Barely two days before his outburst against the UPA government’s ordinance to counter a Supreme Court order disqualifying MPs and MLAs convicted in a criminal case, Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi‘s body language had become a talking point among Pune’s editors and senior journalists.
Rather unusually, Gandhi had held a 90-minutue long informal exchange with a select group of journalists at the Balewadi stadium in Pune. This was the second leg of his Maharashtra tour and Gandhi took everyone by surprise, especially the top editors in Delhi, who later came to know that he had spoken extensively and informally on a range of subjects.
The issue of the controversial ordinance came up during that chat with journalists and Mr Clean’s cryptic response amply indicated that he disagreed with the government’s position. On hindsight, it was disappointing that none of the assembled journalists asked him about his brother-in-law Robert Vadra‘s controversial land deals in Haryana, especially as Gandhi seemed to be in a mood to talk.
As the interaction came to a close, it became amply clear that this was a new avatar of the young scion of the Gandhi dynasty: not the same, indecisive, clueless, reluctant and inaccessible Congress vice-president that everyone spoke about.
Instead, Rahul Gandhi‘s body language suggested that he did not see his political inexperience as a handicap but as an asset, as much as his father Rajiv Gandhi did. He seemed to represent the same generational impatience with things going wrong in India, as did his father. Recall how Rajiv Gandhi was also welcomed into Indian politics as “Mr. Clean” who offered hope to a young generation.
There was a new air of confidence and freshness about Rahul Gandhi at the Pune interaction. “He is intelligent and not dumb as projected by the media,” was how one senior journalist present at that gathering reacted.
Rahul appeared genuinely warm and well-meaning and did not resemble the typical politician. As a part of his media strategy to woo journalists, Gandhi has been known to grace the weddings of relatively junior reporters on the Congress beat in the capital. In Pune, he shook hands with all the 25-odd journalists, exchanged a few words with each one of them and within two days, his media cell mailed these memorable pictures to them. Rahul did something similar with the police constables on duty around him and got pictures taken with them.
These tid-bits apart, the image that came across was that of an earnest and well-meaning Rahul Gandhi who had no airs about him. More importantly, his body language clearly indicated that he was now ready to take charge and willing to lead the Congress into the 2014 general elections.
With his outburst on the ordinance negating the Supreme Court’s verdict on convicted MPs and MLAs, Rahul Gandhi has pitched himself as the Congress’s prime ministerial candidate for 2014 as decisively and as controversially as Narendra Modi did.
If Modi’s elevation rubbed party patriarch LK Advani the wrong way, here was Rahul Gandhi virtually mocking at the entire UPA cabinet led by prime minister Manmohan Singh. His caustic condemnation of the ordinance is a snub not only to Singh but also to others in the cabinet such as Finance Minister P Chidambaram, Law minister Kapil Sibal and Information & Broadcasting minister Manish Tewari.
The 43-year-old Gandhi’s outburst on the ordinance marks a watershed moment in Indian politics because it decisively signals his arrival and emergence as the new face of the Congress party as it prepares for the 2014 general elections.
This moment signals decisively that the Gandhi dynasty is intact and the baton is ready to be passed on from Congress president Sonia Gandhi to her son. As over the past six decades, the Congress continues to be under the spell of the dynasty which has withstood rebellions right from the time of Kamraj during Indira Gandhi’s era down to Sharad Pawar in the Congress under Sonia Gandhi.
There is no question of any such rebellion against Rahul Gandhi who, like others in the dynasty, brings certain clear advantages to the Congress. The charge of being “autocratic” which is being applied to Narendra Modi, applies as much to Rahul Gandhi because it is his voice that will prevail over that of all others. Decisiveness will no longer be a trait seen in NaMo alone as RaGa too is beginning to show the same characteristic.
Unlike in the BJP which has a prominent anti-Modi faction articulated most eloquently by Sudheendra Kulkarni, the former aide of LK Advani, Rahul Gandhi is neither tainted nor handicapped by any such opposition. Like Modi for the BJP, he has emerged as the game-changer for the Congress as India hurtles towards the 2014 polls.
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