The Tao of Winning and Losing

WITH DEFEATS COLLAPSE carefully cultivated illusions. In politics, such disintegrations—the suddenly deflated confidence and the oppressive sprawl of debris—are difficult to accept, unless you are a qualified stoic straying into the arena. Defeats downsize those who have supersized themselves as reality-defying heroes. The pathetic part is the fallen struggling to rise from the ruins, and getting visions of the Dark Denier looming over them.

Donald Trump provided the best case of turning defeat into victory denied by you-know-who in 2020, when the president lost to Joe Biden. The bogey of stolen election became such a stimulant to the resentful right in American politics that the grievance turned into revenge in 2024. The image of loser as martyr was a bestseller in the constituency of the aggrieved. They had their moment finally.

Look who is talking stolen election here in India now. They bear no political resemblance to Trump. They are, unlike the American president-elect, fast getting redundant in the revamped political order of India. The old citadels built on dynastic affinities and the cult of the patriarch cannot any longer withstand India’s new political energy—and its cultural content. Complaints about stolen election are feeble attempts to remain relevant in a political space that is fast shedding its old pieties.

That said, there is something to be said about loss management in politics—and the loser still talking with the confidence of a winner. Move beyond the humbled Sharad Pawar harrumphing about stolen election and come to the philosopher prince of defeat. Losing and keeping the postures of a winner is very Rahul Gandhi. If you care to read his angry post-election structural analyses, you won’t miss the effort to turn the overwhelming reality of losing badly into a soothing sense of winning his own conscience.

It is as if politics for him is still a long passage to self-realisation. What else can explain this tendency to see in every defeat a vindication of what he is: a politician in search of an India compatible with his sociology, not a politician in a hurry to win India. When politics is an existential puzzle you are forever trying to solve, victories and defeats are relative; what remains absolute is your faith in the path, no matter how it fails you consistently. Rahul Gandhi has created an India, with raw material sourced from the worn-out rhetoric of identity and social justice, so remote from the one that rebuffs him.

Maybe he too suffers from the condition that has afflicted liberals elsewhere: a political campaign that has become what the American writer Mark Lilla calls evangelism. Holding a mirror to the liberals in thrall to identity politics, he wrote: “They are losing because they have retreated into caves they have carved for themselves in the side of what once was a great mountain.” Their evangelical mission was doomed to fail because, as he said, “evangelism is about speaking truth to power. Politics is about seizing power to defend the truth.” Rahul Gandhi is not seeking power but defending his version of truth. And losing.

Losing badly because he seems to confuse a campaign for an India he has not yet fully discovered, despite the commendable Bharat Jodo Yatra, with his campaign against Modi. Every political campaign is to some extent negative, if identifying an enemy of the cause is being negative, but building one’s entire political raison d’être on one of democracy’s most popular politicians shows his failure to gauge the growing distance between his world and an India that indulges Modi. Power is accessible to those who realise it is the very reason of politics.

Which brings us to a rare feat in democracy at a time when the system itself is being questioned for its easy obedience to autocrats. In India, Modi is accused of bending the system by the political class rejected by it. They have proved incapable of forming an argument against someone who has made the act of winning the core of his moral system. Power is not an apology for him; it is a permanent struggle for the change he believes in. Power is a moral position for those who build their politics on the aspirations of a people. Misplaced evangelists raging against power have no words left to win it. Someone alone in India “seizes power to defend the truth.” Winning is his pursuit; whining is the other’s profession.

Assembly elections 2024HaryanaJharkhandMaharashtraNarendra Modinational politcsRahul Gandhi