2014: The Election That Changed India (10 page)

Gandhi clearly was looking for intellectual
sustenance to shore
up dwindling political self-confidence. One academic told
me that Rahul would often ask him to suggest books he should be reading. ‘When I gave him a
list, he promptly asked his assistant to get the books as soon as possible,’ the academic
claims.

Another academic wooed by Rahul was Prof. Yogendra
Yadav of CSDS, best known for his psephology and election analysis on television. ‘I was most
impressed with Rahul when I first met him,’ Yogendra confessed to me once. ‘He came
across as good-hearted and well read.’ Then why did Yogendra eventually not bite the bait and
become part of Rahul’s think tank? ‘I think one eventually realized that for all his
good intentions, he couldn’t really change the system as he was promising. The Congress party
was too set in its ways to change,’ says Yogendra, who in 2013 joined the Aam Aadmi Party
(AAP).

Yogendra may have stayed away, but Rahul appeared to
find an intellectual mentor in Dr Mohan Gopal, director at the Rajiv Gandhi Institute of
Contemporary Studies (RGICS) and a former director at the National Law School in Bangalore. Gopal
joined RGICS in 2011 and began providing Rahul with key inputs on political and constitutional
issues. It is Gopal who is believed to have suggested to Rahul that he should target the ‘Not
Rich, not Middle class, not BPL’ (referred to as NRMB) constituency, sandwiched between
poverty and middle-class incomes. This idea would lead Rahul in the 2014 elections to seek out the
unorganized sector social groups like street vendors, farm labour and daily wage earners as a
potential vote bank (see chapter 8).

Gopal has an interesting CV. He was one of the
founders of the Congress’s student wing, the NSUI, in the 1970s. He even became president of
the NSUI between 1974 and 1976 before leaving party politics to do a law doctorate at Harvard, then
work for twenty years in legal administration at the World Bank and then head the prestigious
National Law School in Bangalore.

I met Gopal for this book and asked him to describe
his relationship with Rahul. ‘No, I am not an adviser or mentor to Rahul, I am only a
colleague,’ is how he described the equation. He claimed
that Rahul had
‘genuine empathy and goodwill for the poor’ and was looking to provide them with a
dhancha
(support). ‘Long before Aamir Khan discovered Bezwada Wilson and the
safai karmachari
s in
Satyamev Jayate
, Rahul was already in dialogue with them on
what needed to be done for manual scavengers,’ claims Gopal.

I wondered whether the kurta-clad Gopal had drawn
Rahul into the NGO–
jholawallah
circuit, in a sense, and thereby retarded his
political growth. ‘I think that is a spurious argument. Don’t forget, a political party
is also an NGO that is meant to serve the aam aadmi,’ he countered.

Rahul, though, clearly seemed to lead two lives. In
the day he would engage with thinkers and activists, but at night he seemed to draw comfort from
being in the company of family friends from the glamorous Page Three set. Perhaps the
India–Bharat divide was most in evidence in his own personality, a split he was perpetually
trying to reconcile both with himself and with his view of India. Delhi’s gossip bazaars would
endlessly speculate on who his latest girlfriend was and on the mysterious foreign trips he would
often take off on. I found it amusing that every year in June when Rahul celebrated his birthday,
the Congress faithful would line up outside his Tughlaq Lane residence with cakes and garlands. Only
the birthday boy was never there—he was beating the summer heat abroad with undoubtedly much
more fun folk than Congress netas!

Rahul, it appeared, had very few close friends in
politics. There were a few MPs who the media scornfully referred to as the
babalog
MPs (the
word ‘babalog’ was first used for Rajiv Gandhi’s coterie, his Doon
School–Cambridge buddies like Arun Singh, Suman Dubey, Vivek Bharat Ram and Romi Chopra) whom
he would occasionally hang out with. The likes of Jyotiraditya Scindia, Milind Deora and Jitin
Prasada were in the same age group as Rahul Gandhi. Like him, they, too, came from illustrious
political families, spoke fine English, were educated abroad, and had perhaps similar cultural
tastes and hobbies. Jyotiraditya’s father Madhavrao had been a close family friend and a
Cabinet minister in Rajiv Gandhi’s government. Deora plays a rather swinging rock guitar and
Rahul Gandhi has
been spotted at Deora’s gigs. His father Murli was a
Rajiv loyalist who had stood by the Gandhi family. Prasada’s father had fought for the
Congress presidency against Sonia Gandhi in 1999 and lost. The shared past perhaps made it easier
for this Congress Generation Next to bond with one another.

One of the few exceptions to this ‘people like
us’ syndrome encircling Rahul was Meenakshi Natarajan, a rare young Congress leader to rise in
the party hierarchy without a famous surname. Natarajan who won the Lok Sabha elections in 2009 from
Mandsaur was proof that Rahul’s experiment to break the Congress’s traditional
structures could work only if it was pushed through with firmness at every level. Sadly, that did
not happen.

Perhaps, Rahul Gandhi needed that comfort factor in
being surrounded in his private life by people with similar values and upbringing. He was happiest
in the company of those with whom he could be himself, with whom he could go gymming, cycling and
biking (he has a fascination, I am told, for Harley-Davidson bikes). After witnessing terrible
tragedy within the family at an early age, he had lived a sheltered life and had spent an extended
period of his early adulthood out of the country. He had every right to his privacy, but forgot a
cardinal principle of contemporary politics—a full-time politician has almost no private life.
Genuine mass leaders will keep their doors open for one and all round the clock. I once sat with
Lalu Prasad in his bathroom while he was shaving, while Mamata Banerjee will SMS you at 2 a.m. with
a news point!

Rahul, it appears, prefers the corporate 9 a.m. to 6
p.m. working style, ill-suited to a political world where every party member should have a right to
your time. An old Congressman who knew Rajiv Gandhi well draws a fine contrast. ‘Rajiv liked
to take his Sundays off, but the rest of the week, he would work a punishing schedule, often till
late in the night. Rahul is ready to work hard, but wants to switch off all too often. He
doesn’t understand he is not working in a foreign bank but is in politics in India.’

Rajiv was also a naturally warm and open-hearted
person. Rahul, though, tends to be reserved and lacking the easy charm of his
father. I had met Rajiv once in 1990 at a function organized by the then South Mumbai MP Murli
Deora. His ready smile had floored the audience within minutes. Rahul, I was told, could have mood
swings. ‘He can be gracious and attentive one moment, and seem rude and stand-offish the
next,’ is how a Congress MP described his behaviour. Apparently, when Rahul once visited
Chennai for a Youth Congress function, a senior Congress leader from Tamil Nadu suggested he might
wish to pay a courtesy call on M. Karunanidhi who was then chief minister and a Congress ally.
‘I am here for a Youth Congress function, I can meet him some other time,’ was the terse
reply. He eventually never met the DMK chieftain.

Unlike Rajiv, who was blamed for relying on a tiny
cabal for political advice, Rahul does seek wider counsel. He would, for example, as regularly
consult Sam Pitroda, the flamboyant technology adviser to Rajiv, as he would a university academic
or a business leader. ‘He is much brighter than you think,’ Pitroda once told me, a
shade defensively.

But the truth is, Rahul has miserably failed to
build a political team of substance. He gave important posts to relatively minor politicians like
Madhusudhan Mistry (general secretary in charge of UP) and Mohan Prakash (general secretary in
charge of Maharashtra and a former Janata Dal leader). ‘These are netas who can’t win a
seat in their home states—how will they win some other state for us?’ a senior Congress
MP told me caustically, adding, ‘Just because they look and talk like NGOs doesn’t make
them leaders, for God’s sake.’

This is perhaps where he should have taken a cue
from M.S. Dhoni. As India captain, Dhoni built a culture of excellence by bridging the gap between
the senior legends like Sachin Tendulkar, Anil Kumble and Rahul Dravid and a new generation led by
Yuvraj, Suresh Raina and Virat Kohli. It was that unique combination of young and old with merit as
the great unifier which saw India become the number one test Team in the world. Sadly, Rahul Gandhi
was never able to create a similar enduring team spirit in the Congress party. The older generation
Congressmen couldn’t fathom him, the
younger ones didn’t feel
empowered enough. Party loyalists may have accepted his leadership, but one sensed that they
didn’t really respect him. It is a crucial difference. Respect, even in the sycophantic
Congress culture, has to be earned—it isn’t conferred by birth.

By the time the 2009 general elections arrived,
Rahul Gandhi was established as a ‘national’ leader even though he still hadn’t
proved his vote-catching abilities beyond Amethi. In 2004, Sonia Gandhi had dominated Congress
posters. Now, she was sharing space with her son and the prime minister, Dr Manmohan Singh. In 2004,
the Congress had almost given up on the elections. Now, five years later, there was a greater sense
of self-belief. You could see it in the body language of Rahul as well. Where five years ago he had
hesitated to step out of Amethi, he was now actively campaigning across the country. I managed to
get a sound bite from him while he was on the campaign trail in Mumbai. ‘We’re winning
this one, and winning well,’ he said with a cheery, dimpled smile.

He was right. The Congress won 206 seats, its best
performance since its landslide win in 1984. Its UPA alliance won 262 seats which put it in a
comfortable position to form a government once again. Manmohan Singh would be India’s prime
minister once again, the first to complete two successive five-year terms since Jawaharlal Nehru. But the
credit, unsurprisingly, went to Rahul Gandhi. Every Congress leader who appeared on television on
counting day hailed Rahul’s ‘dynamic’ leadership. Dr Singh’s contribution as
the incumbent prime minister seemed but a footnote. The fact that the Congress had won as many as
twenty-one seats in Rahul’s home state of Uttar Pradesh only added to the euphoria around the
Congress’s ‘yuvraj’. It only seemed a matter of time that the ‘prince’
would be crowned. ‘Just you wait and see, in a year or two Dr Singh will step aside and Rahul
will take over,’ was a refrain one heard from more than one Congressman. Sycophancy
Congress-style had just received a new lease of life.

There was another group
within the Congress which felt that Rahul should become a minister in the new government. They
suggested that Rahul become either rural development or human resource development minister since he
had strong views on rural uplift and education. ‘He refused us point-blank,’ says a
member of that group. ‘His view was that he could only focus on one thing at a time and at
that moment he was obsessed with “democratizing” the Youth Congress and NSUI.’ The
truth is, the idea of a Gandhi family member working under another prime minister also made some
Congressmen uneasy, though Indira Gandhi did serve briefly as information and broadcasting minister
under Lal Bahadur Shastri in the 1960s.

It wasn’t just loyal Congress family courtiers
who were heaping praise on Rahul. There were enough of us in the media who were praising
Rahul’s youthful enthusiasm as a crucial factor in the ruling alliance’s triumph. That
year, the CNN-IBN Indian of the Year award in the category of politics was awarded to Rahul Gandhi.
At the jury meeting chaired by eminent jurist Soli Sorabjee, the verdict was unanimous. ‘For
galvanizing the Congress cadres, for reaching out to young India and enthusing millions of Indians
to vote for the Congress, the CNN-IBN Indian of the Year award goes to Rahul Gandhi,’ read the
citation.

In hindsight, we were wrong. Yes, Rahul had worked
hard; yes, the Gandhi family name had helped the Congress in Uttar Pradesh where the voter was
looking for an alternative at the national level to the BSP and the SP. But the real credit for the
Congress’s strong performance in 2009 should have gone to the prime minister. Only a year
before, he had dared the left parties to withdraw support to his government over the Indo-US nuclear
deal, stitched an alliance with the SP and won a contentious vote on the nuclear issue in
Parliament. Indians like it when their leaders get tough—the nuclear vote, no matter how
briefly, transformed Dr Singh into a prime minister who was ready to sacrifice his chair for a
principle. ‘Singh is King’ became the theme song that carried the UPA to victory. The
BJP’s L.K. Advani, by contrast, looked liked a tired leader, well past his
prime. Yet, the self-effacing prime minister was forgotten and Rahul was hailed as the game
changer.