Political commentator Suhas Palshikar, has said he doesn’t know if Rahul Gandhi will ever become prime ministerial but the party has invested in him for 12 years as its principal leader and it’s too late to change him. “Both Rahul Gandhi’s miscalculations, his own limitations and the timing that was against him have conspired in a sense to make him a failure,” Palshikar said.
In a 30-minute interview with Karan Thapar for The Wire, Palshikar spoke in length about why Congress, in seven months since June 2024, has transformed from being seen as a party that was reviving and whose future looked bright to one that is now widely considered irrelevant.
Palshikar identified three reasons why Rahul Gandhi has failed to capture the imagination of the country and win widespread respect as a political leader – from miscalculations about his inheritance as Rajiv Gandhi and Sonia Gandhi’s son, to the long task of party building that is necessary for Congress’s revival which Rahul couldn’t take up because of his disconnect with party workers, and the timing Rahul’s leadership which coincided with the rise of Narendra Modi, who overshadowed him.
Speaking about the state of Congress in 2025, he said, “Congress is neither living nor dead, it’s in limbo”. The party, he added, has “shrunk a long way in terms of reach compared to what it was earlier”.
