Rahul (11 page)

The victory he referred to was the minister for environment and forests Jairam Ramesh’s rejection of the alumina mining project in the region. In 2011, Manmohan Singh moved Ramesh to head the crucial rural development ministry, another area of focus for the Congress in Rahul’s plan. The Vedanta Mining Corporation, against which the local tribals had complained to Gandhi on his 2008 visit, was denied clearance for mining in the area despite protests from the Biju Janata Dal-led state government.

Rahul’s beard and the mining project’s rejection were not the only changes since the last visit. There was another marked difference. The helicopter in which Rahul travelled to address the public meeting did not land at the helipad built by the Vedanta Corporation. The corporation had extended the same courtesy to the Congress leader’s team as it had in 2008, only, this time, the team had strict instructions not to take favours from Vedanta, a name synonymous in tribal minds with the exploitation of resources that were rightfully theirs. In the intervening months, Rahul had gradually learnt the importance of symbols. It was important not just to do things the right way but also to be seen as doing them the right way.

Surprise visits are part of the Rahul persona and much effort goes into projecting him as a serious man committed to the cause of poverty alleviation. In April 2010, he landed unannounced in Haryana’s Mirchpur village, where a seventy-year-old Dalit man and his disabled daughter had been burnt alive by a group of Jats. Over fifteen Dalit houses had been set on fire. After he reached the village, accompanied by Congress leader Prithviraj Chavan, his SPG crew went up to the affected Dalit families posing as journalists. They said they wanted to speak to the families about the incident in private, and took some of them aside to the spot where Rahul was waiting; the idea was to avoid the hype that would be created by a visit made in the full glare of the media.

Such secrecy had worked in Rahul’s favour earlier. When UP became the chief target of such visits, the Mayawati government had protested his actions furiously. But the Congress government in Haryana, led by Bhupinder Singh Hooda, did not dare display any irritation over his Mirchpur visit. The only Haryana government official present on his arrival was a
naib tehsildar
and that, too, by chance. The media was kept out, yet, the visit attracted more than enough media attention. The publicity machinery around Rahul ensures that the press is never denied details of such visits.

In the forty-five minutes that he spent at Mirchpur, Rahul heard out the victims. The Dalit families told him about their fears of being victimized further at the hands of the Jats. They wanted to be rehabilitated in some other village. Members of the dominant caste, they said, weren’t allowing them to return to their homes. Rahul promised to inform the Congress president of their plight. Sure enough, Sonia pulled up Hooda for not reining in the perpetrators. ‘Almost whenever he [Rahul] makes interventions, the outcome is favourable, and secondly, he makes calibrated interventions,’ said Dilip Cherian, the Delhi-based image management executive who has handled a number of national election campaigns for political parties, including the Congress. ‘I think he intervenes on subjects where he feels there is something to be done about them.’ Every move is clearly well thought out. ‘His team members are doing research all the time. The idea is only to expose him to issues that give him some traction,’ Cherian added.

Delhi University professor and political analyst Mahesh Rangarajan reads a political statement in the issues Rahul takes up. Land, for example, is an important political issue, and an economic one as well. Best of all, it transcends caste and community affiliations. In his opinion, we can expect Rahul to replace Sonia Gandhi as the chief campaigner for Congress before the 2014 general election. It would mark a shift in the First Family’s core appeal: with the politics of sacrifice yielding to the politics of activism. Establishing public trust—that the shift would serve the country well—might not be as easy to achieve as putting together a plan. In itself, brand consistency (seen as espousing the same values and core issues, repeatedly) has served Rahul rather well so far. But, brand reliability (to be seen by the consumer, in this case the voter, as being able to deliver the goods he promises) is always harder to earn. His well-attended rallies have not resulted in proportionate electoral gains for the candidates for whom he campaigned. After the Janata Dal United and Bharatiya Janata Party combine swept the Bihar assembly elections in 2010, Jaitley took a dig at Rahul. ‘The Congress should realize that politics is more than a series of photo-ops.’

Rahul Gandhi remained quite aloof from politics for many years. Then, he suddenly contested the Lok Sabha elections in 2004. He won comfortably from the family’s pocket borough of Amethi in Uttar Pradesh, but he chose to take up neither a ministerial assignment in the first Congress-led coalition government nor a position in the Party. Despite pressure from all quarters within the Party, from leaders, tall and small, eager to associate with the next generation of the Congress, Rahul took his own time to decide what role he wanted for himself. His travels had actually begun with the 2004 Lok Sabha win. He first set out within his constituency, Amethi, stopping at frequent intervals and mingling with the villagers. Amethi and Rae Bareli, Sonia Gandhi’s constituency, were relatively familiar territory for Rahul even then.

From the family’s boroughs, he slowly expanded outwards into other parts of UP as the 2007 assembly elections drew closer. A roadshow in western UP as part of the election campaign took him to the Islamic seminary of Deoband. Interacting with the students there, he announced: ‘I am blind to caste and religion. I see everyone as Hindustani … If one Hindustani tries to harm another, I promise I will come in between. Please remember that I am the grandson of Indira Gandhi.’

Amethi is a constituency that has always been contested, and mostly won, by someone from the Gandhi family or by a close confidant. The family has nurtured the constituency for decades, even during the periods when the Congress remained out of power at the Centre and in the state. But, campaigning and dealing with the voters of Amethi is not the same as dealing with voters in other parts of the country or even other parts of UP. Three successive political movements—the rise of OBC politics, the Ayodhya temple movement and, later, the rise of Dalit politics—ensured that the Congress stayed out of power in the state. It was reduced to an insignificant position in most elections.

Rahul’s remarks on the second day of his election campaign caused a stir. On 19 March 2007, he announced at Deoband, ‘Had the Gandhi family been there in politics [at that time], Babri Masjid demolition would not have taken place.’ It was the Congress that was in power at the Centre with P.V. Narasimha Rao as prime minister when the mosque was demolished by Hindu zealots at Ayodhya on 6 December 1992. ‘My father said to my mother that he would stand in front of Babri Masjid if it would do any good. They would have had to kill him first,’ Rahul told a gathering of listeners. The brief speech caused outrage even within his own party though Congressmen, as usual, were quick to defend it.

Analysts back in New Delhi dubbed it a display of political naivety and immaturity. On the same trip, at Bareilly, he said, ‘Members of the Gandhi family have achieved goals they have initiated, like the freedom of the country and dividing Pakistan in two.’ After years of staying away from politics and public life, Rahul was learning the art of speaking in public the hard way. Unlike his sister, he was a slow learner and, to add to his worries, he has been more in the spotlight than any other Gandhi who had ventured into politics. Every word, in the age of twenty-four-hour news television, was picked up and scrutinized. Every nuance recorded and debated ad nauseam.

It was only after he was given charge of the youth organizations of the Party as general secretary in September 2007 that Rahul began to work to a plan. Within six months of taking charge of the youth organizations, he began traversing the length and breadth of India just as his father had after becoming prime minister in 1984, and his great-grandfather after returning to India. ‘To me, the Orissa tour and all such tours are a journey in understanding and getting close to the people,’ he told journalists in Bhubaneswar on the fourth day of his Orissa visit. When asked by a journalist on how long he planned to tour like this, his response was: ‘It will continue for the rest of my life.’

Congress leaders say the travels that took him to all parts of the country laid the foundation for a more confident and more travelled future prime ministerial candidate from the Party. They also put him directly in touch with the professed target audience of the Congress—the common man. There were bloopers and mistakes on the way, as also criticism from the Opposition, but the travels seemed to have helped the Congress strike a chord with the voters. The returns were greater in 2009. Though the Congress tried to give Rahul the entire credit, it is probably true that it owed at least a part of its success to his travels. The apex body of the Congress—the CWC—passed a resolution in its first meeting after the 2009 results to congratulate Rahul on the Party’s success. His campaign tour during the 2009 elections took him to more rallies than the prime minister and Sonia Gandhi put together. Rahul’s aligning with the poorest of the poor seemed to have worked wonderfully as a political strategy as well as a learning experience.

Everywhere Rahul went, the media followed. An associate of his said the phrase ‘Discovery of India’ was a media coinage that Rahul and his team disliked but it stuck. Rahul was already travelling among the poor to understand how a large part of India lives. He felt the media were giving too much importance to the caste or the religion of the people whose homes he visited. At a press conference in Thiruvananthapuram, he told reporters:

I see it as going to a human being’s house and not a Dalit’s house. I am going to a poor man’s house, whether he is a Dalit or belongs to a minority community or an upper caste. Dalit is your frame and not mine. While you see him as a Dalit, I see him as a poor person.

Rahul’s primary aim was to understand what the poor go through and to know them better. ‘All that I do is to understand what the poor people are faced with,’ he said, adding that the only difference he saw between the poor and the rich was one of opportunity. At the Congress’s 2010 plenary in New Delhi, it was clear that he wanted the Party to play the role of the provider of those opportunities to the poor which, when denied, kept them poor.

But, it was not by coincidence that the media were giving too much importance to the caste or class of people whom Rahul met during his travels. His visits to Bundelkhand and subsequent lobbying with the Central government earned the backward region a special package. He led a delegation to the prime minister to demand a relief package for handloom and powerloom weavers. And five days later, the finance minister, in his budget speech, announced a special bailout package for weavers. The media were quick to give him credit for the development even though Rahul’s meeting with the prime minister came nearly a month after the minister of state for textiles, Panabaka Lakshmi, announced to the weavers in her constituency that a package was on its way.

The weavers owed an estimated amount of Rs 3,400 crores to banks. Rahul suggested that the loan be waived. The delegation under Rahul—which included Congress general secretary Digvijaya Singh, Uttar Pradesh Congress Committee (UPCC) president Rita Bahuguna Joshi, and UP Congress leader Pramod Tiwari—submitted a three-page proposal to the prime minister. It read, ‘The weavers, particularly in north India, are going through acute misery because of increase in prices of cotton yarn and silk yarn. Because of the policy of state governments, the powerloom and handloom sectors in Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and other states are in a very bad state.’

A few days later, the finance minister announced a Rs 3,000-crore package for the weavers’ cooperative societies. Though Mukherjee did not specify the details of the allocation, Congressmen declared that the money was meant for a loan waiver. The Congress leadership had succeeded in projecting to the weavers that it was because of Rahul that their voice had been heard. Weavers form about 8 per cent of UP’s population and due to the large concentration of their population in eastern UP, the Congress hoped that the waiver would influence voting patterns in the region.

When Rahul intervenes, the government acts. The Party goes all out to take note of and praise every little step that builds his image, or to put immediate corrective measures in place if necessary. Sycophancy isn’t a trait Rahul encourages. But that doesn’t discourage even the veterans in the Party from showering praises on the leader who is close to them neither in age nor in experience. Rahul, however, would rather be seen as one with the
aam aadmi
, whether it is through politically strategic moves like supporting the Aligarh farmers in their agitation against his rival Mayawati, or spontaneous decisions like travelling on a Mumbai local train during a visit to the country’s financial capital.

On that visit, he sent both his security and the state administration into a tizzy by suddenly deciding to take a local train, the lifeline for lakhs of ordinary Mumbaikars. He waited patiently on the platform, waving to surprised commuters across the rail track on the opposite platform. Inside the train, he shared a seat with someone, talked to people, reached out to shake hands with them and even took a phone call straining to hear and be heard over the din in the compartment. And finally, when he got off the train, he left the station refusing to say a word to the mediapersons who had rushed through Mumbai traffic to catch up with him. A talkative companion while on the train, he clammed up before the television microphones.

While his co-passengers were thrilled with the unexpected encounter, neither the Shiv Sena nor the Maharashtra Navnirman Sena (MNS) took kindly to the visit. After Rahul stopped at an ATM to draw money, MNS chief Raj Thackeray said, ‘This is what they do at the Centre—take away money from Maharashtra.’ A year later, when he took a local train from Dombivli to Dadar to escape traffic congestion, Thackeray did not lose the opportunity to take a dig at Rahul. ‘I did not want to do any stunt. Unlike him, who had stopped to withdraw money from an ATM to buy tickets, I had money with me to buy my ticket,’ he said. For the record, Thackeray was taking a Mumbai local after twenty-five years.