Time to Walk The Talk

The country has grown weary of Rahul Gandhi’s reluctance to play a larger leadership role. About time he quit dithering

After eight years as a legislator and nearly four as Congress General Secretary, Rahul Gandhi is ready for a bigger role both within the party and Union Government. This expression of readiness comes with a rider, though: the 42-year-old has left it to his mother Sonia Gandhi and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to decide where he fits in best. The two have been trying to push him to perform a bigger role anyway for the past few years. Manmohan Singh has often joyously announced that his efforts to get Rahul Gandhi to join the Cabinet have been spurned. A day before Rahul Gandhi said he was ready to take the plunge last week, his mother had told journalists that only he could decide on the timing of his elevation.

While Rahul Gandhi has been the party’s general secretary in charge only of its youth organisations, and has held no government office, no one disputes that he has had a role in the politics of the Congress and the Government’s framework of policy decisions. He has led the idea of a new Congress—drawn from the Indian Youth Congress—replacing the old one at some point or the other. He has also led the party’s electoral battles in both Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. Adopting a fancier designation in the party would make little sense, unless he replaces Sonia Gandhi as party president. By all accounts, he already exercises all possible power within the party as his mother’s de facto deputy.

The only new role that Rahul Gandhi can play would be as a minister. But even so, he will not be just another Cabinet member. If the ministry he is entrusted with does not perform too well, as has been the case with the assignments he has handled so far, there are no signs to suggest that his party will not want him as its prime ministerial candidate in the next general election.

Rahul Gandhi did not make the announcement of his bigger role. Nor did the Congress. He was merely replying to a news TV journalist, and that too, not at a press conference or in an interview, but when the two ran into each other in a Parliament corridor on 19 July. The journalist had seized his opportunity to ask the question. “I will play a more proactive role in the party and Government. The decision has been taken, the timing is up to my two bosses— the Congress president and the Prime Minister,” he replied.

If it wasn’t for that question, no one may have heard Rahul Gandhi say this. The likes of Digvijaya Singh or Law Minister Salman Khurshid would have spoken of Gandhi’s imminent elevation within the party and everybody would have dismissed it as just another airing of the regular party chorus.

What had made news just a few days earlier was Khurshid’s statement—in an interview that he later claimed had distorted what he meant—on the party’s need for Gandhi to lead it. This made news not because the Law Minister had suggested that Rahul Gandhi take charge of the party or become PM, which is what Congressmen say as a matter of routine, but because he referred to the young leader’s exercises in leadership so far as ‘cameos’. This revealed the party’s confusion over Rahul Gandhi’s timeframe for assumption of full leadership—just how long was he going to wait?

It surprised no one that Khurshid denied saying that the party was feeling ‘directionless’ without a clear change in leadership. Yet, what the minister had said was no revelation. It was the candour with which he said it, and the fact that a Cabinet member was speaking out of turn on a subject reserved for the first family of Indian politics, that gave his words their frisson.

Even after Khurshid broke that code, Rahul Gandhi did not make an announcement on his own. He waited to be asked. And he was asked the day after one of his two ‘bosses’ made her comment on it being his decision: “No one can take a decision on [Rahul’s] behalf” were Sonia Gandhi’s words, spoken when a group of journalists approached her in Parliament after Vice President Hamid Ansari filed his nomination papers for a second term. In effect, all that Rahul Gandhi’s corridor response to that TV journalist did was toss the ball back in his mother’s court.

Congress watchers will recall that Sonia Gandhi had once earlier decided the timing of her son’s elevation. This was around the same time last year. She had even set the ball rolling.

The monsoon session of Parliament had just begun, and to the country’s alarm, neither Sonia nor Rahul Gandhi was present in the House. Or even in the country, as concerned citizens were to learn. It took the Congress four full days to declare that its president, who is also chairperson of the ruling UPA coalition, was overseas for a surgery and that her family, including her son, was by her side. This became known only after Congress General Secretary Janardhan Dwivedi addressed the press waiting just outside the Parliament building. He made a brief statement and stuck to the line he was expected to.

It was a remarkable moment. The Congress party had condescended to tell the country that the leader of the ruling coalition would be absent from Parliament, and so would her successor, because she was in hospital. Both the timing and content of that announcement had been formulated to the Gandhi family’s satisfaction. Unlike Manmohan Singh’s open heart surgery in January 2009, Sonia Gandhi’s medical condition had no bulletins issued. The family kept the surgery a secret till it was over. To this day, both the nature of Sonia Gandhi’s illness and the extent of her recovery remain undisclosed.

Along with that August 2011 statement on the surgery, Dwivedi also announced that his boss had asked for a four-member group to stand in for her on matters demanding the party president’s attention. Though Rahul Gandhi was not in India either, his mother included his name on this list of four. The others were

Defence Minister AK Antony, her Political Secretary Ahmed Patel and Dwivedi himself, who heads the party’s media department. Antony is both an old Congress hand as well as die-hard family loyalist. Ahmed Patel, or AP as he is known in Delhi’s power circles, does not share the same equation with Rahul as he does with his mother; perhaps Sonia Gandhi felt her absence would be a good time for the two to strike a better working relationship. Dwivedi too is an old hand. When Sonia Gandhi started out in the party, he is said to have helped her with Hindi speeches.

The setting up of the four-member group could have been a way to launch Rahul Gandhi into the thick of Congress politics, but it met only a few times and made no decision of any note. After participating in a few meetings—including some with Manomhan Singh and Pranab Mukherjee—Rahul Gandhi seemed to have run out of patience with the old Congress. Party circles were abuzz with a rumour of his taking charge as working president of the Congress.

It did not happen. To most observers, if any further evidence were needed that the man was position shy, if not power shy, that missed opportunity was it. He could have played an interim role as his party’s top leader, but his diffidence came in the way. This was seen even in the symbolism of his actions—or lack thereof. Instead of hoisting the national flag as acting party president at its 24 Akbar Road headquarters on 15 August, he merely stood aside as one among many politicians, insisting that party treasurer Moti Lal Vora perform the Independence Day ritual.

Rahul Gandhi’s reluctance to take charge in ways that his two ‘bosses’ expect—or once expected—has been noticeable for quite a while now. In 2009, after taking charge as PM for his second term, Manmohan Singh had famously said that Rahul Gandhi had turned down his ‘requests’ to join the Cabinet.

“He is already the second-in-command in the Congress, their most important general secretary. What else can they make him?” asks Syed Shah Nawaz Hussain, BJP spokesperson and parliamentarian. It is true that though Rahul Gandhi is in charge only of the party’s youth wings, his interventions have far exceeded that brief. His leadership of Assembly campaigns is a good example.

Even before the UPA’s second term began, Rahul Gandhi’s belief that the Congress would be better off in the longer run without troublesome partners had started dictating the Congress’ attitude towards its allies. As a result, even though the Congress has greater numbers than in had during the UPA-I term, the Government it now runs is far more unstable than it ever was. It is not far-fetched to say that the UPA’s ‘policy paralysis’ is an outcome of the Congress having painted itself into a corner where it finds almost every other party, including its allies, opposing it. His interactions with farmers and the landless, the poor and the marginalised have dictated policy decisions such as special packages for farmers and weavers or for regions like Bundelkhand. So, if he is already influencing the Congress’ ties with its allies, important government decisions like its land acquisition policy and leading electoral campaigns in big states like Bihar and UP, what more can Rahul Gandhi do for the party while Sonia Gandhi is still president?

His current official assignment seems almost over. By next week, the IYC will complete the first round of its election and membership drives across the country. Though two years behind schedule, it also pretty much marks the end of the initial process that Rahul had started: that of democratising the IYC.

‘The results were amazing, to say the least,’ writes an IYC office bearer on the organisation’s website to mark the occasion, referring to Punjab, the first state where these elections were held in 2009, ‘While the previous membership drive in Punjab in 2006-07 had seen membership of only around 30, 000, this time the figure went up to 3 lakh… Ravneet Singh Bittu created history by becoming the first elected Youth Congress president in the country. The successful completion of the membership and election process in Punjab convinced even naysayers that change was possible, and the team put in even greater effort to fine-tune and improve the process as we went along.’ It is necessary to point out here that Bittu is the grandson of former Punjab Chief Minister Beant Singh, who was assassinated in 1995. Singh’s children, including Bittu’s father Tej Prakash Singh, were politicians and ministers as well. The first Youth Congress election, in effect, had thrown up yet another dynast. And subsequent elections have led to young men and women from political dynasties being elected office bearers.

True, Rahul Gandhi was indeed able to turn the IYC into something of a feeder service for the Congress. Yet, there are shortcomings in the system he created that are likely to persist. “Money power plays a big role in IYC elections even now,” admits an office bearer of a state committee, “It encourages people to align with one leader or the other and takes the split right down to the grassroots level. IYC workers who are pitched against each other will probably take their differences into the Congress.”

While Gandhi’s model is functional in many ways, no one can realistically expect it to deliver much in terms of fresh leadership. And he himself obviously cannot sit around and micromanage the IYC or NSUI for the next decade or so.

On the day that word of Rahul Gandhi’s readiness to play a ‘bigger role’ went viral, participants in TV studio discussions on the subject went from wild speculation on fancy party designations for him to the ministries he might head in the Manmohan Singh government. Satyavrat Chaturvedi of the Congress told a TV channel that while Rahul Gandhi was now adept at handling party matters, his preparation for prime ministership would remain incomplete without “having trained as a minister”.

Gandhi has been acquiring legislative experience for almost a decade now, and his record as a legislator is rather poor, to say the least. From attendance to participation in debates to raising questions, his score ranges from zero to below average. That a corridor utterance of his should stir up such excitement in the Congress is a comment on the state of near-depression the party is in.

In the final analysis, Gandhi’s entry to politics remains burdened with expectations that have far exceeded those faced by anyone else of independent India’s Nehru-Gandhi dynasty. Also, too much has been made of his actions without the results to show for it.

Now that popular expectations of him in the country are at their lowest, this is perhaps an apt time to do what he has not done before. Get into the thick of it without his bosses having to drag him, and get on with the job. It is about time.

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