It's not often that I agree with M J Akbar - here are two examples where I do.
Byline for November 20, 2011
The Curious Gamble of Rahul Gandhi
M.J. Akbar
There is one question within the complicated Uttar Pradesh conundrum that has left me completely bewildered. Why on earth has Rahul Gandhi made the results of its Assembly polls next year such a prestige issue – his own prestige, not his party’s? Why has he staked his personal reputation on UP, and then multiplied the stakes, when he has no real reason to gamble his own future on the vagaries of Awadh?
The Congress party makes no demands on him. It will anoint him Prime Minister the day he chooses to shift from waiting room into head office. The job comes to him by genetic entitlement, not electoral endorsement. Rahul Gandhi led his party’s campaign in Bihar, only to be drowned by the Nitish Kumar-BJP deluge. Did this diminish his claim on the Prime Ministership? No. Supposing the results of UP are equally dispiriting. Will that end the constant chirrup by acolytes for his elevation? No. Competence is not the primary measure in current Congress mathematics. Family is. If Pranab Mukherjee had the right genes he would have been Prime Minister, and in the mould of the person he admires most in recent Indian history, Mrs Indira Gandhi. But he does not have the genes. And that is that.
When the electorate gets its chance to evaluate a Prime Minister Rahul Gandhi, it will not do so on the basis of how many votes he gets in Mayawati’s UP. It will take a call on how he manages the crises that he will inherit, and there will be enough of them in 2012.
Jawaharlal Nehru is the only Congress PM who was battle-tested at the hustings before being sworn in – the general elections of 1937 and 1946; the first was an incomplete victory and the second a bitter triumph. Lal Bahadur Shastri had no track record when he became PM in June 1964. Neither did Indira Gandhi when she succeeded him in January 1966. Mrs Gandhi failed miserably in her first electoral test. The Congress lost every state between Amritsar and Calcutta in 1967. Rajiv Gandhi was totally untested when he became PM in October 1984. His landslide two months later owed more to his mother’s martyrdom than to any promise he exuded. P.V. Narasimha Rao never won anything, either in 1991, an election he did not contest, or 1996, when he contested with awful consequences. Dr Manmohan Singh was not made PM because he could set fire to a crowd with his oratory.
What will a few seats more or less in UP prove? The dynamics of a general election are radically different from those of a provincial poll. Mayawati won a splendid victory in 2007, and slipped behind the Congress in 2009. The Congress got fewer Assembly seats in 2007 than it got Parliament seats in 2009. The battle of 2012 will be determined by factors completely different from 2007. The Congress lost the state of UP in 1989, and still has not discovered how it has slipped from its once-formidable grip. Delhi is closer to Congress than Lucknow.
Rahul Gandhi has thrown expensive specialists into a war room to plan out minute strategy; demographic experts have become flush with funds. The investment is personal; he is the general of this campaign. In another context, the UP election of 2012 could have become a legitimate bid for Congress rule in Lucknow. But oddly, his advisers like the general secretary in charge of UP, Digvijay Singh, are letting it be known that they will view a mere 60 seats out of 403 as “victory”. This is terrifyingly naïve.
There is only one reason for such discordant UP hype: to create a Rahul “bounce” that will serve as ballast for entry into the PM’s office. But Rahul Gandhi does not need any artificial boost. Dr Manmohan Singh has said repeatedly that the door is open for him to enter on any day he wishes. Are the allies who keep Congress in power waiting anxiously for the UP results to find out whether they can entrust their fortunes to a youngish heir? No. Sharad Pawar and Karunanidhi are too vulnerable to risk a mid-term poll. They will swallow their reservations and join the chorus.
There is no objective reason; but there could be a subjective one. Is this anxiety for success a sign of Rahul Gandhi’s own insecurity, a gnawing desire to prove to himself and the political class that he has come of age, and that he no longer needs his father’s memory or his mother’s shadow?
Doubt is a familiar component of his age group, particularly if there is no professional success on the CV. But he has advisers whose job is to chart the safest way forward rather than feed into their leader’s doubts with meaningless risk. If things go right Rahul Gandhi will get what was already his designated due. If they go wrong he could be left holding, as that acerbic simile puts it, the dirty end of a burnt matchstick.
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Byword
A Gandhian Paradox
M.J. Akbar
The Nehru-Gandhis seem to have a soft spot for grandfathers. When Rajiv Gandhi posed for india today at the launch of his public career to establish a public image, he ignored Jawaharlal Nehru’s trademark red rose on a khaddar sherwani, and slung a Kashmiri shawl over the shoulder in the manner of Motilal Nehru, the aesthete barrister who forswore a lucrative practice and elite lifestyle to become a Gandhian exactly 92 years ago.
When Rahul Gandhi launched his first independent-responsibility campaign on November 14, at Phulpur, for Uttar Pradesh, he revived Jawaharlal Nehru rather than Rajiv Gandhi. Jawaharlal was born on November 14, 1889; and Phulpur was his constituency in the first general elections. November 14 is also celebrated as Children’s Day.
If Rajiv’s preference was iconic, Rahul’s choice is political. His electoral persona is being shaped. The foundation remains true to character: an edgy on-and-off stubble and rolled-up kurta sleeves designed to swoop up campuses and cricket fans. This is layered by a patina of left-of-centre rhetoric aimed at the poor who are beginning to feel a bit ripped off by the trickle-down theory that is the standing rationale for economic reforms, which were envisaged, with minimum fuss, by Rajiv Gandhi, but have become synonymous with P.V. Narasimha Rao and Dr Manmohan Singh. In the Rahul calculus, eternal youth plus dynastic charisma plus poverty politics equals hundred-plus seats in Uttar Pradesh.
Nehru became a socialist long before he had to fight an election. Rahul Gandhi’s speechwriters tend towards American Ivy League academic glamour for intellectual inspiration. Here is something they could use the next time Rahul Gandhi goes to Phulpur. His grandfather was elected president of the Congress for the first time in December 1929, at the Lahore session, which, under his pressure, adopted the historic Purna Swaraj (full freedom, rather than mere dominion rule) resolution. Discussing his convictions, Nehru told delegates: “I must frankly confess that I am a socialist and a republican and no believer in kings and princes, or in the order which produces the modern kings of industry, who have greater power over the fortunes of men than even the kings of old, and whose methods are as predatory as those of the old feudal aristocracy.”
During his first campaign, for the 1937 elections, Nehru was assertive enough—or brash, as his critics might put it—to claim that the socialism he had injected had visibly strengthened Congress. He said in Mumbai on May 20, 1936, “If the Congress has grown stronger, it is because I raised the issue of socialism.” It was at the very least an audacious assertion in the shadow of a Mahatma who had converted Congress from a lawyers’ forum into a mass movement. Gandhi knew the art of the gentle rebuke. He told the 1942 aicc session, after the Quit India resolution, “In Jawaharlal’s scheme of free India, no privileges or privileged classes have a place. Jawaharlal considers all property to be state-owned. He wants planned economy… He likes to fly, I don’t. I have kept a place for the princes and the zemindars in the India that I envisage.”
Gandhi wanted his heir to understand him, just as he sought to understand his heir, but that socialist gulf was never bridged. Nehru got his Planning Commission in free India, but the Mahatma was more perceptive. The princes and zemindars are still with us, not to mention modern kings of industry, quite a few of them in Congress, possibly queueing up to polish Rahul’s Nehruvian sentences. Such are the paradoxes of politics.
If a creed has to work, it must carry the weight of conviction, not just the frippery of an electoral tactic. Is Rahul Gandhi indulging in ritual appeasement, or is he seeding the climate for economic policies that he will implement when he becomes prime minister? Has he thought through a simple proposition: social justice is essential to social stability, but what precisely does it mean in 2011 and 2012? Surely it cannot mean what it did in 1929 and 1937. How do you reconcile the needs of the impoverished with the demands of an expanding middle class? The relevance of any idea is determined by objective reality. India is no longer a colony; it is still cursed with poverty but not crushed by famine and helplessness.
Rahul Gandhi’s slogan for UP is a curious defensive feint disguised as an aggressive jab: Hum jawab denge. It is the sort of phrase that looks more convincing in an advertising agency than a village teashop. Is it a subliminal plea by a new leader, eager to answer questions that no one has yet asked? Maybe we could begin with a simple one: has Rahul Gandhi thought through a philosophy for the future? Rahul Gandhi likes to fly, but to where?
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