Rahul (15 page)

Amid interruptions, he told the stories of two women from Vidarbha in Maharashtra—a region infamous for suicides by debt-ridden farmers—and how nuclear energy would change the fate of their families. ‘Three days ago, I went to Vidarbha and there, I met a young lady who has three sons. The young lady, Sasikala, a landless labourer, lives with Rs 60 a day,’ he said, and spoke about how her sons dream of a bright future but are forced to study with the help of a little brass lamp because the house has no electricity. When he started to speak about Kalawati, who had nine children, some MPs interrupted and a few of them laughed. ‘I am glad you find that funny,’ Rahul said to them, ‘But Kalawati is a person whose husband committed suicide. So, I would urge you to respect her.’ As more protests and interruptions followed, Speaker Somnath Chatterjee said, ‘I think the Parliament of India is reaching its lowest position—nadir!’ The House was adjourned and when it met after the lunch recess, Rahul picked up from where he had left.

After initial disturbances, he was allowed to speak uninterrupted. Only now, instead of Kalawati, he spoke of the woman from Vidarbha as ‘Mrs Kala’ evoking laughter from the benches. Rahul, too, stopped to smile sheepishly. A familiar mood of indulgence settled on the benches as Rahul went on to finish his speech. While concluding, he candidly spoke of the lesson he had learnt that day.

We might have different views about how this country should be built. We might have different opinions on what we should do. But essentially we sit in this room together and we have to solve our problems together. This is what differentiates us and this is what gives us our true power—that any voice can be heard in this room, that any voice can disrupt any other voice in this room. I am being serious. It is uncomfortable for me. But I am very proud of it that every voice can be heard in this country.

Despite all the attention that followed Rahul’s mention of Kalawati’s struggles, she never got compensated for her husband’s suicide. The land he tilled was not in his name and his death was never registered as a farmer’s suicide. In 2010, her son-in-law killed himself and the following year, her daughter.

In the initial years, Rahul openly admitted in Parliament, ‘I am new to politics and still have a lot to learn.’ The simple issues that he raised as a first-time MP might have sounded naive to seasoned parliamentarians but those were pertinent points coming from a political novice. MPs are indeed supposed to keep an ear close to the ground and bring issues of concern to Parliament, where laws are enacted. In the second term, it is only natural to expect an MP to graduate towards making more assertive and pertinent interventions in policymaking. But that hasn’t happened in Rahul’s case. In seven years, he has participated only in five debates.

This is perhaps one reason that he sometimes finds himself ill-equipped to tackle questions that are unexpectedly asked of him. During his 2011 padyatra in Uttar Pradesh, when Rahul was faced with tough questions from the peasants he met, he simply ignored those questions. At Bajna village, he chose not to reply to a farmer who said inflation was hurting them as much as land issues. This was the second time in two days that he had ignored the question. At Chandpur, a young man questioned him on corruption and Rahul said ministers were sent to jail and action was taken. He took no supplementary questions from the young man and asked him to read the papers for details.

Rahul’s stance on many issues of pressing national importance is either not known or is seen as simplistic. His utterances, inside and outside Parliament, have not provided observers with enough material to see him as a fully rounded personality—as a politician and citizen. Jim Yardley of the
New York Times
wrote in June 2010, one year after the UPA’s resounding comeback in the Lok Sabha polls:

Despite his aura of inevitability, Rahul largely remains an enigma. India is an emerging power, facing myriad domestic and international issues, but he remains deliberately aloof from daily politics. His thoughts on many major issues—as well as the temperature of the fire in his stomach—remain mostly unknown.

Like most other journalists who tried and failed to get an interview, Yardley did not succeed in gaining access to Rahul. If India is the world’s largest democracy, the US claims to be the greatest, and Yardley’s observations—as a foreign correspondent who grew up in the US and is writing about the next leader of the Indian National Congress and possibly even India—are both interesting and telling:

Rahul is using his enormous popularity to broaden the party’s political base, steering clear of more contentious policymaking. That could help position the Congress party to win an outright national majority—though it does little to illuminate what he would do with a mandate if he won it … Rahul is omnipresent in the media, and his face is plastered on untold numbers of billboards and political posters. His public image is as a humble, serious man, if somewhat shy, even as his name invariably tops polls ranking the country’s ‘hottest’ or ‘most eligible’ bachelors. Yet he rarely grants interviews, including for this article, and only occasionally conducts news conferences. Reporters are often tipped to his appearances at one village or another, but often all they get is a photograph—which inevitably appears in newspapers around India.

His daily life is cloaked in secrecy, which makes it an irresistible if elusive topic for the Indian media. One news station ran a lengthy report after obtaining a 10-second video clip of Rahul riding his bicycle in New Delhi.

Yardley’s article quoted Pratap Bhanu Mehta, once a member-convener of the National Knowledge Commission, a high-powered advisory body to the prime minister of India, and now the president of the New Delhi-based think tank, Centre for Policy Research. ‘What most people still have a hard time figuring out is, “What is Rahul Gandhi’s vision?”’ Mehta told the
New York Times
. Mehta had met Rahul privately and spoke highly of him, yet his concerns—with regard to what exactly the Congress leader’s ideas are—remained unresolved. ‘It is still not apparent to a lot of people what his own deep political convictions are.’ In another interview, to
rediff.com
’s Sheela Bhatt, as UPA-II neared its second year in the saddle in the beginning of 2011, Mehta appeared to have been able to diagnose the problem more clearly.

We know Rahul Gandhi is extremely important for the party. He is mobilizing the new constituency for the party. Somehow, he seems to be operating on the assumption that there is a difference in political mobilization and government and governance. I think Rahul Gandhi is making the biggest mistake in thinking that political mobilization and outreach can happen independently of your record in government. That somehow you can be a big national leader without taking a clear public stand on the major issues of the country.

Speaking to one of the authors some months later, Mehta said he had nothing more to add to his analysis. Nothing had changed. ‘A leader is judged by his actions. People will judge [Rahul] the same way too.’

If one goes by opinion polls that appear in the media from time to time, Rahul remains the most popular contender for the prime minister’s position. Yet, his projected charisma does not quite seem to turn the Congress’s fortunes in places where the party does not have a strong base any longer. An opinion poll by NDTV in 2009 found that 46 per cent of the respondents believed that Rahul would make a better prime minister than Manmohan Singh, who lagged behind by 8 per cent. Though a majority (55 per cent) felt that Rahul would be the next prime minister, a greater percentage of voters also felt that there would be no change of guard at the prime minister’s level before the 2014 elections. The same year, a C fore survey conducted for the newsweekly
Open
soon after the Congress’s surprise revival in Uttar Pradesh found that a majority of the respondents (46 per cent) felt that Rahul should have become the prime minister in 2009 instead of Manmohan Singh. Opinions clearly had changed since 2005 when a survey conducted for
India Today
had found that a majority of Indians (63 per cent) felt that dynastic politics was unacceptable.

The truth of electoral politics in India is, however, often at variance with the findings of such surveys and polls. In the 2004 elections more than 240 political families contested and nearly two dozen political dynasts were elected as members of Parliament. The
Open
magazine survey of 2009 also revealed that nearly 60 per cent of the people felt that Rahul was more accessible than other politicians. A majority went to the extent of describing him as incorruptible and as a young, energetic leader with a clean image. A whopping 64 per cent was of the opinion that Rahul should contest the 2012 assembly election in Uttar Pradesh as the Congress candidate for chief minister—an option which senior Congress leaders had ruled out saying that Rahul was a national leader with a national image and could not be confined to one state. Besides, despite the inroads which the Congress has made in Uttar Pradesh, surveys have indicated that though Mayawati might have lost some ground, the battle is far from over. The Congress, surveys showed, isn’t yet in a position to wrest control from the Bahujan Samaj Party. A CVoter opinion poll on Uttar Pradesh, conducted for the
Sunday Indian
, showed that while 64 per cent felt that BSP will suffer if Rahul goes all out with his poll campaign, a majority still wanted to see Mayawati as the chief minister of the country’s most populous state. Mayawati, it was felt, had already consolidated her votes among minorities; infrastructure development under her had improved and her schemes to uplift the Dalit population would fetch her votes.

Assembly electoral results since 2009 have shown that Rahul’s magic does not work in state elections. The party paradropped him into every election campaign, and he attracted listeners but not voters. Though the Congress did not fare as badly in the 2011 assembly elections as it had in Bihar, it did not do too well either. Rahul’s nominees discovered the hard way that it takes more than just blessings from the high command to win elections against strong opponents. In Kerala, for instance, despite the anti-incumbency vote against the Left front government, the Congress-led United Democratic Front barely scraped through. Of Rahul’s eighteen nominees, only eight won. He had selected twenty-four Youth Congress candidates for the elections in Tamil Nadu, West Bengal and Assam—seven each in the eastern states and ten in Tamil Nadu. Not a single candidate won in Tamil Nadu, where the Congress and its senior alliance partner, the DMK, took a severe beating at the hands of the Jayalalithaa-led challenge to the incumbent government. In West Bengal, where the Congress played a junior partner to Mamata Banerjee’s Trinamool Congress, riding an anti-Left wave, four of Rahul’s seven nominees won. Assam was the only state where all seven nominees returned from the polls as members of the legislature. Here the Congress government returned to power in the absence of a serious challenger. Clearly, in these states, local factors rather than the pull of youth led the voters to decide on which way they went.

Electoral politics is as much about winning as it is about making your opponents lose. Rahul Gandhi’s next big challenge is the UP assembly polls of 2012. Before he (or his party on his behalf) can stake a claim to the post of prime minister in 2014, the UP elections must show that his party-building exercise is fetching results. Those around him, however, hasten to clarify that Rahul is in no hurry to be the prime minister. According to a member of his core team,

He is looking at the position that the party will occupy in one to two decades’ time from now. The Congress will have new members, those who have come through a process of election via the Youth Congress. It will have strong presence in every part of the country and the current old guard of the party would have phased out by then.

Before he stakes a claim to the position of the prime minister, Rahul will also have to tackle the contradictions between his left of centre stance and the government’s reformist approach. He has often spoken of the contrast between the ‘two Indias’, of the rich getting richer at the cost of the poor, and has taken pro-poor positions. He has been able to influence similar decisions by the government. But special packages for weavers or farmers and guaranteeing rural employment or food security are not the only decisions the UPA government has taken. Commenting on these conflicting positions, Sitaram Yechury, CPM politburo member and MP, said, ‘I don’t want to personalize this but if anybody else wants to pick up our issues and our ideas, they are very welcome. I only wish that they don’t just look at this as a descriptive term but also try to understand why this is happening. The reforms which it is following on the one hand and its
aam aadmi
concerns on the other are the fundamental contradictions of UPA-II.’

August 2011 was an eventful month for the UPA government. It threw up new challenges that would require swift action and not merely ideas. The monsoon session of Parliament began with the government appearing increasingly confused under growing pressure from an agitation led by the Maharashtra-based activist Anna Hazare and his support group. Called Team Anna, the group included bureaucrat-turned-activist Arvind Kejriwal, Kiran Bedi, a retired (and India’s first) woman Indian Police Service officer, civil rights lawyer Prashant Bhushan and his father, former law minister Shanti Bhushan. The group was supported by a host of other people, including a number of film stars. They had been demanding the institution of a strong anti-corruption body—the Lokpal—that successive governments had managed to put off for more than four decades. After the first round of protests in April 2011, in which Hazare and his supporters insisted that the government’s version of the Lokpal Bill was toothless and that their version be adopted by Parliament instead, the government formed a joint drafting committee including Hazare and his supporters on one side and some of the government’s key ministers on the other. The committee failed to reach a consensus as the government insisted on keeping the prime minister, the judiciary and the lower bureaucracy out of the purview of the proposed anti-corruption watchdog. As the talks fell through, Hazare threatened to go on an indefinite fast at New Delhi from 16 August to press for his team’s version of the Lokpal Bill, which they called the Jan (People’s) Lokpal Bill.