Rahul (14 page)

Will the massive mobilisation by the Congress Party under Gandhi make his ‘Mission 2012’ of capturing power in the next state assembly election successful? While it is early days yet, the Congress faces a Herculean task with enormous challenges from within and outside. UP is a big state, and obtaining a majority requires performing well beyond family strongholds. Organisational hurdles such as building strong local leadership and machinery across the state, internal elections, removing factionalism, finding winnable candidates with clean records, have yet to be resolved. Despite the discourse on development, Dalit/OBC issues retain importance and the BSP’s success in the by-elections last year indicate that Mayawati’s grip over her Dalit–Bahujan constituency remains strong, while the SP remains a contender with its vote-percentage remaining intact in 2007. What is clear is the emergence of a highly competitive, no-holds-barred political rivalry in the run-up to the next election, between the Congress attempting to regain lost ground as a broad-based party, and the BSP attempting to consolidate its position as a party of disadvantaged sections with a Dalit core.

A single paragraph of the political scientist’s observations lists out several constraints that the Congress must overcome to gain UP, failing which, the assembly election will remain merely an interesting electoral fight. For Rahul, however, it could stretch further the long road to the Congress’s dream of forming a government on its own at the Centre. The massive exercise of getting ten
chetna
yatras—that is, awareness marches—to travel through different places almost flopped. ‘If at all, the marches have allowed Mayawati’s followers to consolidate the BSP’s position wherever the marches went. After a Congress yatra passes through an area, the BSP cadres take the opportunity to talk about their party and about Mayawati’s rule to her vote bank. They tell the people that the Congress is conspiring to dislodge Maya from her position and that only leads to the consolidation of votes in her favour,’ said a journalist working with a national Hindi news channel in Lucknow.

After he travelled to the villages of Bhatta and Parsaul in Greater Noida to join the farmers in their agitation against the government in May 2011, Rahul launched a four-day
padyatra
, a march on foot, through the villages along the Yamuna Expressway project. The journey, covered extensively in the media, gave a boost to Rahul’s desire to make the Congress seem like the principal challenger to Mayawati’s regime. It ended with a massive meeting of farmers in Aligarh, where the farmers’ agitation against land acquisition for the project had begun in 2010. ‘When a rich man sells his house, he gets the market rate. When a poor man asks for the market rate, he gets bullets. This is what I have understood after walking among you for four days,’ Rahul told a gathering of farmers. ‘That is why I walked,’ he told a young farmer in the gathering who asked Rahul why he had walked when he had cars at his disposal.

‘Your government only needs to come here and talk to you. A solution can be found, the government just needs to change its intention a bit. We can give you a good law but we can’t change the intention of your [state] government,’ he told another group of farmers at one of the several meetings he held during his march. The state government’s land acquisition drive in western UP had left the peasants there feeling wronged. Rahul, after a failed attempt at targeting Mayawati through the chetna yatras of the Congress, found a good opportunity to use the ire against the BSP government and its chief.

In November 2011, Rahul reinitiated the Congress’s bid for UP. Not only was the new campaign an admission that the Party had failed to convert the awareness campaign he launched in April 2010 into a wave, it was also a step backwards in his politics: Rahul chose to play the dynasty card. The time and the place for his rally to launch the Congress into election mode were carefully chosen. It was on 14 November 2011, the 122nd birth anniversary of his great-grandfather and India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, at Phulpur near Allahabad. Phulpur was Nehru’s political bastion from where he had won the first Lok Sabha election. Rahul launched a more aggressive-than-ever tirade against the Mayawati government and Mulayam Singh Yadav’s Samajwadi Party.

The Party’s posters and banners shouted out Rahul’s Nehru connection—with the slogan ‘
Nehruji ko yaad karenge, Rahulji ke saath challenge
(We will remember Nehru, and go with Rahul)’—all over Allahabad. Hardened by his experience in politics, Rahul himself was more measured in invoking the Nehru–Gandhi dynasty, unlike in 2007, when he had infamously taken credit for belonging to the family that split Pakistan. ‘At one time, Nehruji was the MP here, today mafiamen are the MPs here. There has been a lot of change in UP but no development,’ he said, subtly reminding those gathered there of the Nehru connection.

The last time around, in Ambedkarnagar, on the BSP founder Kanshi Ram’s birthday, there had been no mention of the dynasty. Instead, Rahul had spoken of moving on from the casteist and communal politics that was keeping UP backward. Both the Party and its emerging leader seemed to have taken a few steps backwards this time. Hitting out at the top leaders of the SP and the BSP, he said:

I have been in politics for seven years and I have been touring all of India and UP. In these tours, you have taught me the most. The poor in UP taught me that if a leader does not go to people’s homes, eat with them and see them toil, he will not understand poverty. Until a leader drinks the dirty water from wells in their homes and falls ill, he will not understand anything about poverty. And, until a leader understands poverty in the homes of the poor, he will never be angry at the atrocities against the poor in the state. There was probably a time when Mayawatiji and Mulayam Singh Yadavji had this anger in them. Today, it has died in them and they are running after power.

Turning on the heat, he continued, ‘How long will you continue to beg in Maharashtra or work as labourers in Punjab? When are you going to change the government here? Tell me right now. I want a reply. Let all of us join hands to bring about the change.’ He added: ‘Sometimes I think I should come to Lucknow to fight for you myself.’ The remark drew a round of protests from the Opposition that dubbed it insensitive to the people of UP. The mild suggestion that he might even run for the top post of the chief minister was a tad late. A few days later, he launched his mass contact programme from Barabanki district, once again accusing the Mayawati government of siphoning off central funds meant for the poor. Rahul asserted that, if the state’s voters elected a Congress government in 2012, UP would be among India’s top states in five years.

In the meanwhile, the Congress had become slack again. It was nowhere near giving itself the kind of headstart it had aimed for. At the time Rahul held his Phulpur rally, the Party had only declared its candidates for less than half the seats in the state. It had not executed its earlier plan. The BSP and the SP had finished their lists even before the Congress was half way through the exercise.

In another part of UP, in Rahul’s constituency and his mother’s, concerns over Sonia Gandhi’s illness once again raised expectations of Priyanka’s participation in electoral politics. Speculation about the younger sibling contesting the next Lok Sabha election from either Amethi or Rae Bareli was back to pre-2004 levels of intensity. At that point, locals, including Congress supporters and assembly-level Congress leaders, had expected Priyanka to contest the Lok Sabha elections in 2004, and had even prepared for it. A few days before Rahul’s Phulpur show in November 2011, a local Congress leader in Amethi said, ‘With madam [Sonia Gandhi] planning to go abroad for treatment soon, expectations of Priyanka replacing her in the next election have grown. Earlier, her children were young, now they have grown up. She can contest the election and we are preparing the ground for that.’

It was only in early 2004, when Rahul visited Amethi with Priyanka, that the speculation about his entering politics began. On that tour of Amethi, Priyanka had been Rahul’s guide. She had taken him around the constituency and introduced him to people there. In March that year, the Congress announced Rahul’s candidacy; Sonia Gandhi vacated the Amethi seat for him and moved to Rae Bareli. Priyanka stayed away from contesting elections, but remained an active campaigner, both at the parliamentary and the assembly level elections. Of the ten assembly constituencies in Amethi and Rae Bareli, the Party won seven in the 2007 elections. Without this, its tally of a mere 22 of 403 would have seemed even more inconsequential. ‘The Party’s performance in the area was largely due to Priyanka’s active campaigning,’ said an insider. Besides, she continues to participate actively in the development initiatives run by the Rajiv Gandhi Foundation and the Rajiv Gandhi Mahila Vikas Pariyojana (RGMVP). She closely monitors the self-help groups (SHGs) run by the RGMVP. Towards the end of 2011, the SHGs had almost three lakh women from different parts of the state involved in small-income generation and employment initiatives. Before the 2004 election, the number had stood at a mere 6,000. Running the SHGs had provided Priyanka with a window of access to thousands of families in the constituencies through the women who worked there.

Back in New Delhi, the Congress has denied reports of Sonia’s ill health. Details of her trip to the US in August for the treatment of an undisclosed ailment have never been made public. Asked about the Congress president’s health and a possible visit in the future to the US for follow-up treatment, Janardhan Dwivedi, the Party’s general secretary and chief of the media department, snapped at a reporter on 8 November that the information was ‘total rubbish’, adding, ‘I don’t even consider it worth a response.’ Dismissing a question about whether Sonia Gandhi would be fit enough to campaign in the UP elections, Dwivedi declared she would be addressing a rally at Chamoli in Uttarakhand the very next day to kick off the Party’s election campaign in the hill state. Only, on the day of the rally, he was made to eat his words and announce: ‘The Congress president is running a fever. Her visit to Uttarakhand has been cancelled.’ Instead, Sonia’s address was read out.

Even in Delhi’s Congress circles, murmurs of the scam-ridden UPA using Priyanka as a trump card in 2014 have been doing the rounds. So, when Dwivedi was asked whether she would indeed enter the arena of active politics, he said, ‘They themselves decide who in the family has to do what and, right now, Rahul is in politics.’ In early 2004, when Priyanka had taken her brother around Amethi, the national media—particularly the news channels—had followed them on the tour. On one occasion, an informal interaction turned into an impromptu press conference. Asked if she was going to contest the election or if she would agree to play a bigger role, Priyanka had shot back at a journalist, almost laughing: ‘Who will give me a larger role? I have to decide for myself.’ Given the casual setting, the editor of an international news service said she had answered ‘like a Gandhi’. Unfazed, she had responded, ‘I have been hearing this about myself since I was fifteen. And I hear of my entering politics mostly from you [the media].’ If the Congress performs poorly in UP, the results will again trigger the pre-2004 ‘Rahul or Priyanka’ debate, irrespective of whether or not she takes the plunge.

Though it doesn’t seem as though 10 Janpath and 24 Akbar Road would be adjoining addresses, the two compounds are separated only by a wall that is approximately ten feet high. One of the gates of Sonia Gandhi’s heavily guarded residence—the one that visitors, including top notch party officials and ministers, use—opens onto Akbar Road. Every time election results pour in or there is a party-related celebration, the 150-yard stretch between this gate and the entrance to the Congress headquarters becomes one long stage on which performers shout themselves hoarse singing paeans to the first family. Dates like 9 December or 19 June, Sonia’s and Rahul’s birthdays respectively, are, of course, occasions for celebration. Jagdish Sharma is a small-time Delhi Congressman who appears on such occasions leading a troupe of others like him. They dance and shout slogans, to the tune of hired bands that play at weddings, wishing Sonia or Rahul a long life. If it’s Sonia’s birthday, the slogans range from ‘Mother Sonia’ to ‘Mother India’; if it is Rahul’s, then the slogans revolve around wishing him a long life and demanding that he take over the party, the government and the country forthwith.

As Sonia Gandhi slowly withdraws from public life, her message to sycophantic Congressmen is to not celebrate her birthday. The focus has slowly shifted to Rahul, whose birthday continues to be celebrated outside 10 Janpath whether or not he is in town or even in the country. Amid bursting crackers, Sharma and his bunch of enthusiastic fellow Congressmen get their pictures taken holding Rahul’s posters. They even cut a cake and pretend to feed it to the posters. Year after year, TV news cameramen shoot the cacophonic display of sycophancy and transfer the footage from the broadcast vans stationed outside the Congress headquarters. Often these images of the frenzy surrounding the event are telecast in a loop for a few seconds in the occasional bulletin as fillers, as part of the ‘Rahul Gandhi birthday’ package. Sometimes, this footage comes in handy when the channels show opinion polls that point out how Rahul remains the most favoured PM-in-waiting.

Sharma is one of the many Congressmen who cry themselves hoarse shouting slogans. Congress leaders, irrespective of their position and experience in the party, do not hesitate to declare that Rahul Gandhi has come of age, that he must take over the party and/or the government with no further delay. Manmohan Singh is no different. Year after year, since Rahul Gandhi became party general secretary, Singh has spoken about how he would be only too happy to make way for ‘younger people’ to take over. In May 2009, as he returned to power as prime minister, Manmohan Singh said, ‘It is my wish to have Rahul in the Cabinet but I have to persuade him to be in the government.’ A few days later he repeated himself, ‘So far [Rahul] has not agreed but I have not given up hope.’ Seven months later, he said it again, ‘I have tried many times but not succeeded, I will be very happy to have him in the ministry.’

On 19 June 2011, Rahul Gandhi turned forty-one. Senior Congress leaders used the occasion to announce that he had the right qualities, instincts and experience needed to become the prime minister of India. ‘I think it is time that Rahul can become the prime minister. He is now [past] forty and he has been working for the party for the last seven to eight years,’ Digvijaya Singh said in Bhopal. It was left to a lesser leader, party spokesperson Jayanthi Natarajan, to clarify that the party wasn’t going to effect a change immediately. ‘Manmohan Singh is the prime minister and will continue in the post,’ Natarajan clarified. But she also made it clear, ‘Rahul Gandhi is the future leader of the party and the country.’ Less than a month after the incident, in July 2011, during his announcement of what he said would be the last Cabinet reshuffle in UPA-II’s tenure, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said for the umpteenth time, ‘I requested [Rahul] several times to join the Cabinet but he has said he has responsibilities in the organization.’ In that reshuffle, incidentally, Natarajan was made a minister.

After Rajiv’s death, Sonia did not formally take charge of the Congress. Initially, she stayed away from politics. She slowly started taking a keen interest in the affairs of the Congress but by the time she became its president in 1998, it was nearly seven years after her husband’s assassination. Rajiv, an even more reluctant entrant into politics, was pushed into the thick of things by the deaths of his brother Sanjay and mother Indira. Indira is said to have reluctantly joined Shastri’s Cabinet in 1964. In less than two years, she succeeded him as the prime minister. Rahul’s reluctance is very much of a piece with his family’s attitude.

Rahul has tried to model a large part of his politics around some of Mahatma Gandhi’s and Nehru’s ideas. There is an interesting exchange between the two that merits mention here. In response to Gandhi’s suggestion that Nehru take over as party president in 1929, Nehru wrote to him on 13 July that year as to why he preferred to stay away from the post:

My own personal inclination always is not to be shackled down to any office. I prefer to be free and to have time to act according to my own inclinations. But for years past I have been tied down to various offices and have had to give a great deal of my time to routine and other work to the exclusion of other matters to which I would have liked to attend to. On my return from Europe I had the fixed intention of spending a few months at least in some village areas, more or less cut off from outside activities. I wanted to try to organise them according to my own ideas but even more so I wanted to educate myself and try to get at the back of the mind of the villager … So far as I am concerned the presidentship will thus be a burden to me.

Rahul, though in his second term as the Lok Sabha MP from Amethi, has repeatedly turned down ‘requests’ from the prime minister and has chosen not to work as a minister. Theoretically, it may be possible for any MP from the ruling party not to be a minister despite the prime minister asking him to be so, but legislative duties are not a matter of choice. Rahul has continually chosen to neglect parliamentary proceedings and instead spend time picking up lessons in the field. Several eyebrows were raised when, in his eighth year in Parliament, he told a group of villagers in western UP during his padyatra that he had learnt more from them than he had in Parliament. ‘When we sit in Delhi or Lucknow, we don’t get to know ground realities. I have not learnt as much in Lok Sabha as I learnt from you,’ he said. The statement immediately put the spotlight on Rahul’s performance in Parliament and it turned out that he had been a reluctant participant as a lawmaker.

From May 2009 till the monsoon session of 2011, Rahul had not asked a single question of the ministers in the current Lok Sabha, unlike his counterparts. MPs from other political parties had asked, on an average, 119 questions in the two years of the fifteenth Lok Sabha. Data compiled by PRS Legislative Research, a New Delhi-based organization that tracks the performance of legislators, revealed that—against the national average of about sixteen debates that every Lok Sabha MP participated in—Rahul drew a naught. He had performed better as a first-time MP in the UPA I government, but only in comparison to himself. His attendance was 63 per cent compared to the national average of 70 per cent. He had asked three questions in five years during the question hour as opposed to an average of nearly 180 questions each by other MPs. He had also participated in five debates as against the national average of thirty.

During his second term, Rahul asked no questions and had no debates in his account, with the exception of a zero hour mention on 26 August 2011. Beyond that lone intervention, he largely remained a mute spectator to the Lok Sabha proceedings. While attendance of the MPs went up to 77 per cent in the current Lok Sabha, Rahul’s average has been a low 47 per cent. Leave aside learning from the Lok Sabha, a student with this kind of attendance would be barred from taking exams for not having been present in enough classes. But in politics, the exams are of a different sort. ‘In the Indian system,’ said contemporary historian Mahesh Rangarajan, ‘unlike the US, you are not judged by your performance in Parliament.’ Rangarajan clearly meant that what an MP says in Parliament, or doesn’t, needn’t fetch him or her votes or popularity. He cited the example of former prime minister Indira Gandhi. ‘For the initial ten years that she was in the Rajya Sabha, she made very limited interventions. She hardly spoke,’ he said, adding that her silence in Parliament in those years did not stop her from becoming one of the toughest prime ministers India has had.

Those who track Parliament even more closely have a different view. ‘It is very important for every MP to engage in the parliamentary process,’ said M.R. Madhavan, head of research at PRS Legislative Research. ‘The main role of the MP is to represent national interest: your role in making laws, which does not apply just to your constituency.’ The number of days Parliament meets annually has been reduced by half since the 1950s. It is about sixty-five sittings every year now. This leaves more time for MPs to work outside Parliament but at the same time, it should leave them with less scope for absenteeism when Parliament is in session.

The standard reply from the party when questioned about Rahul’s refusal to take up a ministerial job or to play a more active role in Parliament is that he is focused on his organizational task—of rebuilding the Congress from the grassroots. ‘He deliberately keeps a low profile. If he asks a question, ministers will bend over backwards to please him. You can expect Congress MPs to laud everything he says. This kind of situation is best avoided,’ a junior minister considered close to Rahul said when asked about his leader’s poor performance in the Lok Sabha.

Of the few times that Rahul has spoken in Parliament, he has nearly always stuck to the issues on which he seems to be building his entire politics: Uttar Pradesh, and the India of the poor and the marginalized. In his maiden speech in 2005, he used the opportunity to slam the Uttar Pradesh government, then headed by Mulayam Singh Yadav, while drawing attention to the plight of sugarcane growers:

The Uttar Pradesh Government made a statement in the Supreme Court on 11 January 2005 stating that the private sugarcane mills had paid all the arrears to the cane farmers of Uttar Pradesh. However, the Uttar Pradesh Cane Commissioner later said on the TV news channel Aaj Tak that a sum of Rs 517 crore which were the arrears for the year 2002–03 had not yet been paid. This is extremely unfair to our farmers. I urge upon the Government of India to see that the State Government complies with the directions given by the Supreme Court.

Two years later, while addressing a rally at Muzaffarnagar, UP, Rahul reminded the people present about that speech. ‘The sugarcane farmers face problems. Are you happy that I have to raise their problems in Parliament? Isn’t it the duty of the state government to look after them?’ He had learned early in politics that while it is important to keep one’s ear to the ground and pick up the signals, it is equally important to harp on every little step taken to improve the lot of the people.

Every speech Rahul has made in Parliament has almost always been peppered with personal experiences from his travels across the country. The tours he has undertaken to educate himself about the concerns of the
aam aadmi
have him approaching the issues in a personalized manner where, instead of talking numbers, Rahul has brought names and stories of ordinary Indians into the Lok Sabha. During Budget 2006–07, while drawing attention to the education system which he said is ‘crushing the aspirations’ of thousands of children across India, he cited an example from his visit to a village school a year ago.

I walked up to a village student and asked him, ‘
Beta, bade hokar kya banoge
[What will you become when you grow up]?’ The silent stare which I got in reply disturbed me. In school after school, I have asked this question. And in school after school, I have got no answer. Many students, teachers and parents believe that our system is a dead end.

More such examples followed, one of them of a jobless university topper.

Two years ago I visited a university in a northeastern state. I met a university topper who was unemployed. Now, here is an exceptional person, a person who has followed the path laid out for him perfectly. But after fifteen years of hard work he discovers that our system has led him nowhere. It has crushed his dreams.

On the rare occasions that Rahul has stood up to make a point, senior leaders in the Lok Sabha have listened indulgently as adults would to a child making his first appearance on stage. The times when he fumbled, there were encouraging smiles from the benches. When he spoke during the debate on the trust vote in July 2008 after the Left pulled out on the Indo-US nuclear deal, he started out by saying, ‘I decided that it is important at this point not to speak as a member of a political party, but to speak as an Indian.’ This time around Opposition leaders immediately jumped up to protest. ‘All are Indians,’ said one member of the House. ‘Please speak in Hindi,’ demanded another MP, BJP’s Karuna Shukla who is also former prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s niece. This was not how Rahul’s earlier speeches had been received. Most MPs had patiently given him the time and the space to make his point. A surprised Rahul gathered his wits and addressed Shukla in Hindi, ‘Madam,’ he said, ‘I will speak in Hindi and English both. All I am saying is that you are our elder, please listen to us. You don’t have to agree with us but just listen to us.’ To the others he said,

I completely agree with you that you are also an Indian and you should also speak as an Indian. I would go further to say that you do speak as an Indian and I do not doubt that. So, I decided that what I would do is that I would take a step that a lot of our politicians normally do not do. I decided that I will make a central assumption in my speech. The assumption is that everybody in this House, regardless of which party they come from, whether they come from the BJP or the Shiv Sena or the Samajwadi Party or the BSP or the Congress Party, speaks in the interest of the nation.