In a shocking development, the Gandhi wing of the Congress party is set to elevate Rahul Gandhi to the post of President early next month. The schedule for the election of its President, as released by the Congress Working Committee, lists December 16 as the date of the poll - and rather hilariously adds "if necessary" within brackets. Ah, the joys of having an inheritance.
Gandhi, now 47, is a little too old to be a "youth leader"; his father became Prime Minister at 40. Of course, Rajiv Gandhi's premiership started terribly, with the anti-Sikh riots, and only got worse, ending with the rise of communal politics - that he enabled - and the possibility of a government debt crisis brought on by compulsive overspending. So perhaps the seven additional years of age and experience are a good idea. Rahul Gandhi can still be attacked for his lack of executive experience, but he is going up against Yogi Adityanath and his ilk, so he is much more likely to be attacked for not knowing how to sit properly while doing
puja.
To be fair, Rahul Gandhi has been a member of parliament for 13 years now, so he isn't exactly a newbie. He's still not a good politician, but he is now a moderately experienced one. True, most of his experience consists of losing elections, so it is fitting that his elevation to the diminished status of President of his party coincides with two state elections that it is overwhelmingly likely to lose.
Still, you have to ask two questions. First: does the ascent to the leadership of what is still India's largest opposition party of someone so obviously unwilling mean that the Gandhi Congress is condemned forever to being a dynastic organisation? And, second: does this mean that Rahul Gandhi is now the Congress' prime ministerial candidate in 2019?
Odd though it may be to remember, there was a time when Rahul Gandhi spent all his time on trying to reorganise the international organisation of his party - holding elections, primaries, and so on. Many suspected he was doing this in order to ensure that it somehow produced an electable leader and got him off the hook. It looks like this is no longer a possibility. It is Rahul or nothing, apparently. I have long argued that those who suggest replacing the Gandhis will save their wing of the Congress either covertly seek its destruction or are absurdly naive about politics. The Gandhis, whatever the caliber of leadership they provide, undertake one very important task: their very presence ensures that nobody else competes for the top job. The moment that restriction goes away, the Gandhi Congress will fall apart. That is what happened in the 1990s, until Sonia Gandhi was persuaded to enter active politics. The Gandhi Congress is a dynastic party not out of conviction or even out of doglike devotion to the dynasty, but because unless it is a dynastic party, it will be no party at all. It will simply cease to exist, turned into a skinny carcass being warred over by packs of scavengers.
So does this mean that Rahul Gandhi will seek to become Prime Minister in 2019? In the United States recently, he said that he thought he could be PM. If the Gandhi Congress is not to be completely wiped out in 2019, however, it will need to continue a sustained attack on Narendra Modi and his government - but combined with a forward-looking vision of what its own new governance philosophy is, and how it differs from both Modi's and that of the last United Progressive Alliance government. So far, we haven't seen many signs of this. If the Gandhi Congress does better in Gujarat than projected, that will be purely because of old-style politics: a focus on anti-incumbency, putting together a caste coalition to counter Amit Shah's effective electoral engineering, and blatant populism such as the promise of reservations to the Patidars. That might help the party survive, and perhaps even win a state election or two going forward, but it is not going to topple Modi, who remains phenomenally popular, in 2019. And perhaps not even in 2024. They have to work on something beyond that.
Perhaps, in spite of its brutally flawed past, the Gandhi Congress will learn that it has nothing to offer the electorate beyond a commitment to the sort of woolly liberalism, with all its holes, that has kept India chugging along all these years. If that can be packaged as something forward-looking and modern - which it in fact is - as opposed to the "Know Your Legacy" nonsense that exalts various members of the Nehru-Gandhi family, then the Gandhi Congress might have a chance. Not a big one, but a chance.
Here's the thing: it's difficult to see Rahul Gandhi being an effective spokesman for that vision. The representative, chief architect, and promoter of that vision will have to be someone else, even if Rahul does his job of holding his party together. Frankly, the Sonia Gandhi-Manmohan Singh model had much to commend it, whatever the whining of those who claimed it debased the Prime Minister's office. (A stupid argument: after all, we in India have a prime minister, a first among equals, not an autocrat, a king or even a president.)
The real question has never been whether Rahul Gandhi will take over the post of President of his party. It is whether he will try to be Prime Minister -- and, if not, who the Gandhi Congress' choice will be. Sachin Pilot? Kumari Selja? Or perhaps Raghuram Rajan, as the whisperers in Lutyens' Delhi suggest? Trust me, there will be no election for that post. But it's the real one that matters.
(Mihir Swarup Sharma is a fellow at the Observer Research Foundation.)Disclaimer: The opinions expressed within this article are the personal opinions of the author. The facts and opinions appearing in the article do not reflect the views of NDTV and NDTV does not assume any responsibility or liability for the same.