Rahul (10 page)

What Szarita had done for the family was simple: she got a poor household something that was legitimately theirs under an existing centrally sponsored government scheme. Only, they didn’t know it belonged to them. The Youth Congress team acted as a catalyst. AAKS was a programme fashioned around this disconnect. Rahul Gandhi hoped there would be millions of young men and women in their twenties and early thirties acting as catalysts between the Congress’s
aam aadmi
and the establishment, winning friends for the Congress and influencing voters. The grand old party, on the other hand, would have managed to tap the largest pool of young Indians. Apart from the IYC’s projected one crore members, there would be a similar number of NSUI members. The students’ body, too, is in the midst of a similar drive. ‘India has the world’s largest pool of young people. Between two general elections, about five to seven crore voters between the age group of eighteen and twenty-three are being added. If, as a political party, we do not tap them, we are not doing our job,’ said Sanjay Bapna, who was the AICC secretary in charge of the IYC till the younger Jitendra Singh replaced him.

Within three months of taking charge of the IYC and the NSUI, Rahul had set out on a talent hunt to identify young men and women who could be groomed into future leaders. At a joint meeting of the NSUI and the IYC in New Delhi on 17 November 2007, Rahul made an impassioned speech that would set the agenda in the days that followed:

It is we, the youth, who have the greatest stake in our future. It is from among the youth that tomorrow’s leaders will rise. I firmly believe that the Youth Congress and the NSUI should become the vehicles for young Indians who want to serve the nation. Over the last few weeks, I have spent many hours with our workers and office-bearers. I am proud to say that there are many among them with talent, character and the will to serve. But there is work to be done. In my travels, I am often asked two questions: the first is from young people who ask me how can we join politics and help India? The second question, which comes from within the Youth Congress and the NSUI is, how do we progress within the organization? These two questions touch the heart of what needs to be changed. If we are truly to become an organization to represent the youth of our country, if we are truly to develop leaders of whom this nation can be proud, we need to do two things: The first is to build an organization that is open and relevant to the broad range of Indians who believe in our values and seek to serve the nation. The second is to build a meritocratic organization. Young people bring tremendous passion and energy into our organization. We must see to it that they are accountable. It is our duty to ensure that their progress is linked to their performance. I urge every young Indian to join us and help us build institutions worthy of your dreams, your values and your capabilities.

Rahul, and his men—Kanishka Singh and Sachin Rao, his lieutenants who work out of the MP’s official residence at 12 Tughlaq Lane; Jitendra Singh who was in charge of the IYC (till he became minister of state for home affairs in the UPA government on 12 July 2011); Ashok Tanwar, MP from Sirsa in Haryana and a member of RG’s core team; and the young MPs Jyotiraditya Scindia, Sachin Pilot, Jitin Prasada and Deepender Hooda—set out to tour the country and interview people. Scindia, Pilot and Prasada—all political dynasts—were later made junior ministers.

As a young MP who was part of the initial talent hunt said:

Mr Gandhi told us that even before he became an MP or the general secretary in charge, the young people he met anywhere would say they wanted to do something for the country or society but felt that politics wasn’t the path they wanted to take. They felt that there was little reward for people who were honest, and that first-timers with no lineage were bound to fail sooner than later.

Through the many interactions that he had with young people, Rahul told his associates, he had learnt that young men and women were full of idealism and patriotism. Only, they were completely disillusioned with politics. So, the first step was to spread the word that those who were willing and deserving should come forward to be a part of Rahul Gandhi’s large team of young leaders who would usher in the revolution in politics for which they so desperately yearned. In almost every state, young people were asked to land up at IYC-organized conclaves or meetings. There were many who said their voices were never heard. The responsibility given to youngsters did not match their talent because the children and relatives of existing politicians lapped up the top posts in every set-up, at all levels. Where there was responsibility, there was no evaluation and, finally, no reward. ‘RG’s thought process evolved through the meetings he had with students and young people during his travels. We had brainstorming sessions with him and people in the organization and, finally, the plan for building a democratic IYC and NSUI was formed,’ the MP added.

The talent hunt used a special software to judge the applicants on several counts on a scale of one to ten: level of commitment, organizational skills, personality, past experience of social service, loyalty to the Congress, vision, ideological leanings and educational qualifications. The perfect Congressman or Congresswoman would do exceedingly well on all counts. The idea was to find as many committed young people as possible and steer them towards higher scores. ‘The result of the talent hunt is that RG’s office has a list of thousands of young men and women who fit the bill. They can be future leaders. Many of them have already been roped in at various levels. This is highly talented human capital that would be the envy of any large organization,’ said Ashok Tanwar, who was IYC president for five years, from 2005 to the beginning of 2010. He saw his term being split into two phases: the pre-Rahul phase till September 2007 and the period that followed Rahul’s appointment.

Before Rahul took over as the man in charge, the IYC was full of dead wood. Office bearers in many state units were men well past the upper-age limit for retaining an IYC membership—thirty-five. ‘Over two-thirds of India’s population is under thirty-five. If we wanted to attract young crowds, we had to get younger people to lead the organization,’ Tanwar reasoned. Tanwar’s team at the IYC office on Raisina Road drew up a list of state unit presidents who were to be changed. Many were older than Rahul, who was thirty-seven at that time and thus ineligible for membership himself. The list included sitting and past MLAs and MPs. Sukhwinder Singh Sukhu was an MLA from Himachal Pradesh and had been president of the Himachal Pradesh Youth Congress since 1998. He was forty-one years old. His Andhra Pradesh counterpart, T. Venkata Rao, also an MLA, was nearing forty. Others prominent on the list were Karnataka Youth Congress chief and second-term MLA Dinesh Gundu Rao, and Chhattisgarh’s Devvrat Singh, another second-term MLA who had even contested the Lok Sabha polls. In the cleaning-up exercise that began just before Rahul took over, the overaged presidents of Haryana and Punjab were changed.

Bapna, who was then in charge of the IYC, said the Congress was looking seriously at making the IYC set-up young and vibrant once again.

The Congress president is keen that those who are over age or have been in these posts for a few years be removed to make way for the younger lot. The upper-age limit for Youth Congress posts was always thirty-five but, over the years, it was ignored. Now, we are getting things back on track.

Bapna usually took orders from his boss Sonia Gandhi, but these orders had come from Rahul. Within weeks of his taking over from Oscar Fernandes, a Rajiv Gandhi loyalist, Rahul and his team were working on the new election model for the IYC and the NSUI. The talent hunt, too, had been kicked off.

Both Szarita and Abdul emerged from the talent hunt. But Devendra Pratap Singh Patel of Satna in Madhya Pradesh was not so lucky. He had studied to be a lawyer at the APS University in Rewa and was national secretary of the Samajwadi Party’s youth wing, the Yuvjan Sabha. He approached Rahul in early 2010 to join the IYC. ‘He sent me to meet Jitendra Singh but they wanted me to contest the IYC elections in Madhya Pradesh. I belong to the backward Patel caste there and have a following of about 10,000 voters,’ he claimed. His community in Satna votes for the rival Bharatiya Janata Party and his inclusion in the IYC could tilt the balance, he added. Patel had been active in politics in that area for over seven years before he approached the IYC. He had been a trade union leader with the Bidi Mazdoor Sangh and had been booked by the state government for rioting. He was then a part of the CPM and had also fought elections for the mayor’s post but lost. ‘The SP had a few elected MLAs in the state and the CPM was not strong, so I joined the Party’s youth wing to protect myself from harassment,’ Patel said. He fought for the rights of the poor but the new IYC order has no place for him. ‘The Youth Congress leaders want me to first enrol members and then contest the elections. This way, I will have to start all over again,’ he complained. And with a criminal case against him, there was little chance of his nomination papers getting past FAME’s scrutiny. The new format of inducting members into the IYC would pick up the likes of Szarita and Abdul but leave out many like Patel.

11 May 2011. Even though it was summer and the heat can get unbearable in the fields of western Uttar Pradesh that abut Delhi on the east, it wasn’t yet hot. The sun had been out for barely a few minutes. Before the policemen who had been posted there—to prevent outsiders from reaching the twin villages of Bhatta and Parsaul in Greater Noida—could realize what was happening, Rahul Gandhi and his team managed to sneak past the cordons through a lesser-known route. They were at the site of a sit-in protest by farmers against the Mayawati government’s land acquisition drive which had turned violent.

The farmers of the two villages believed that the rates offered to them by the government for taking their lands away—to hand them over to private builders to develop and sell—were unfair. They were being paid only a small part of what buyers were being charged by the private construction companies, which, apart from constructing the Yamuna Expressway passing through their lands, were building condominiums, malls and multiplexes. To add to the injustice of the state being in cahoots with the builders was the action of the state police force who had cracked down brutally on the farmers, leaving a number of them injured and a few homes ransacked. This had happened less than a week earlier. Unhappy with the land acquisition that was proceeding unhindered despite their pleas for better rates from the state government, the villagers were holding captive three lower-rung officials who had come there to conduct a pre-acquisition survey. They wanted to send a message to the state government: acquiring their lands would not come easy. A day after the government officials were illegally detained by the villagers, the state police came down on them heavily. A large posse of policemen descended on the villages and beat up several residents; according to some accounts, women and children were targeted. Newspaper reports said the police attack was so brutal that most of the men fled the villages. Many were ruthlessly thrashed and property was destroyed. It was against the backdrop of this violence that Rahul went to meet the farmers. In fact, people close to him claim that he had sought permission from the farmers, who were wary of politicians due to the incidents that preceded his visit, to join the sit-in protest. The Congress general secretary Digvijaya Singh had been to the villages to prepare the ground a day before Rahul’s visit. This has been the pattern for the last few years: if you want to know what Rahul Gandhi’s next move will be, just follow Digvijaya Singh.

Rahul sat in through the protest despite prohibitory orders from the administration. Later that night, he was in police custody—arrested for the first time in his life. During the course of a single day, he had managed to join a group of farmers otherwise hostile to politicians and had even got arrested like an ordinary citizen—demanding to be shown a proper arrest warrant—and whisked away by the local police despite his elite SPG cover. ‘This was probably the first time that an SPG protectee was arrested. The SPG had never faced this situation before,’ recalled a member of Rahul’s team who had accompanied him to Greater Noida that day.

The police were all set to leave him at the UP–Delhi border and let him return to the capital. According to the associate who was with the Congress general secretary that day,

Instead, he insisted on being shown the arrest papers. The police official heading the local police contingent that included jawans of the Rapid Action Force said that the papers were lying at the police station. On Mr Gandhi’s insistence that he wanted to see the papers for his arrest, he was taken to the police station.

The day ended, but Rahul’s association with the farmers did not. He followed up the visit by leading a delegation of the farmers to meet with the prime minister and demand a judicial inquiry into the violence unleashed by the state police on them. The visit came on the day that Mahendra Singh Tikait, the last big farmers’ leader and founder of the Bharatiya Kisan Union, was cremated in his village in western UP. Tikait is best remembered as being a leader who could muster the support and participation of thousands of farmers in an agitation. In 1988, he had led several thousand farmers from all over north India to camp at Boat Club in the heart of Delhi to press for the acceptance of their demands. His message was simple: If the powers that run the country from Delhi didn’t care, the peasants would lay siege to the capital and defecate on Rajpath, the road that leads from India Gate to the President’s house. On 15 May, Rahul Gandhi put a batch of eight farmers from Bhatta and Parsaul villages face to face with the man occupying the highest seat of authority in the capital. As a career politician Rahul was sending a clear signal to the farmers that they would be heard in Delhi and that he, as someone from the political class which had ignored them all this while, would facilitate that. Tikait’s message was to the powers that be in Delhi while Rahul’s message was to the farmers.

The fact that farmers who were totally distrustful of politicians were ready to listen and willing to engage with Rahul was due to a combination of factors: he had been working hard with regard to those at the bottom of the pyramid and he had a plan in place. In addition to this he was another Gandhi. Even before he entered active electoral politics, Rahul Gandhi had enjoyed superstar status in India. Little was known about him, except that he belonged to the first family of Indian politics and was expected to succeed as the fourth prime minister from the Nehru–Gandhi clan. And since two of them—his grandmother Indira and father Rajiv—were victims of political assassination, he had grown up with rings of security around him. The kind of security that brings with it layers of secrecy.

Rahul Gandhi was a man with the kind of experience few politicians would have thought relevant: he had some training in business theory. His brief association with Monitor Group in London would have acquainted him with the theory of ‘competitive advantage’ put forth by the consultancy’s chief founder, Michael Porter. You win either via a cost advantage or through a strategy of differentiation. The world’s top brands always pick the latter—offering something that the others do not. These brands also insist on being brands in the truest sense: they pack together a consistent set of values that stay ever-relevant.

The happenings on 11 May 2011 and the days that followed are evidence of a strategy that Rahul and his advisers had honed to perfection and of a persona that had been created over years. When Rahul was taken into custody for the first time ever in his life, he had nearly perfected his stance of being on the side of the underdog. Yet, the aggressive manner in which he took on the Mayawati government caused some experienced older Congressmen to question the intentions of his advisers. When he led the farmers of the two villages to meet with the prime minister, Rahul submitted a long list of complaints on alleged police atrocities. He maintained that women had been raped in the villages and that his team had found a heap of ashes with human bones in them, suggesting that some missing villagers had probably been killed and their bodies burnt by the police. The statement led even veteran Congressman and Indira Gandhi’s aide R.K. Dhawan, an old Nehru–Gandhi clan loyalist, to say that Rahul’s advisers needed to be changed.

In a party where sycophancy is the minimum requirement for progress, to suggest that the leadership is being advised wrongly implies that the leadership is at fault. This is the only way for Congressmen to express their anguish when they think the leadership is not right. These occasions are rare, though, and the Congressmen in question run the risk of getting isolated or even fading into political oblivion. According to Arun Jaitley, leader of the Opposition in Rajya Sabha and former law minister in the NDA government, the problem lies with dynastic politics. ‘In the event of a mistake, blame is always put on others and it is said the family was very angry,’ he said. ‘In this kind of a structure, a Gandhi can never commit a mistake, [he] can only be misled … A government cannot run like this,’ he added, referring to the uneasy relationship between the Congress and the Gandhi family where the latter’s actions are never questioned from within the Party.

Rahul had clearly gone overboard with his allegations which were hard to prove in the months to come. But, with his visit to Bhatta and Parsaul and the amount of coverage it garnered, he conveyed the impression that he stood with the farmers, even if they resorted to kidnapping state government officials to stall the process of their lands being taken away.

This event is illustrative of the way Rahul reaches out to the underprivileged and the manner in which the Congress rallies behind him to help sustain his pro-poor stance. The perception that everyone in the government and the Congress Party is attentive to his every utterance, of course, is a part of the package. The meeting with the prime minister resulted in the Centre announcing compensation for the farmers of Bhatta–Parsaul. When Rahul proposes, the Manmohan Singh government always obliges. Even the National Advisory Council headed by Sonia Gandhi does not enjoy such a privilege.

The journey—from visiting homes of farmers to leading a delegation of farmers to the prime minister’s doorstep—had taken a few years. After he assumed charge as general secretary of the Party, Rahul began touring the rest of the country. Till then, he had largely confined himself to UP. Most of these tours were built around resurrecting the Party’s youth wings, but the core purpose of the visits was to gain more and more experience in engaging with those who lived on the margins.

On Friday, 7 March 2008, the budget session was on and the two houses of Parliament would meet again in three days. While fellow parliamentarians were busy working on the politics that would play out at the centre of power, Rahul Gandhi decided to set up his political arena elsewhere. He set out to visit the most backward and ignored parts of the country. He wanted to familiarize himself with the lives of people from the ‘other India’ and establish links that he hoped would ultimately turn into bonds. A few hundred miles from New Delhi, the Amethi MP began a series of trips—news of which soon made headlines as ‘Rahul’s “discovery of India” tour’. His first stop was in Orissa’s ore-rich but extremely backward tribal district, Kalahandi. This would be his first visit to Lanjigarh, but not the last. He interacted with a number of tribal men and women and assured them in small public meetings of his being their voice in New Delhi. He was as eager to know from them what they wanted from the government as he was to tell them that he was on their side. He spoke of the two Indias that were developing within the country—‘one having access to education, health and employment and another that was lagging behind’. A few days later, he would refer to the two Indias in his budget speech in Parliament.

In Rahul’s words, the UPA government had fulfilled its promises made to the
aam aadmi
during its four-year rule: the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA), renamed after Mahatma Gandhi in 2010, and the Forest Rights Act were revolutionary legislations that would change the lives of the poor and the tribals. In his place any lesser-known Congressman could have been mistaken for a leader from one of the Left parties, given the manner in which he spoke to the people and the content of his speech. These were legislations for which the Left parties, too, claimed credit while supporting the UPA from outside. The Left, since it had begun to support the Congress-led UPA government, had successfully claimed credit for the government’s pro-people tilt, especially for legislations like the NREGA, the Forest Rights Act and the Right to Information Act. In the series of visits that followed, Rahul would try to change that perception and wrest back the credit from the Left. Refusing to join Manmohan Singh’s cabinet in both 2004 and 2009 allowed him the luxury of raising issues with ministries across the policy spectrum.

After the Left–UPA divorce in 2008, the UPA again returned to power. In its second run, the space vacated by the Left was occupied by Rahul and the NAC led by the Congress president. The day after Rahul’s speech, a report in
The Hindu
said:

Expressing grave concern over the backwardness of the region, Mr Gandhi promised the tribals that he would continue to maintain the relationship that his grandmother and parents had established with them. He assured them that he would now be a part of their struggle for development in education, health care and employment.

The media was only too eager to cover Rahul’s tour.
The Hindu
reported:

Addressing a Save Forest rally at Bhawanipatna, the district headquarters town of Kalahandi district, he said: ‘
Kalahandi ka, aur Adivasiyon ka Delhi mein ek sipahi hai; uska naam Rahul Gandhi hai
’ (For Kalahandi and the tribals, there is a soldier in New Delhi; his name is Rahul Gandhi).’

Earlier, he interacted with tribals at the Nangalbod gram panchayat in Nuapada district and the Ijurpa tribal hamlet in the Lanjigarh block of Kalahandi. At Ijurpa, the people belonging to the Dongria and Jharnia Kondh tribes opposing the setting up of an alumina refinery in their locality sought Mr Gandhi’s help. He promised them to take up the matter with the AICC president Sonia Gandhi.

More than two years later, during another session of Parliament—the first monsoon session of the 15th Lok Sabha with the Congress-led UPA back in the saddle—the lawmaker from Amethi once again left parliamentary proceedings behind for a meeting with tribal people and landowners at Kalahandi. There was a marked change in his appearance. He wore his trademark white kurta and pyjama attire with sneakers, but this time he also sported a beard. Addressing a congregation of tribal people in Lanjigarh, he said:

You were fighting for your land and your faith and I said to you: ‘Look, I live in Delhi. Your voice is being suppressed here but I am your soldier in Delhi.’ But when I reached back and started making inquiries, I got to know that the voice of the tribal people is reaching Delhi and even outside India. I got to know that you were getting yourself heard far and that you were fighting for your rights. And, most importantly that you were fighting peacefully … I did what I could but this is your victory.