On the Front Foot, Congress Must Embrace the Idea of Rahul Gandhi as PM Candidate

Every state election seems to inevitably bring along a new train of criticism of Congress party leader Rahul Gandhi. The substance of criticism is not new, only the act of reiteration is. 

The Congress’s loss in Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and Rajasthan recently brought this on again, but critics often fail to present a more rounded picture of the party’s state or performance. The Congress, in fact, won about 40 percent of the vote in the states it lost; analysts have pointed out that it actually won more votes than the BJP in the aggregate, yet sections of the media represented the results as a “debacle”. 

This blinkered approach extends to the commentariat’s view of Rahul Gandhi as well. He is hardly given credit for the party successes but accorded the blame for its defeats. 

Are not, one might ask, victories in Karnataka and Telangana, against formidable regional and national adversaries, significant achievements in themselves? Does it not matter that Congress is in control of state governments in key thriving cities like Hyderabad and Bengaluru (or that the BJP has no governmental presence in other southern states)?

Critics scarcely acknowledge that Rahul Gandhi has evolved as a politician since 2019 into a more confident speaker and public campaigner. On the contrary, one cohort or another constantly finds fault with either his rhetoric or the party’s strategy. 

Also read: Congress’s Telangana Victory: Import of the Karnataka Model

For instance: if he wears the Brahmanical janeu thread or visits temples, he is pandering to soft Hindutva and not sticking to hardline secularism. If he talks about peace, love and anti-hate then he’s virtue-signaling. He raises corruption issues, talks about the Rafale deal or the alleged favouritism to Adani and Ambani. He is told that that critique has no impact on voting behavior. He demands a caste census, only to be reminded that the nature of Other Backward Castes consolidation has changed and that those castes are more drawn to Hindutva now (never mind the citizenship claims of Muslims and Dalits, thank you very much). 

He’s told not to lead the Congress party in order to get past dynastic rule, but then faulted for not leading the party nonetheless or for not guiding it properly. It is sometimes alleged that there is too much top-down High Command control in the party but if regional leaders like Sachin Pilot and Kamal Nath do their own thing, then there is not enough High Command control. 

He goes abroad; they ask him to stay at home. He stays at home and goes on a Bharat Jodo Yatra, they ask what the point of that is. 

He talks values, they ask him to pursue hard-nosed politics. If the Congress plays tough in seat adjustments with allies, they ask it to play nice. He can never really win with critics, can he?

No politician in a mass democracy really succeeds in coming up with the perfect algorithm for widespread public appeal or develop a composite profile that satisfies all constituencies. Narendra Modi himself struggles with one — having to rely on raw bureaucratic power, business-friendly regulation, welfarist schemes, consistent electioneering, constantly shifting rhetoric, relentlessly-tweaked caste arithmetic, a pliant media, and all manner of photo-ops to make himself appealing to different groups and identities – and yet he is unable to win every state election.

Look, in contrast, at the conditions in which Rahul Gandhi pursues opposition politics. He lives with high-security detail and experiences the kind of scrutiny and creative obstruction that no other Indian politician is subject to. The Israeli spy software, Pegasus, was reportedly installed on his phone. He is disqualified for a speech in Parliament and when the court clears him, he returns to Parliament and finds himself edited out of the TV screens during the (many) interruptions to his speech. The media’s coverage of him is mostly negative or none at all. His pictures rarely figure in the front pages of newspapers – a contrast to Keir Starmer as Labour leader in the UK, who is constantly in the headlines or on TV. Leading Indian businesses and celebrities from the world of sport and film do not endorse, fund or associate with him. He leads a party of career politicians and opportunists who often do not share his ideological fervour. 

Rahul Gandhi has emerged with the biggest game in opposition politics despite such daunting circumstances – but analysts maintain that he should not be the opposition alliance’s Prime Ministerial candidate. 

An argument to this end was made recently by Harish Khare, who has, for years, been one of India’s finest political columnists. He’s a brilliant writer: take any column Khare has written – and you’ll get penetrating insight, plenty of stylised contempt for those in power and he is quite the master of churning out fast-moving prose, that is powered by subjects mingling with verbs. He can be peerless when in form – sometimes it feels one hasn’t fully processed a political event in India until Harish Khare has had a chance to write about it. 

One can, however, take issue with Khare’s view on the role of the Gandhis in Indian politics. In a recent piece he argues that a third term for Modi is not inevitable but that the opposition must demonstrate a willingness to act collectively and coherently to defeat the BJP. 

The primary responsibility in this endeavour, he says, rests with the Congress party. “Its leadership must understand and accept that Rahul Gandhi will not be acceptable as a prime ministerial face; nor will country want to countenance a Manmohan Singh type of arrangement where the Gandhis would continue to call the shots.” He also reckons that non-Congress partners in the INDIA alliance should do their bit and “help the Congress deal with the Rahul Gandhi conundrum.” 

Also read: There’s Nothing ‘Inevitable’ About Narendra Modi’s Return in 2024

Acceptable to whom, one may ask. The number of votes that the Congress secured in state elections over the last year or so, the public response to the Bharat Jodo Yatra etc do not indicate that Rahul Gandhi has an acceptability problem among fellow Indians. Opinion polls, for whatever they are worth, confirm this. In mid 2023, around 27% of those polled picked Gandhi as the PM pick, Gandhi edged out Modi 41% to 40% in the likeability stakes, and 34% saw Rahul as the main challenger to Modi, ahead of Arvind Kejriwal and Mamata Banerjee at 11% and 5% respectively. 

Khare further suggests that INDIA’s alliance leaders can do without Gandhi at the helm saying “they have the rhetorical skills, the idiom, the local flavour, acumen, street-smartness and a political grammar of their own, and are therefore well-equipped to nail the Modi’s exaggerated claims. The mythology of “vikas” or development has to be de-mystified in village by village, qasba by qasba.”

He’s right up to a point – state level regional politicians do have the record and wherewithal to challenge the BJP in their own backyard. But they are constantly out of depth when attempting to project their leadership more broadly. How many, for instance, would turn up in Uttar Pradesh to hear Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge or West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee speak in a public meeting and would Arvind Kejriwal have much traction in rural Tamil Nadu? Like it or not, only Rahul Gandhi among opposition politicians has the brand visibility to summon crowds across the nation.

It would be tough to imagine what an election campaign in 2024 would look like if Rahul Gandhi took a backseat. Opposition politicians would, in that scenario, struggle to mobilise crowds or elicit media’s interest; the BJP and its media allies would be constantly berating them for not picking a candidate and portray the absence of one as a replay of 1970s Janata Party waiting to happen.

On the other hand, if Kharge is picked as a PM candidate, then Rahul Gandhi will be actively campaigning no doubt, but that would again generate questions again about a Manmohan Singh-style arrangement with the Gandhis wielding back room power. If Kharge is to be the PM candidate, why have the shadow of the Gandhis lurking over him, undercutting his legitimacy from the beginning? Instead, why not end the pretense and settle the issue of Gandhis in politics by letting Rahul Gandhi directly run for the post many Congress voters expect him to?

In other words – if Rahul Gandhi is expected to lead the charge on the Opposition’s efforts, as he already is with the second leg of the Bharat Jodo Yatra; if he provides the momentum for the attack on Modi and secures a measure of public response (far greater than others in his party and the alliance are able to), would it not be respecting the wishes of voters to hand over the reins of power to Gandhi, should the INDIA alliance succeed? Past experience shows that the source of instability in any democratic government is to separate the vote getter from the office holder, thus creating two power centres needlessly. The Congress might as well be true to its voters and itself by unapologetically proposing Rahul Gandhi as its PM candidate.

There are two other points in Khare’s piece worth reflecting on. He contends that one of the reasons Gandhi should not be the PM candidate is to ensure that “Modi does not have the Gandhis as the punching bag.” 

The fact, however, is that Modi, the BJP and the media, will make this election about Rahul Gandhi regardless of the role he takes on. Modi has a chequered record to defend: around 45.4 percent of young people aged 15-34 were reportedly unemployed in 2023 while the female labour force participation rate fell from 25 percent in 2014 to 24 percent in 2022, lower than Bangladesh and Pakistan. The Ram Temple is about to be inaugurated, the anti-Muslim card has been played, China still occupies Indian land in Ladakh and so he needs Rahul as the foil to attack in the numerous rallies he will likely hold. 

Rahul Gandhi has become a programming necessity in the conduct of Indian politics, especially for a BJP bereft of a positive agenda and a media market hooked on polarisation for content and revenue. If Rahul is so crucial to the drama of national politics, why not project the elections, in part, as a contest between the two? Can any other Opposition figure flex big enough to be a better high-profile, nationally-recognised alternative to Rahul, in so far as matching wits with Modi is concerned?

Finally, Khare makes an observation about the kind of political communication that the Opposition needs, which probably leads to a misreading of the import of Rahul Gandhi’s politics in India now.  

He writes that the “INDIA alliance leaders will need to devise a narrative that taps the vast masses’ grievances and disappointments” to counter Modi’s Hindutva agenda. “A national election”, he continues, “is the only time when everyone gets a chance to articulate their promise of firm and fair governance. The INDIA alliance has to spell out its ideas of “no appeasement” – neither of the Hindus nor of the Muslims. Indeed, the trick is to make the Hindus feel that being fair towards the Muslims does not mean being unfair towards the majority community.”

The problem in these polarised times is that a centrist rhetoric based on the promise of firm and fair governance and the demystification of vikas village by village does not (by itself) seem to work. The Congress tried out the themes of Rafale, Adani and the devastation caused by demonetisation and introduction of GST in the 2019 election campaign to little avail. The age of populism has snapped the correlate between the public’s needs / wants and their voting behaviour. The contest in democracies today is not merely about governance and economic performance but also about identity and cultural politics. Seventy-four million Americans voted for Donald Trump in 2020 despite his mishandling of Covid, in part because he panders to majoritarian anxieties. Other political fantasies similarly thrive elsewhere. 

Liberals in India are up against Hindutva, an ideological project that is recrafting the moral psychology of Indians, through an unsavoury in-your-face majoritarianism – one which wants citizens to deride Mahatma Gandhi, participate in anti-Muslim rhetoric and no longer sees India’s identity as linked to its capacity for communal harmony. Progressive politics is thus intimately woven into clarification of values in a democracy, which is imperative in India now. There is no one in the opposition space who is taking on the rhetorical burden of liberal politics more seriously than Rahul Gandhi. Who else speaks more regularly for social virtues that make a democracy work? Or what will political talk in India look like if Rahul Gandhi’s discourse is missing?

It is for a reason that Modi, BJP and Rahul Gandhi are ineluctably drawn into an encounter with each other. The BJP wants Rahul for sport and ridicule to cover up its deficiencies but he is using the contest for a discussion on ethics and human values. They propose Hindutva, with its exclusionary vision; he espouses constitutional politics and norms for collective living. Perhaps the logic of history, and the attainment of justice and the good requires this contest to play out, whichever way it may turn out. 

How this plays out depends on the decisions non-Congress leaders in the INDIA alliance take in the lead-up to elections. They need to recognize Rahul Gandhi’s crucial role in the fight to sustain the liberal democratic frame of Indian politics that allows their own smaller parties to flourish in the first place – and logically extend that recognition to decide on their PM candidate. They are expected to choose not to, as regional parties like the Trinamool Congress or Sharad Pawar’s NCP have emerged as offshoots of the Congress and see it as their primary threat in their states. 

It may well be that Rahul Gandhi does not want the mantle. He has not made attempts to mobilise a public or media narrative to this effect. But INDIA’s alliance partners do need to do their bit to tackle the Rahul Gandhi conundrum by persuading him and the Congress (besides agreeing a seat-sharing formula) – if at all they are serious about unseating the BJP. 

Years from now, when the Constitution perhaps changes, when they fight for liberal democracy alone from their regional silos, without the rallying power of a recognised name with an agreeable politics, INDIA’s alliance partners will not like looking back at this time as the moment of persuasion that they missed. 

Sushil Aaron is a writer and policy analyst. He posts on X @SushilAaron.