India’s Camelot Moment

Leader of opposition Rahul Gandhi is an idea whose time has come. After 12 years of a paternalistic and performative monologue from prime minister Narendra Modi and the Bharatiya Janta Party (BJP), India has a growing appetite for the compassionate, participatory and ideological politics Gandhi represents. He has neither changed his operational methodologies nor discovered progressivism belatedly.

Long before the political winds shifted, he challenged the Manusmriti at a 2015 Nagpur programme marking Dr Ambedkar’s 125th birth anniversary, supported equal rights for the LGBTQ+ community in 2013, and stood by Deepak Kumar for countering communalism in Uttarakhand. Similarly, he has consistently amplified the voiceless and prioritised citizens needs and aspirations.

Consider for example, the Congress’s 2014 manifesto consultations, the Bharat Jodo Yatra and the 2024 Samvidhan Conventions. In doing so, he has not only confronted (and increasingly confounded) the pervasive political grammar of the past decade but in doing so, now commands tremendous moral authority. Given that he has now become more than just an effective opposition leader, its worth dissecting the moorings of Gandhi’s politics, and what it means for India.

Gandhi's ideological battle

Firstly, Gandhi's ideological battle for the hearts and minds of the silent majority mirrors the challenge prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru confronted in 1951, when he effectively converted the first general election into a referendum on the Hindu Code Bill and what kind of Republic India would become. Nehru risked his political capital to persuade citizens that politics and governance are not merely about delivering benefits or managing constituencies, but about forging a just nation by breathing life into ideals.

Similarly, in championing the constitutional values of equality (samanta), fraternity (maitreyi), dignity (garima) and individual rights, Gandhi is not asking citizens to look beyond what a government can give them, and consider what kind of society they wish to inhabit, and therefore collectively build. Beyond shaping mass consciousness, this has the potential to move Indian politics beyond the transactional bargain between the state and the citizen. Rooted not in patronage or grievance but in a shared idea of India, it could establish a deeper and more enduring political allegiance to Gandhi.

This is in stark juxtaposition to the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh (RSS)’s prescriptive vision of citizenship, which defines the “good Indian” through rigid notions of duties, discipline and conformity (and camouflages it as Indian culture). It is equally at odds with Amrit Kaal (a distant, imagined future that asks Indians to endure present hardships and overlook oppressions for the promise of a better tomorrow, reminiscent of Ursula Le Guin’s Omelas). Instead, Gandhi is championing a utopia closer to Ravidas’ Begampura, Tukaram’s Pandharpur, and Kabir’s Amrapur, which are not fantasies of deferred prosperity.

They are visions of a just society in which dignity, equality and fellowship are experienced here and now. In doing so, Gandhi is going beyond ideologies (which represent the interests of ruling groups) and proposing a new socio-cultural and economic order where no matter who you are, or where you come from, you have an equitable right to the constitutional promise of India.

His politics transcends the imperative to capture power

Secondly, Gandhi’s politics transcends the imperative to capture power. It seeks to change what the levers of power are meant to achieve. In his conception (gleaned from what he has championed in the last few years), this means deepening India’s social justice paradigm (smashing patriarchy, caste-census, reservations in promotions etc.), ensuring equitable growth (institutional autonomies, empowering MSMEs, restoring the Rights Based Paradigm, a distributed economic system etc.) and enhancing capacities (through education overhaul). This alternative vision of, and for India does not impose a ceiling on aspirations, but raises the floor beneath everyone, while refusing to make dignity a privilege.

Unfairly caricatured as the NGO-isation of the Indian National Congress (INC), Gandhi’s ideological politics has been consistently challenging the unequal and unjust socio-economic and political order that has held India back. In doing so, he has strived to give politics (and the INC) a moral centre, and has thus been as disruptive and radical as Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., Nelson Mandela and Mairead Maguire were in their time.

This is critical in the national interest, because even though India’s Constitution marked a radical break with the graded inequalities of the past, vested interests have continued to (violently) perpetuate regressive and repressive norms. That is why rapists are protected (as in the Bilkis Bano, Ankia Bhandari, female wrestlers and Kathua matters), social justice is subverted (as reservations are vilified, Dalits face countless atrocities like in the Una, Hathras and Hyderabad university matters, manual scavenging is ignored etc.), education has been undermined (with massive fee hikes caused by drastic slashes in UGC funding, attacks on pedagogic freedoms and curriculum, rent-seeking in teacher appointments and entrance examinations etc.), oligopolies are encouraged, and democratic institutions and norms are circumscribed.

In combatting these regressions, and in stridently championing progressive values, Gandhi has successfully reversed the trend of the last decade, when the majority of political dynamism was outside the formal political space. But even more crucially, he has prompted a tantalising question – if he can do this much without state power, what might he achieve with its instruments to further the Constitution’s promise?

Thirdly, although electoral gains are clearly not the immediate motive (given the Chhatron ki Goonj programmes have been primarily in non-election bound states), Gandhi is clearly setting the national political agenda, putting the BJP on the defensive which has manufactured consensus for nearly a decade. In this, he has emerged as the primary vote-catcher for the Indian National Congress (and even the Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance (INDIA), and that too without compromising on his ideological commitment or yielding to short-term electoral exigencies.

If he sustains this momentum through the next 915+ days to the 2029 Lok Sabha elections, Gandhi could well generate the wave that carries the Congress party beyond the threshold. For progressives weary of BJP’s concerted attacks on India’s soul, that prospect is more than electoral; it is a chance to renew the Republic’s promise.

However, the Congress party organisation will need to keep up with LoP Gandhi (and emulate leaders who are already doing so, from Karnataka home minister Priyank Kharge programmatically outmanoeuvring the RSS, to INC leaders like Harshvardhan Sapkal, Satej Patil, Yashomati Thakur confronting the RSS-BJP’s harassment of women students in Pune and fighting for Adivasi students, to INC leaders like Pawan Khera, Supriya Srinate and Gurdeep Sappal countering the RSS-BJP on various fora).

The Congress party organisation must complement Gandhi's efforts

The Congress party needs a hundred flowers to bloom. Given electoral victories are the most immediate incentive for every political organisation, the INC may deem it expedient to both postpone urgent structural reforms and outsource critical political functions exclusively to Gandhi. However, the scale of today’s polycrisis demands more. The Congress party organisation must complement the leader of opposition’s efforts and develop a visionary governance blueprint to repair the damage of the past decade, reshape mass consciousness at the village and ward levels, spearhead disruptive (and sustained) campaigns to counter the RSS-BJP from the panchayat to the parliament, reject transactional politics, and methodically restore constitutional and institutional integrity, civic rights and freedoms. Only if the INC can make this both its own purpose, and a shared national mission can it ensure that the dark decade now receding does not harden into India’s permanent socio-political order.

To do this, the Congress and the INDIA bloc must capitalise on the very real opportunity that has been created by the BJP’s missteps and failures. Even though prime minister Modi’s project is running out of steam, it is not enough to wait for the BJP to stumble (and hope to inherit power by default). Not only do Indians deserve an inspiring alternative, INDIA must be prepared to redress the regressions unleashed in the last decade (which includes the Sangh Parivar embedding aligned sleeper-cells in every sphere of public life).

Like president John F. Kennedy’s appeal, Gandhi embodies a distinctly Camelot-like possibility – the hope that power can empower rather than diminish the citizen. Whether this becomes India’s Camelot will ultimately depend not on Gandhi alone, but on whether the politics he champions can become a movement and eventually a governing ethic. Nevertheless, the opportunity he poses is real. After a decade of divisive politics which has asked Indians to fear, obey and wait, Gandhi is offering hope for a better India. And every democratic renewal begins with precisely that audacity – the belief that a better India is possible, and worth building together.

Pushparaj Deshpande is Samruddha Bharat Foundation’s Director & Editor of The Great Indian Manthan (Penguin).

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