The Unbearable Lightness of Being Rahul Gandhi

IN 280 BCE, KING PYRRHUS OF EPIRUS DEFEATED THE ROMANS IN THE Battle of Heraclea. He emerged victorious once again in the Battle of Asculum in 279 BCE, during the Pyrrhic War. After the latter battle, Greek historian Plutarch says, one soldier brought the king word of his victory. To which a despondent Pyrrhus reportedly replied, “If I achieve such a victory again, I shall be forced to return to Epirus without a single soldier.” Despite the victory, his best generals were dead, his friends vanquished, his army demolished, the morale of the few still standing destroyed, and with no new soldiers to recruit. The Romans, on the other hand, had reserves to recruit from and new zeal to energise their army. The term ‘Pyrrhic victory’ is derived from this event where the technically victorious army was razed to the ground, with costs so heavy that the victory seemed meaningless.

Congress leader Rahul Gandhi is emerging as a virtuoso of Pyrrhic victories in politics, dedicated to a revisionist worldview that entails heavy costs on his party and society so that his woke ideas can prevail. That often translates to naïve opinions and a superficial politics, erasing nuances and complexities. His worldview has the appeal of a Mickey Mouse to a kindergarten audience. Yet Gandhi has little of Mickey Mouse’s ability to take a reality check in consonance with the current socio-political circumstances, surrounded as he is by his similar thinking coterie.

Addressing the Samajik Nyay Sammelan in Delhi recently, Gandhi said, “They say I’m not serious, I’m not interested in poli­tics. Land Acquisition Bill, MGNREGA, Niyamgiri, Bhatta Parsaul are not serious. When people talk about the larger population, they deem us non-serious. When you don’t have the loudspeaker in your hand, everything that you say is non-serious to them.” But the first family of Congress has been scoring self-goals on this count and in public view.

Before the Lok Sabha vote in Kerala last year, Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan, whose CPM is part of the I.N.D.I.A. bloc, made a jibe at Gandhi, saying, “Many times when serious political de­velopments happened in the country, Gandhi was not there. It is the experience of ordinary people that he is inexperienced and not a serious politician.” Gandhi’s trip to Vietnam during the Budget Session drew flak recently. The trip came months after he had left for the Southeast Asian country during the seven-day mourning period for former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh last Decem­ber, with BJP saying the Con­gress leader left for New Year’s celebrations when the “country is mourning Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh’s demise.”

That approach to politics was evident during the recent debate on the Waqf (Amendment) Bill, 2025 too, with the sole objective of elevating the Nehru-Gandhi family’s political ratings. Gandhi chose to hyperventilate on social media on the issue but his reluc­tance as Leader of the Opposition (LoP) to speak on the subject, or even stay through the key debate while his younger colleagues took the floor, came under fire. Worse, his sister and Wayanad MP Priyanka Gandhi absented herself from the vote despite a party whip. Wayanad has a significant Muslim population that voted for her and a regional newspaper, Suprabhaatham, run by the Samas­tha Kerala Jamiyyathul Ulama, a prominent Muslim organisation in Wayanad, criticised the passage of the Waqf Bill in Parliament and the notable absence of influential Congress leaders. “Wayanad MP Priyanka Gandhi, whom the coun­try looks up to with great expecta­tions, did not come to Parliament despite the party whip. That will remain a blot. The question of where she was when the Bill was debated will remain forever,” an editorial in the newspaper said. But the first family’s fan club ignored the criticism and took to social media to celebrate the arrival of Sonia Gandhi in Parliament to vote on the Bill in Rajya Sabha at midnight.

Former Governor of the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) Raghuram Rajan had joined Rahul Gandhi on his Bharat Jodo Yatra, triggering speculation that he could join Congress. In a 2022 interview, he had outdone the Nehru-Gandhi fan club by claim­ing that “India would be lucky to do 5% GDP growth next year (FY2022-23).” India registered a 7.2 per cent GDP growth in fiscal 2022-23. In another interview in May last year, Rajan clarified that his family did not want him to enter politics. That was the start of his de-hyphenating from Congress and the Nehru-Gandhi family. By September, he had noticeably changed his opinion on economic growth under the Narendra Modi government, its achievements in the infrastructure sector and Make in India, and even on manufacturing where he said the government should not focus. No prizes for guessing the reasons for disassociating from Rahul Gandhi’s economics and politics.

With economists like Rajan out of the picture, the Rae Bareli MP chose to give an interview recently to Sukhadeo Thorat, econ­omist, educationist and writer. Gandhi attacked India’s merit system, rubbishing it as “completely flawed”. Commenting on the struggles of Dalits, Other Backward Classes (OBCs), and Adi­vasis in accessing education and the benefits of governance, he questioned the fairness of the current system, saying, “There is a completely flawed concept of merit where I confuse my social position with my capabilities. For anybody to say that our educa­tion system or our bureaucratic entry systems are fair to Dalits, OBCs, and tribals… that’s just utter fallacy.”

Rahul Gandhi’s caste campaign is an egregious superimposi­tion of Critical Race Theory (CRT)—pioneered by Derrick Bell among others and propagated from the seminar halls of Harvard University during the 1970s and 1980s—on the Indian milieu as ‘Critical Caste Theory’. This is despite the vast chasm between the cultural and civilisational trajectories of the two countries. The attempt to draw a specious parallel between the historical subjugation of African Americans and the socio-religious dy­namics involving Dalits and OBCs in India is nothing short of an intellectually disingenuous exercise. But Gandhi’s advisers are fascinated by these theories and insist on using him as a vehicle for propagating them. So obsessed is he with caste that in recent discussions with students on drug abuse, he brought in caste and Brahmanism to discuss the penchant among youth for jobs in engineering and medicine, leaving the interviewers flummoxed.

The critical race theorists based their political strategy on the work of Antonio Gramsci, the Italian Marxist who pioneered the concept of cultural hegemony and argued that modern leftwing revolutions could succeed through a “war of position” against the establishment. “Critical scholars derive their vision of legal ideology in part from the work of Antonio Gramsci,” wrote Kimberlé W Crenshaw, American civil rights advocate and CRT scholar, in Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings That Formed the Movement. In examining domination as a combination of physical coercion and ideological control, Gramsci articulat­ed the concept of hegemony, the means by which a system of attitudes and beliefs, permeating both popular consciousness and the ideology of elites, reinforces existing social arrange­ments and convinces the dominant class that the existing order is inevitable.

In the US, Crenshaw maintains, the existing hegemony was the regime of “white supremacy” which, even after the fall of slavery and the Jim Crow laws, had “been submerged in popular conscious­ness,” and still provided the basic structure of racial domination. According to the narrative of CRT, American institutions perpetu­ated this invisible white supremacy while mystifying it through appeals to merit, neutrality, colour blindness, and equal protection under law—all of which were illusions designed to protect the “racist ideology” and material interests of the ruling class.

In America’s Cultural Revolution: How the Radical Left Con­quered Everything, Christopher F Rufo outlines how the final key element of CRT is actually critical race praxis, or the ap­plication of the theory to practical politics. Crenshaw and her colleagues explicitly adopted Karl Marx’s dictum in the ‘Eleventh Thesis on Feuerbach’ that the purpose of philoso­phy is not to interpret the world but to change it. “Unlike some academic disciplines, critical race theory contains an activist dimension. It tries not only to understand our social situ­ation but to change it,” Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic an­nounced in the opening of Critical Race Theory: An Introduction.

“Street activists, for their part, need new theories to challenge a social order that treats minorities and the poor so badly. By the same token, theorists need the infusion of energy that comes from exposure to real-world problems, both as a galvanizing force for scholarship and as a reality test for their writing. As for criticiz­ing the existing system, the critics respond that they are indeed at work developing a vision to replace it,” wrote Mari Matsuda, academic and CRT activist.

RAHUL GANDHI APPEARS to be driven by this transposed agenda that aims to systematically dismantle India’s socio-political fabric, without a clue as to what coherent vision would replace it and how. For him, the pursuit of victory— no matter how Pyrrhic—seems an end in itself, even if it entails the ruination of India as a nation.

The lenses through which Gandhi views a progressive India stand in sharp contrast to the prism through which his great grandfather Jawaharlal Nehru had seen the country’s future. In a letter he wrote to chief ministers on June 27, 1961, Nehru emphasised the need to empower backward groups by giving them access to good and technical education, not by reserving jobs based on caste and creed: “I dislike any kind of reservation, more particularly in services. I react strongly against anything which leads to inefficiency and second-rate standards. I want my country to be a first-class country in everything. The moment we encourage the second-rate, we are lost. The only real way to help the backward group is to give opportunities of good education, especially technical education…”

Nehru was also concerned about the consequences of com­munal reservations. “But if we go in for reservations on a com­munal and caste basis, we swamp the bright and able people and remain second-rate or third-rate,” he had cautioned. “I am grieved to learn of how far this business of reservation has gone based on communal considerations. It has amazed me to learn that even promotions are based sometimes on communal and caste considerations. This way lies not only folly, but disaster. Let us help the backward groups by all means but never at the cost of efficiency.” (Letters For A Nation: From Jawaharlal Nehru to His Chief Ministers, 1947-1963 edited by Madhav Khosla.)

While highlighting his lack of support for both communal and caste-based quotas in jobs, Nehru, however, asserted the need for affirmative action in the new nation. “It is true that we are tied up with certain rules and conventions about helping Scheduled Castes and Tribes. They deserve help but, even so, I dislike any kind of reservation, more particularly in services,” he had added.

Nehru’s grandson Rajiv Gandhi did not stray too far from that path either. In 1990, as LoP, he told Lok Sabha, “The Con­gress is for all assistance to ‘Socially and Educationally Back­ward Classes’ (SEBCs). But we are not in favour of having such measures being cornered by one particular group within the SEBCs.” On September 6, 1990, in a discussion on the Mandal Commission Report and Measures for Promotion of Employ­ment for Youth in Addition to Reservations for Socially and Edu­cationally Backward Classes, Rajiv Gandhi accused then Prime Minister VP Singh of implementing the recommendations of the Mandal Commission report in a tearing haste that triggered widespread strife in society and without due diligence, solely in or­der to keep his government from being toppled by the withdrawal of support by the chief ministers of two states.

Rajiv Gandhi punched holes in the Mandal Commission report itself: On what basis had the com­mission defined caste? How did the commission reinterpret the Constitution and change backward “classes” to backward “castes”? He also accused BP Mandal of basing his conclusions on flawed methodology, his personal views and a negligible sample survey of villages, of recording statements of only OBC respondents and those only from the Hindu community, practically ignoring the views of the other panel members while drawing his conclusions.

The BP Mandal panel had con­cluded that OBCs formed 52 per cent of India’s population and rec­ommended a job quota percent­age based on this. It was a decisive moment in independent India’s political history—Mandalisation would fuel caste-based divisions in society in a never-before and ir­revocable manner. Rajiv Gandhi asserted, “[T]here has been, after a very long time, a caste tension like the one that has developed and the caste tension that we have seen today is on two levels— the first wave of caste tension was caused by the formula used by the National Front to get together, the AJGAR formula.” The AJGAR formula (Ahir, Jat, Gujjar, Rajput caste combination) is a casteist formulation and it brought back casteism as an electoral ploy after a break of approximately 10 years.

The Mandal Commission report was submitted to Indira Gandhi in 1980 when she returned to power after the 1977 debacle. The report had been ordered by the Janata Party govern­ment. Indira Gandhi, however, chose to put it on the backburner and instead coined a slogan to counter the resurgence of caste-based politics. That slogan from 1980 was ‘Na jaat par na paat par, mohar lagegi haath par (Not on community, not on caste, seal your trust with Congress’ hand)’.

Stressing that all political parties would concur that eradicat­ing backwardness and poverty and ending casteism were key national goals, Rajiv Gandhi maintained that the first step towards this would be to ensure equal opportunity to all sections. He also maintained that civil strife along caste lines would prevent India, which was at a critical juncture in its develop­ment journey, from harnessing the energies of all sections in order to move the country for­ward. Rooting for comprehen­sive, well-thought-out and well-executed affirmative action that he claimed the Mandal Commission report was not, Rajiv Gandhi said that only reservations in jobs, only financial assistance or only education would not work in isolation. Decrying the report and its implementation as “political manipulation”, he made out a case for benefiting SEBCs and the most disadvantaged among different social groups.

He asserted that Mandal was treading a dangerous path by recommending caste-based electorates. Quoting from the recom­mendations, he had thundered: “Does the Government subscribe to the Mandal Commission view that political constituencies should be carved out on the ba­sis of caste? Are we going back to the Round Table Conference for having separate electorates? That was designed to break our country.” The report says: “With a view to giving better represen­tation to certain backward sec­tions of OBCs like the Gaddis in Himachal Pradesh, neo-Bud­dhists in Maharashtra, fisher­men in the coastal areas, Gujjars in J&K, it is recommended that areas of their concentration may be carved out into separate constituencies at the time of delimitation.”

From father Rajiv Gandhi to son Rahul Gandhi it has been a long haul and a paradigm shift. Three-and-a-half decades later, the Congress leadership is doing exactly what Rajiv Gandhi had warned against in September 1990. Back then, the issue was one of giving a modicum of jus­tice to socially and educationally backward groups; today it is part of a series of attempts to put the government on the mat and in­flame political opinion by calling for a na­tionwide caste census, with little to do with affirmative action or social justice. That the biggest beneficiaries of the Modi govern­ment’s pro-poor schemes are Dalits, OBCs and tribals, pulling 25 crore people out of poverty, seems to be a technical glitch in Rahul Gandhi’s worldview.

Speaking after inaugurating 1.3 lakh houses under the PM Awas Yojana (PMAY) via video conference in February 2024, Modi had said that having his own house is a guarantee of a better future for any poor person. In Gujarat alone, the state government allocat­ed 1.3 lakh houses for the eligible poor, rubbishing the Opposi­tion’s allegation that SCs, STs and OBCs were being ignored by BJP. Much of the heat over demands for higher reservations for different castes is actually political opportunism and reflects an unprincipled position. Rajiv Gandhi’s 1990 speech serves as the best exposé of Congress’ current duplicity on the issue of caste-based quotas. But that is not the only bit of opportunism in sight.

When I.N.D.I.A. bloc leaders met in Bengaluru on July 17 and 18, 2023 and then later in Mumbai, Nitish Kumar, who was then a key mover of the Opposition alliance, had pitched for a caste census. But his demand came to naught. Lalan Singh, a key leader of JD(U) and a Union minister who was privy to these developments, later told reporters in Patna, “Rahul Gandhi is simply shedding crocodile tears over the caste census issue… He is trying to confuse people. When the Bihar government conducted a caste-based survey in the state, we were part of the I.N.D.I.A. bloc and we kept asking him to pass a resolution on this in the coalition’s meeting. Two meetings were held, but Rahul Gandhi turned down our request under pressure from West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee.”

This was not the first time Congress developed cold feet on the matter. In 2011, the UPA 2 government ordered the Socio Econom­ic and Caste Census (SECC) that was done through door-to-door enumeration in June of that year. The survey was not carried out by the Census authorities but by the Ministry of Rural Develop­ment. The report was not released during UPA’s term but only in 2015, a year after the Modi government had come to power.

A similar exercise of this kind in Karnataka also proved to be a non-starter. In 2015, Chief Minister Siddaramaiah had commis­sioned a socio-economic and educational survey. Almost 10 years later—and Siddaramaiah is chief minister again—the survey has not been released. He was non-committal on a release date. Much of the controversy has to do with the Vokkaliga and Lingayat popu­lation numbers, the two dominant communities in the state. His ministers, too, have reportedly opposed the release of the report.

IN 1983, AMITABH BACHCHAN, Rishi Kapoor and Waheeda Rehman starred in a Manmohan Desai blockbuster called Coolie. ‘Main Coolie No 1, saare desh ka bojh uthata hoon’ became a popular song, highlighting the plight of railway porters in India. Stripped of the romanticisation, however, it also showed the underbelly of this world where porters lacked regu­lations, even leveraging collective action to bring entire railway stations, the hub of travel, business and personal life decisions for several lakhs of ordinary intercity and rural to urban commuters, to a complete standstill. It showed how porters fleeced unsuspect­ing commuters, even sold or illegally leased their trade badges with numbers on them to other needy unemployed for several lakhs, and lent muscle and drew clout from political and other patronage, something quite common before the Modi govern­ment came to power.

Three decades after the release of Coolie, in 2014, Rahul Gandhi landed at a railway station and, in a staged interaction, was seen lis­tening to a porter saying, “Others call their father Babuji at home, we use that word dozens of times with strangers on the platform in order to beg for one fare a day.” In 2023, at the Anand Vihar Railway Station, Gandhi once again popped up in Congress videos, Ajay Maken in attendance, donning the trademark red shirt of the porters, appearing to haul heavy (wheeled) luggage on his head. Some porters at the event said nothing much had changed for them and their work conditions since his last interaction with them.

After the stampede at the New Delhi railway station in­volving a train bound for the Kumbh Mela, which resulted in several deaths, Rahul Gandhi wasted no time in trying to monetise the tragedy politically. He hailed the bravery of porters during the stampede and promised to fight for their rights. He highlighted their financial struggles and emphasised their role in assisting passengers, vowing to present their demands to the government.

This was not his first choreographed interaction with workers on the lower rungs of society. But it was obvi­ous that a calculated political game was on to attack the image of a young Narendra Modi selling tea at a railway station and his neglect of the interests of these sections, rather than any genuine concern for their rights. Earlier instances of such interaction by Gandhi had included those with long-distance truck drivers; fishermen in Ker­ala; rural cooks; vegetable sellers; farmers, the women among whom were invited to lunch at Sonia Gandhi’s home; locomo­tive drivers; gig workers; and so on. Once the social media PR is done, the bags are packed and Rahul Gandhi moves on to the next section to wring out political dividends.

IN THE 18TH CENTURY, Dharavi was an island with a predominantly mangrove swamp. Koliwada, then already populated by Koli fishermen, became more populated with the urban growth of the Bombay peninsula in the 19th century under British rule. The city’s population density was already 10 times higher than that of London. After Independence, Dharavi grew into the largest slum in India and later in Asia. With the rapid growth of Bombay and skyrocketing prices for land and residential areas, especially for the poor coming into the city for work from rural areas, Dharavi, by the late 20th century, had spread over 175 hectares (432 acres), with a population density of more than 2,900 per hectare or 1,200 per acre. Living conditions were, and mostly re­main, terrible. The maze-like lanes leading to precariously perched living spaces were so narrow that it was difficult to stand with arms akimbo. There were no private toilets, no separate kitchens, no fresh water supply, no green spaces, and no room even for a pot­ted plant. Women, in particular, faced immense hardships. There were repeated outbreaks of tuberculosis and other communicable diseases. The claustrophobic living spaces reached into makeshift attics, narrow balconies, and two feet by two feet sleeping spaces. By now, Dharavi had long become home to not just the Koli folk but also poor workers from across the country, including Gujaratis, Marathis, Telugus and Tamils. More importantly, it became the hub of a massive informal economy, and tanneries, dyeing, pottery works, etc spread into the living spaces.

Satellite images showed a very crowded area with appalling liv­ing conditions for the poor, in the thick of the financial capital of the country, apparently India’s most cosmopolitan and richest city. Voter turnout has been estimated by some sources to be anywhere between 3,00,000 to a million for the elections in 2019. With an esti­mated literacy rate of 69 per cent, Dharavi is among the most literate slums in the world. But its redevelopment plans failed to take off repeatedly for decades thanks to bureaucratic delays, failed ten­ders, and political concerns about displacement. The land was split between the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC), the Indian Railways, and state agencies and had witnessed unplanned growth. The state government had passed the Maharashtra Slum Areas (Improvement, Clearance, and Redevelopment) Act, 1971 to rehabilitate the slums rather than displace them.

In 2022, for the fourth time, the Maharashtra government issued a global Request for Qualification (RFQ) and Request for Proposal (RFP), but with revised terms by which the entire rede­velopment was consolidated into a single Special Purpose Vehicle (SPV) allowing for integrated planning and execution. Industrialist Gautam Adani’s bid won the contract through a fresh bidding pro­cess in 2023 after Adani Properties Private Limited (APPL) made a `5,069 crore bid. Its proposal laid out construction investments with an estimated total cost of $2.4 billion. DRPPL, renamed Navb­harat Mega Developers Private Limited, became an SPV Company (PPP model) constituted to execute the Dharavi Redevelopment Project (DRP), a first-of-its-kind initiative that aims to transform the Dharavi slum into a state-of-the-art township while preserving its legacy. The Maharashtra government holds a 20 per cent stake, with the Adani Group holding the rest and being responsible for investments and execution. For the first time in decades, Dharavi’s redevelopment had moved beyond rhetoric, duplicitous concern, paperwork and politics. Lane surveys got underway. Again, for the first time a slum development plan took not just ground-floor resi­dences (typically eligible for free housing) but also the top floors into consideration in its surveys, existing Slum Rehabilitation Authority (SRA) buildings, slum dwellers on Rail Land Development Author­ity land as well as all religious structures.

Adani’s DRP is now conducting an eligibility survey which is in its final leg. According to latest survey figures, lane recce has been completed for more than 97,000 tenements, more than 91,000 tene­ments have been numbered, and door-to-door surveys have been completed for more than 65,000 tenements. The final number of eli­gible tenements will be determined after a GoM survey and under it all Dharavikars will receive 300-350 square feet modern homes under the Housing for All scheme, with private toilets and kitch­ens. Under the project, ground-floor residents who settled before 2000 will receive 350 square feet homes inside Dharavi free of cost; ground-floor residents who settled between January 1, 2000 and January 1, 2011 will get 300 square feet homes outside Dharavi at a subsidized cost under PM Awas Yojana (PMAY); all upper-floor residents till November 15, 2022 and those ground-floor residents who settled after 2011 till November 15, 2022 will get 300 square feet homes outside Dharavi on a hire-purchase scheme.

Unlike conventional slum rehabilitation projects, all residents, even those who settled after 2011 or live on upper floors, will be given housing, although outside Dharavi. Other projects would have rendered them homeless by outright displacement. Every home will have 24/7 water and electricity along with private toi­let and kitchen with proper drainage and sanitation systems that reduce health risks. The modern townships will have wide roads, green spaces, modern hospitals, educational institutions, sports facilities, parks, playgrounds, and recreational spaces. Residents will have access to retail shops, malls, restaurants, and movie theatres within the township. Public transport connectivity is expected to be facilitated, including Metro services. No financial burden is envisaged on Dharavikars as the buildings will be main­tained by the developer for 10 years after rehabilitation. Moreover, 10 per cent of the built-up area will be convert­ed into commercial spaces. The revenue from monetising these commercial spaces is expected to cover maintenance costs in the long term. In addition, statutory corpus fund per tenement will be deposited to the competent authority.

The DRP goes beyond housing, aiming to create a modern, inclusive city that integrates Dharavi into Mum­bai’s future. This project is seen by most as a step towards a slum-free Mumbai in a megapolis where nearly 40 per cent of the population lives in slums. A 40-acre plot in Matunga belonging to Indian Railways has been identi­fied to relocate those families whose homes are being redeveloped and will be transferred to the Mumbai Slum Rehabilitation Authority (SRA). But guess who had repeatedly tried to throw a spanner in the works? Rahul Gandhi and his allies. Just before the last Maharashtra state election, he linked the July 2022 toppling of the Uddhav Thackeray-led Maha Vikas Aghadi (MVA) government to the contract for the lucrative housing project in Dharavi being awarded to Adani.

At a rally before the elections, then Chief Minister Eknath Shinde (now deputy chief minister) took on Rahul Gandhi and chastised MVA for misleading people although the original talks with Adani for redeveloping Dharavi were started by the Uddhav Thackeray government. “Some even drove their cars, things were hunky dory between them then but now that we have actually gone ahead with the project, they are attacking us for the same thing. They live in bungalows, but they want the poor of Dharavi to live in slums with no facilities, not in modern homes. They were planning homes only for the traditionally eligible un­der slum development projects, we are going to re-home two lakh people,” Shinde shot back.

Political gambits like those Rahul Gandhi used on the DRP may not have worked at the hustings in Maharashtra but the Con­gress leader believes in multiple arrows in his quiver in the desper­ate hope that one of them will hit bull’s eye. In August last year, he rubbished as “insensitive thinking” the Modi government’s decision to impose 18 per cent Goods and Services Tax (GST) on health and life insurance, allegedly making it unaffordable or at least less affordable to poorer sections of society. The LoP in Lok Sabha, posting on X, demanded the removal of 18 per cent GST on life and health insurance premiums. He said the Modi govern­ment collected `24,000 crore from millions of Indians who pay health insurance premium every year by saving every penny.

RAHUL GANDHI’S INABILITY to coherently spell out his positions on bread-and-butter issues that resonate with ordinary people has worked to the advantage of his political opponents. That is the signature of Rahul Gandhi and the in­credible lightness, futility and desperation of his being in politics.

Bharat Jodo YatraCongressIndian politicsOppositionRahul GandhiRajeev GandhiSonia GandhiWaqf (Amendment) Bill