Rahul (8 page)

Being in charge of the Congress youth and student wings isn’t the most important post at the general-secretary level. But, if anyone has any doubts about Rahul’s stature in the Party, all they need to do is look carefully at the proceedings of the plenary in 2010. There were no drum-beaters and sloganeers at the meet, demanding more powers for Rahul. What more could they have asked for, anyway? Rahul was the only Congress leader other than Prime Minister Manmohan Singh—neither of them had ever been an INC president—who had his sepia-toned picture adorning a 20-foot-high stand-alone billboard along with those of Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, Sardar Patel, Sarojini Naidu, S.C. Bose and others. Besides, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh had already said earlier that year that he would be ‘very happy to make place for anybody the Congress Party decides’. The brazen display of sycophancy at the January 2006 plenary was missing in December 2010. Instead, there were subliminal signs of the demand raised in 2006—of Rahul’s taking over the Party’s reins—having been met with. Sonia was the president, dealing with the old guard and old allies, while Rahul was laying the path for the future and, in doing that, steering and influencing the decisions of the Party in the present. What remained to be done was his taking over as prime minister but that would happen after he had fulfilled his promise of having strengthened the Party. Till then, Congress workers and leaders, the sloganeers for putting him in charge of everything, would wait patiently.

As Congress president, Sonia Gandhi dedicated a large part of her speech to what she described as the ‘democratic, professional and systematic’ manner in which the IYC and the NSUI were making qualitative additions to their ranks. The Party, she said, was happy to welcome more and more young people. Despite the debacle in Bihar, where the Party has made new enemies out of old friends—Lalu Prasad Yadav’s Rashtriya Janata Dal and Ram Vilas Paswan’s Lok Janshakti Party—Sonia declared that Rahul’s chosen line of a go-alone Congress would persist.

At Hyderabad, on returning to power after a long gap, if the Party was conscious of coalition realities and its coalition dharma, the Delhi plenary was held in an atmosphere of increasing tension between the Congress and its existing and its former allies. Taking a cue from Rahul’s remarks during his tour of West Bengal in mid-2010 (when he said the Congress would respect its ally, Trinamool Congress, but wouldn’t bow to it), MP Deepa Dasmunsi lashed out at the Bengal ally for not treating the Congress with enough respect. She spoke of ‘conspiracies against the Congress’, pleading with the Congress president not to give away seats to the allies in places where the Party was strong. Rahul’s aide and former Youth Congress leader Manicka Tagore, now an MP from Tamil Nadu, took on the DMK, one of the significant allies of the Congress. He spoke of the ‘self-respect of the Congress worker’, and of establishing Congress rule in the southern state, echoing Rahul’s remarks. The general secretary in charge of UP and Assam, Digvijaya Singh, suggested in his speech that it was time for not just Rahul but his entire team to take over the Party. Digvijaya Singh announced after his passionate bashing of the BJP and the RSS, that he and the likes of Ahmed Patel (Sonia Gandhi’s political secretary), Ghulam Nabi Azad (former Jammu and Kashmir chief minister and party general secretary) and Ashok Gehlot (the reigning Rajasthan chief minister) had been brought in by Rajiv Gandhi when they were in their mid-thirties. ‘Now, our expiry date is nearing,’ he said, adding, ‘I am confident Rahul Gandhi will make his own team.’

As for Rahul himself, the period between the two plenaries saw him slowly taking charge of things. From being a low-key first-time MP, to being Sonia Gandhi’s election manager, to determining the course of the Congress alliances, he had come a long way. This time around, in his speech, he even took on ministers in the Manmohan Singh government for not doing enough for party workers, or taking time out, during their visits, to meet party functionaries. ‘The organization is the bridge between the government and the people. There are ministers and chief ministers here on stage. You should give more time to the party workers. Wherever I go, I hear this complaint,’ he announced from the dais. The tent, filled with delegates—AICC members from all over the country, members of the frontal organizations like the Congress Seva Dal and the All India Mahila Congress—broke into a thunderous applause as Rahul gently rebuked the ministers seated on the raised platform.

He spoke of linking the common man’s life with the growth engine of the country’s economy. Of course, Rahul’s address had its emotional appeal this time as well. ‘Anyone not connected to the system’ is the common man, he said.

We call him the common man but, in fact, he is unique. He has immense capabilities, intelligence and strength. He builds this country every day of his life and yet our system crushes him at every step. We will never build a nation until we build a system in which this man’s progress is based not on whom he knows but on what he knows. This is the challenge for our generation.

Rahul had prevailed upon the Congress to replace the ‘poor man’ with the ‘common man’ as the chief beneficiary of the Party’s promised policies in its 2004 pitch when it was attempting to come back to power. In 2010, he set out to define who this common man was. He cut a wide swathe by including the country’s ever-growing middle class.

Within the Congress, a peculiar insecurity preceded the Lok Sabha elections of 2009. Allies went their own ways, leaving the Congress jittery about its chances of returning to power. It was hard to find anyone in the grand old party smiling. Unless, of course, they were on camera. The older the leader, the more resigned he was to the prospect of the Party’s not crossing the one-third mark in the Lok Sabha tally. An internal survey of the Congress said it was going to emerge as the single largest party. But the survey pegged the number of seats in the Congress kitty at just about 150. The level of self-doubt in the Congress ranks was rather high. Even among those who worked with Rahul, it was only the young and the less experienced who were convinced that the Party would do better than it had done in the previous election. That most of them had acquired their political education outside the electoral arena added to the worries of experienced Congressmen.

Open
magazine pegged the number at 165 seats. The magazine’s political bureau, where one of the authors of this book works, had looked at the state-wise condition of the Congress, and come up with that figure, which was published in the run-up to the 2009 election. ‘You are either being too nice to us or you can see something that we in the Congress can’t,’ said a Congressman who is an old associate of the family and is one of those who handle the activities of the Rajiv Gandhi Foundation in Rae Bareli and Amethi. ‘
Agar aisa ho jaye to apke munh mein ghee shakkar
(If we can pull that off, may you be blessed),’ he said with scepticism, sitting in his makeshift office at the Congress headquarters in New Delhi.

In such a scenario, the move to go it alone, and by alienating key allies, would be disastrous, Congressmen with more salt than pepper in their hair told each other. At 24 Akbar Road—the Party headquarters and a lesser centre of power after 10 Janpath—many argued that the Congress ought to learn from the BJP’s 2004 experience. The BJP, which had ruled the country from 1998 to 2004 as the head of a motley alliance of parties, had finished with 138 seats in the 2004 elections. That was just seven MPs fewer than the Congress’s 145 but it could not muster another alliance to return to power. Another chief cause of worry for Congress party leaders was the falling out between the UPA and the Left. For more than four years, different constituents of the Left Bloc comprising over sixty MPs led by the Communist Part of India (Marxist) had backed the UPA. The Left had supported the Congress-led government from outside and lent the much-needed stability to the coalition government. In 2008, however, the Left and the Congress drifted apart on the issue of the Indo-US nuclear deal, ultimately leading to the Left’s withdrawal of outside support to the UPA government. They fought the 2009 election with the bitterness of former partners who have just been through a divorce.

In short, the mood was that of uncertainty. The Party was going to the polls, after five years in power, unsure of which way the voter would swing, and therefore, sceptical of returning to form a government. But, if you had looked where cameras were forbidden, and still are, you would have spotted a completely different atmosphere: the young and very business-like Team RG was busy at work. The members of the team appeared to be filled with a sense of purpose—something that they seemed to have acquired from their leader. They were working to a plan, based on their own little inputs and everything he had picked up over the years. They organized his election tours meticulously, ignoring reports of the Congress’s barely satisfactory prospects. While the seniors in the Party harboured mixed feelings, this team of young people was sure of the Congress improving on its previous tally. Call it lack of experience or political acumen (a quality that often manifests itself as cynicism), or the necessary caution so characteristic of experienced politicians, the team around Rahul worked unmindful of the pitfalls of pushing him into an election that—based on the Party’s own assessment—the Congress might lose.

Confident of the Party’s prospects, Rahul clocked more than 85,000 kilometres in election travel, campaigning and speaking tirelessly. If he was addressing an election rally in Punjab’s Hoshiarpur, the event would be preceded by one at Tiruchirapalli in Tamil Nadu, and followed by another at Roorkee in Uttarakhand. At the end of the campaign, he had addressed over a 110 rallies and touched almost every state in the country. By the time the election results came in, it was clear that Team RG had struck gold. The Congress finished with a higher tally than it had in 2004. Quite a few of the foot soldiers even returned from the election battlefield as members of the Lok Sabha.

With its headquarters at 12 Tughlaq Lane—the house officially allotted to Rahul Gandhi as the MP from Amethi—the team has been slowly preparing the curriculum for the future. The election win of 2009 was firmly tucked away in the trophy showcase. At forty-one years of age, Rahul can afford to be patient. ‘I am still young,’ he had said during the 2009 campaign. In his view, short opportunistic alliances to gain power had weakened the Party. ‘We would have liked alliances with Mulayam Singhji, Laluji and Paswanji to keep the secular vote intact, but their attitude disappointed us. The Party will only benefit from going it alone in the long run,’ said Congress general secretary Digvijaya Singh in the run-up to the general election. ‘The Party went through a series of flip-flops after 1991, supporting one party or the other, and that proved disastrous,’ he added, laying down what could be expected in the near future: ‘The result is that we have to start building it from scratch in certain parts.’

A slow change that will be for the long haul. The databanks being monitored and the spreadsheets being pored over by Team RG—all these activities do convey the message that this is a management project. There are hints of changes taking place at a faster pace. The Rahul Gandhi Corporation has its work cut out, more so after the successes of 2009. After the UPA’s almost surprising win in May 2009 that brought the economist prime minister Manmohan Singh back to power, the team’s task has become even more daunting. It must deliver a bigger, better and more confident leader to succeed Dr Singh as India’s next prime minister in 2014. Not just that; the Party’s tally in the next general election should be even more impressive than the 206 seats of 2009 so as to make governance easier or, at least, the decision-making more effective. ‘RG is not in a hurry. He says we have a twenty-year game plan and that his goal is to tap the youth,’ revealed a close aide. Rahul, at a meeting with young professionals, said, ‘Give me ten years of your life and at the end of those ten years, you will be very proud of what you have achieved.’ He was out on one of his talent hunts scouting for educated young men and women to bring into politics. The big question, however, is whether professionals from the ‘I-want-it-yesterday’ world would have the patience to wait and to achieve such long-term goals. Probably not. The point to note here is that the strategy for shaping the Party’s future is not being devised at 10 Janpath, India’s most important address, but at 12 Tughlaq Lane.

Ironically, this emerging power centre is located on a street named after a dynasty brought down by its last scion’s futuristic ideas. Back in the fourteenth century, Muhammad bin Tughlaq dreamt of a pan-Indian sultanate, launched token currency and shifted base for better strategic control. Large-scale counterfeiting, famines, opposition from the orthodoxy and a rebellion jeopardized his grand plans. Rahul, too, has brought in ideas considered out-of-sync with the times, and whether his fate will be any different from that of Tughlaq will depend on the outcome of his efforts. The Congress tally in the 2009 general elections silenced critics, but only for a short while.

The emphasis on youth has been just the start. Team RG’s first task was to rejuvenate the IYC and the NSUI. Since September 2007, when Rahul took charge of the two units, lakhs of new members have been signed up. ‘The pace at which things were moving, we could see the IYC touching a figure of over one crore by the time the drive ended,’ said Ashok Tanwar, Congress MP from Sirsa, Haryana, in 2009. Tanwar was the IYC president in 2007 when Rahul took over as the general secretary steering the two outfits, a post previously held by his father Rajiv and uncle Sanjay. The target for membership was later revised to two crores for the IYC and the NSUI put together. By mid-2011, the IYC decided to extend its membership drive and make it a continuing process. Punjab, for instance, conducted a second round of recruitments that year.

Youth empowerment is the team’s KRA (key result area)—a goal etched in stone. To Rahul’s credit, the IYC and the NSUI conducted internal elections for the very first time, and the talent hunts have lapped up youngsters with fire in their bellies. But such hunts haven’t always been without trouble. In Kerala, in 2009, for instance, M. Liju, Rahul’s choice as Youth Congress president, had to be sacked within hours of his appointment, as a measure to quell a local rebellion. In 2010, serious allegations against the Youth Congress president of the Goa state unit threatened to snowball into a full-blown controversy. A district president wrote to the IYC top brass and Rahul alleging that the state committee was involved in siphoning money from a flood relief fund. He later said he was removed from his post in the Youth Congress and his allegations were not pursued. No inquiry was conducted and he ended up quitting the Party.

The Congress had never seen anything like 12 Tughlaq Lane before. An aide of Rahul Gandhi’s said, ‘The functioning of the office is completely professional.’ He cited an example to underline the changes that took place in the IYC control room after Rahul took charge. Rahul was to go to Puducherry on 25 March 2009 on the eve of the general election. But his visit would have clashed with the schedule of IYC local chapter. The Puducherry unit e-mailed Tanwar’s office about the problem. The e-mail was forwarded immediately to 12 Tughlaq Lane, where Sachin Rao, who looks after the youth organizations, checked with Kanishka Singh and got back to the Puducherry Youth Congress office within minutes. Rahul’s visit was rescheduled. ‘The entire office runs on BlackBerry,’ confided a team member. The joke in Congress circles is that one reason why the Government of India went soft on BlackBerry service despite security and encryption problems is because the IYC and the NSUI—and, ultimately, the overhaul of the Congress—are fashioned around it. Compare this to 24 Akbar Road where the broadcast vans of TV channels parked outside offer the only hint of modernity.

Kanishka Singh, who is younger than Rahul by six years, is a Wharton MBA. The son of S.K. Singh, a former governor and an old Rajiv Gandhi associate, he quit his job as an investment banker with Lazard Frères & Co. in New York to join the Congress. In an early 2004 article in
Outlook
magazine, drawing parallels between Indian general elections and American presidential polls, Kanishka Singh had likened Sonia Gandhi to John Kerry and predicted wins for both. He was only half-right but that was really the half that mattered. He has been an integral part of Team RG since. In another essay published in 2005 in
Seminar
, Kanishka (or K, as they call him in the team) pushed for doing away with the gerontocracy that rules India in favour of dynamic leadership. He argued that most influential leaders in both the BJP and the Congress would be either over the hill or approaching the point from where a decline is inevitable. Dr Manmohan Singh, seventy-eight years old in 2010, would not be pitched again as the Party’s prime ministerial candidate in 2014. That’s a well-established fact within and outside Congress circles. Arjun Singh at eighty (he died on 4 March 2011) had already retired from active politics, Sonia Gandhi at sixty-four was only too eager to pass on the mantle to her son—Kanishka Singh argued in his thesis. He reasoned that, with Vajpayee turning eighty-six and Advani eighty-three in 2010, a generational shift in the BJP would be absolutely necessary:

The writing is on the wall with regard to a generational shift in the BJP by 2010. The Vajpayee–Advani duo will no longer be at the helm of that party five years from now. The jury is still out on who could possibly grow into that role in the BJP. The Congress, too, must see some turnover in its senior ranks by 2010. However, the near-universal ageing of the Party’s entire senior leadership rung shall not have taken place, unlike in the BJP. Smaller national and regional parties, too, are witnessing generational shifts with the passing of the baton. The period between now and 2010 is likely to herald a partial dismantling of the gerontocracy that India has evolved into during the post-Rajiv Gandhi era. A younger leadership in India will, by default, have the ability to think and act beyond a limited five-year time horizon. The potential upside of such a shift is considerable.

The ‘younger leadership’ referred to by Kanishka is clearly Rahul Gandhi, the exemplar of dynamism in the Congress world view.

Compare this with what Digvijaya Singh—chief minister of Madhya Pradesh for two consecutive terms till 2003—told his interviewer, Hartosh Singh Bal (
Tehelka
, 11 June 2005):

Every political party has to build up new leadership. In the 1960s, Indira Gandhiji picked up a number of young people who became chief ministers in the states, ministers in the state and Central government and important functionaries in the AICC. In the 1970s, Sanjay Gandhi did the same thing and then in the 1980s Rajivji picked up people like Ashok Gehlot and Ahmed Patel. I was made PCC president in Madhya Pradesh at the age of 37.

This kind of generational change has to take place, and we would like Rahul Gandhi to come to the organization as soon as possible so that the most challenging task today—the process of building up from grassroots to the AICC—is done by a whole set of younger people. It may take some time but the process of generational change within the Congress party has to start … I strongly feel the new team must have Rahul Gandhi as general secretary of the AICC so that youth could be given predominance at all levels of the organization.

We have to slowly build up our own cadre and more so when we have to face the challenge of the BJP in some states and the Left Front in some other states. The Congress has always been more or less a mass-based party and not a cadre-based party. But both the BJP and the Left Front are cadre-based. We not only have to build cadres but also instil discipline in the Party.