‘guided tour’. It was almost as though she had become a
‘mascot’ for Vidarbha’s plight. Had her life changed, I asked. She nodded her head
in a manner that suggested there hadn’t been any dramatic transformation. Had she met Rahul
Gandhi? More silence. Did she trust politicians? She didn’t seem to want to answer.
Kalavati’s story, in a sense, appeared to typify Rahul Gandhi’s politics—well
intentioned but lacking the focus and stamina to convince the sceptics that he was a genuine 24/7
politician.

On 24 September 2007, another famous chapter in
Indian cricket was scripted when Mahendra Singh Dhoni’s team won the inaugural T20 World Cup,
defeating Pakistan in the final. That win sparked the emergence of a new cricket hero in Dhoni.
Rahul Gandhi perhaps was hoping for a similar political metamorphosis when on the same day he was
anointed the Congress general secretary in charge of the Indian Youth Congress and the National
Students’ Union of India (NSUI). While the rest of the country was celebrating the cricket
triumph, Congressmen were rejoicing in the fact that Rahul Gandhi had finally
decided to take up a specific political responsibility.

On the face of it, it wasn’t such a bad idea.
The Youth Congress and NSUI were in desperate need of revival. The Congress was perceived as an
ageing party in a ‘young’ country. Politics per se was seen as having no space for the
youth even though 60 per cent of the population was under the age of thirty-five. As a young
politician still in his thirties, Rahul Gandhi was, in a sense, ideally placed to effect a
demographic shift in the Grand Old Party. If he could inspire the young to join politics, he was
assured of a dedicated vote bank that would cut across traditional caste and community divisions.
The last time a Congressman had attempted to build the Youth Congress was when Sanjay Gandhi took
over the organization in the 1970s, leading to much controversy during the Emergency years. Rahul
later told an aide in an unguarded moment, ‘I am not my uncle. He tried to destroy the Youth
Congress, I want to build it.’

A few months after taking over, Rahul met some of us
at his residence (once again, off the record, of course!). Through the meeting, he spoke
passionately about his desire to revamp the student bodies of the Congress, how he wanted to
‘democratize’ the organizations by ushering in new faces. He spoke of holding free and
fair elections to these bodies, of organizing ‘talent hunts’ where necessary, of
questionnaires that were being prepared to identify the right people for specific tasks. ‘We
will transform the Congress party bottom-up in a manner that will be truly revolutionary!’ he
said, with almost missionary zeal. For the old-timers amongst us, it was a near-rewind to Rajiv
Gandhi’s famous speech in the 1985 Congress centenary session in Mumbai when he had vowed to
rid the party of ‘power brokers’.

He also reflected on his other big idea—the
need to bridge the divide between ‘Bharat’ and ‘India’, between the
‘poor’ and the ‘rich’. I had heard him speak on the ‘two Indias’
at a public rally during the Congress plenary session in November 2007; now he was giving us a
detailed exposition on his social and economic world view. ‘You cannot have one India that
travels on a bullet
train and another that takes a bullock cart,’ he
said in a tone of controlled aggression. I couldn’t decide whether he was astoundingly
platitudinous or earnestly sincere, whether the lectures on the Indian predicament were his own
eureka moments, or whether in fact he had charted out a long-term agenda of inclusive growth for a
more compassionate India.

I must confess emerging from that meeting with a
sense that we had perhaps underestimated Rahul Gandhi. Here was a young man from India’s most
durable political family promising to end the dynasty cult and open up the closed shop that Indian
politics had become. His economic thoughts were more dodgy—they appeared almost a straight
lift from some 1970s thesis, echoing a certain old-world socialist viewpoint that was completely at
odds with the massive changes taking place in post-liberalization India. The growing interlocking
between the countryside and the market economy seemed to have missed him altogether. And yet, I was
inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt—if he could show the same fervour in
transforming his ideas into a concrete plan of action, then we were really witnessing the start of a
new innings in Indian politics.

In the next two years—2007 to 2009—Rahul
Gandhi kept up this image of being a youth leader who stood for ‘change’. NSUI
conventions were organized across the country where Rahul Gandhi would reiterate his desire to bring
in a new order of politics by ridding his party of the ‘nomination’ culture. Images of
enthusiastic students greeting him were seen on TV screens. His critics called it a ‘discovery
of India’ tour, suggesting that Rahul Gandhi was still struggling to get acquainted with the
real India. When he visited a Dalit home for a night, Mayawati accused him of
‘opportunism’ and a desire to pander to Dalit voters. ‘He has used a special soap
and incense to purify himself,’ she thundered at a rally in April 2008. The visits may have
smacked of tokenism, perhaps even of poverty tourism, but at least a Gandhi finally seemed to be
readying himself for a fierce political battle.

It didn’t take long, though, for the bubble to
burst. On a visit to
Mumbai, a few Youth Congress members expressed a desire
to meet me. I asked them about the electoral process that had been initiated in the organization.
‘What elections, sir, everything is being fixed and a lot of money is changing hands. You must
expose it,’ was their plea. Apparently, the main candidates in the fray were all sons of
leading Congress politicians from the state. Eventually, the Maharashtra State Youth Congress
‘elected’ as its president Vishwajeet Kadam, son of a powerful state minister who owned
a chain of private education institutes. The pattern was repeated in other states with the children
of top politicians dominating key positions. When it came to Lok Sabha seats too, most of the
younger candidates had family links with senior leaders. Attempts at fostering inner-party democracy
could not break the well-entrenched cliques of patronage within the party system.

In a sense, Rahul Gandhi was a prisoner of the very
system that had spawned him. Once the top leadership of the party observes the dynastical principle,
it is difficult to impose a different set of rules for those down the line. The deep paradox
remained that Rahul could not radically alter the Congress and yet insist on quasi-royal status for
himself—the road to genuine glasnost would have to include his own abdication. He may have
genuinely wanted to change the organizational structure, but in a party as old as the Congress, as
ossified and as crowded with big egos, rival camps, an entrenched old guard and byzantine intrigue,
no quick fixes were possible.

But the problem was not just with the Congress
party—it was also with the method adopted by Rahul Gandhi to try and effect change. In her
book,
Decoding Rahul Gandhi
, author Aarthi Ramachandran claims that Rahul Gandhi wanted to
adopt a Japanese style of management to revamp the NSUI and Youth Congress. ‘The Toyota
Way’ is how Gandhi saw the future, urging his team to develop the right
‘processes’ and ‘systems’ which would make standardization of practices
possible. Apparently, a few of his team members were even sent to the Toyota factory in Japan to get
first-hand experience of how the auto company was able to arrive at a zero-error system of
production.

Rahul Gandhi failed to
recognize that a political party is not a corporate house. Business practices that worked in the
automobile industry simply could not be replicated in the Congress party. A senior MLA from
Maharashtra told me how he had to wait almost a month in Delhi for an appointment with Rahul.
‘In a business, you can interact on the computer. In a political party, there must be direct
contact. What is the point of having a “system” when I cannot even get access to my
leader? A party worker feels on top of the world when his leader talks to him; he doesn’t want
to be told to fill in a form first and wait in a queue!’ The frustrated politician later
joined Sharad Pawar’s National Congress Party (NCP). In fact, more than one Congressman
complained that if they rang up Rahul’s office, they would be put through to a voice recording
machine.

The people chosen by Rahul Gandhi to implement his
agenda reflected a desire to have strategic consultants, management-oriented corporate types and
well-meaning scholars around him rather than full-time politicians. The one member of Team Rahul
whom I met on a couple of occasions was Kanishka Singh. A slight, bespectacled, soft-spoken young
man, he was the son of a former foreign secretary, S.K. Singh, who later became a governor. Kanishka
had a degree in international studies and business from the University of Pennsylvania, a degree in
economics from St Stephens College and had even done a stint in an investment bank in New York. In
other words, he was the perfect child of Delhi’s elite Lutyensland, complete with
well-connected parents, a foreign degree and a CV that would probably have got him a top job in
corporate India. But was he the right man to be strategizing politics for the Congress’s
future?

Kanishka had, interestingly, written about the need
to restructure the political system in an article in
Seminar
magazine in December 2005:
‘Our leaders are older than they ought to be. Our citizenry is young. A severe and visible
disconnect exists between the separate time horizons that each of the two groups are focused on and
invested in . . . If India is to leapfrog into the millennium we live in, we need to be proactive in
demonstrating that political and
organizational capital is being invested in
the domain of future-oriented implementation.’ The words sounded perfect, echoing Rahul
Gandhi’s similar desire for change. But in the cut and thrust of electoral politics, what did
these high-sounding fancy words really mean in practice?

On one social occasion, Kanishka and I got down to
discussing UP politics. He rattled out impressive statistical data on caste and community equations
in the state, but you could easily sense this was the kind of knowledge that one acquires on the
Internet. He couldn’t, or so I sensed, have intimate knowledge of the local leaders of the
Congress in each district of UP, the kind of personal information that makes a Mayawati or a Mulayam
such a formidable opponent in the state. The roaring, rumbustious subaltern leaders of the Hindi
belt can hardly be combated through an academic grasp of caste combinations.

The other member of Rahul Gandhi’s A-Team was
Sachin Rao. Like Kanishka, he, too, was foreign educated, having got an MBA in international
business and strategy from the University of Michigan. He was deeply influenced by management guru
C.K. Prahlad’s ‘Bottom of the Pyramid’ philosophy. He had returned to India with a
desire to build a culture of ‘social entrepreneurship’, to reach out to those poor and
marginalized sections who needed access to markets and technology. His NGO-like approach to politics
appeared to mirror Rahul Gandhi’s ‘two Indias’ philosophy.

Interestingly, during this period, Rahul Gandhi also
sought out prominent left-leaning academics as part of his ‘political learning’ process.
Professor Sudha Pai of Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), an expert on BSP and UP politics, was one
such academic. Rahul even attended a seminar at JNU on ‘UP in the 1990s: Critical Perspectives
on Politics, Society and Economy’ and invited Prof. Pai to speak to a Congress youth training
camp in Chitrakoot in UP. Dalit Bahujan scholar Kancha Ilaiah, known for his controversial
anti-Brahminical views, was also engaged with. Caste politics in particular had, it seems, captured
Rahul’s imagination.