If Rahul is serious about non-Gandhi chief, time he ceased being Congress’ poster boy

It’s a busy month for Congress leader Rahul Gandhi. Rahul returned to New Delhi on Sunday (September 4) – he was on a 10-day visit abroad during which he also attended the last rites of his grandmother Paola Maino – to address the Congress’s Mehangai Par Halla Bol rally at the Ramlila Maidan.

On Monday (September 5), the Wayanad MP will be in Gujarat’s Ahmedabad to address a convention of his party workers and take stock of the Congress’s preparedness for the assembly polls due in the state at the end of this year. Then, on September 7, Rahul will visit Sriperumbudur in Tamil Nadu for a prayer meeting at the site of his father Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination before travelling to Kanyakumari to launch the Congress’s 3,570 km Kanyakumari to Srinagar ‘Bharat Jodo Yatra’. Rahul will be one of the 118 Congress volunteers who will participate in the Bharat Jodo Yatra for the entirety of its five-month schedule.

Juxtapositions over leadership galore  

This projection of the 52-year-old Nehru-Gandhi scion as the man leading his crisis-ridden party’s doddering political battle against the BJP coincides with the countdown for the long-due election for the Congress presidency. The Congress party is due to elect a full-term president on October 17.

Also read: Doon to doom: Rahul Gandhi and coterie undo once-grand Congress

Those close to Rahul want everyone to believe that the Wayanad MP, who had quit the Congress presidency in the aftermath of his party’s 2019 Lok Sabha debacle, is still adamant on installing a non-Gandhi party chief. Over the past few weeks, amid continuing demands by a sizeable section of its members to bring Rahul back at the helm and his steadfast refusal to oblige such a wish, the Grand Old Party has been agog with speculation that Rajasthan chief minister and Gandhi family loyalist Ashok Gehlot could take over the presidency from interim party chief Sonia Gandhi.

It is in this collective backdrop that the recurring and presently ongoing effort by the party to reboot Rahul as an alternative to Narendra Modi and the BJP assumes significance. For, this churn makes it somewhat difficult to reconcile Rahul’s insistence for a non-Gandhi party president with his tacit complicity in being projected as the fulcrum of every major – or minor – initiative that the Congress takes to revitalise itself.

In the event of Gehlot or any other non-Gandhi leader becoming Congress chief next month, it is predictable the party’s critics will instantly hound the newly-anointed with accusations being a mere rubber stamp of the Gandhis. One could have empathised with the unenviable position that this presidential dilemma leaves the Gandhis in for it’s clearly a ‘damned if you do, damned if you don’t’ situation for the family.

Is Rahul the hurdle in way of non-Gandhi chief?

But then, Rahul’s ready willingness to be projected as the man leading his party for all practical purposes except in actual designation begs the question: Is he the biggest hurdle to his avowed goal of democraticising the Congress and letting the party be led, in the true sense, by a non-Gandhi?

In the time since Sonia was forced to return as interim party chief, and especially after the G-23 controversy of August 2020, a constant charge levied at Rahul by critics as well as some leaders within his party is that though he resigned as party president, he never stopped acting like one. At least for public consumption, this was the grouse that the G-23 members held against Rahul too. That the charge stuck was primarily because of Rahul’s own actions as his stamp has been more than evident in the functioning and faltering of the Congress – appointments of office bearers, selection of Rajya Sabha nominees and even some assembly poll candidates, the tenor of the party’s attacks against Modi, the Centre and the BJP, et al.

Also read: Azad versus Rahul: Bitter bickering brings Congress to brink of a split

Rahul has never really made an effort to deflate this impression. In fact, if anything, his conduct shows that he seems to rather enjoy the appellation of a backseat driver with an insatiable appetite for privilege. At any press conference he addresses, he is always flanked by a couple of senior party colleagues. When he chooses to attend Lok Sabha proceedings, several Congress MPs hustle to escort him in and out of Parliament. On the rare occasions when Rahul decides to also speak in the Lower House, clips of his speech are promptly made viral by his party’s social media wing. Though he holds no official post in the party except that of being a member of the Congress Working Committee and some lesser panels, it is often at Rahul’s residence where party colleagues are summoned when internal differences have to be sorted out or machinations to dump the odd CM or PCC chief – as we saw in Amarinder Singh and Sunil Jakhar’s case last year – and anoint a new ones are given effect.

It’s the same impression of remote-controlling the party’s power button that Rahul is strengthening once again as his party prepares to elect a new president. If a non-Gandhi Congress chief is an impending eventuality Rahul needs to come clean on why he is taking centre-stage on every initiative of his party, more so when the BJP’s vicious social media army has succeeded in portraying him as the Congress’s biggest liability, or as some disgruntled Congress members say in hushed tones – Modi’s biggest political asset?

At the Mehangai Par Halla Bol rally, Rahul was the party’s last, and by implication, the main speaker and party workers attending the rally with banners demanding his return as the Congress president were not hard to miss. On Monday, it will be Rahul sounding his party’s poll bugle in Modi’s Gujarat. One may still discount these appearances as a former party chief and perennial heir apparent filling in for his mother at important party events as Sonia is currently abroad, in mourning over the loss of her mother and also undergoing check-ups for her own failing health.

However, considering that the party is set to elect Sonia’s successor next month, what would explain Rahul leading a brigade of 117 lower rung party leaders (a majority of them drawn not from the main party but its frontal outfits such as the Youth Congress and the NSUI) in the Bharat Jodo Yatra, pegged as the Congress’s biggest mass outreach program in decades? If Rahul has indeed ruled himself out of the party’s presidential race, what will be the role of the next Congress president in the Bharat Jodo Yatra considering that the march will continue for another four months before it concludes as per schedule in Kashmir’s Srinagar early next year?

Time to take a backseat?

During the decade-long UPA-era and subsequently, Manmohan Singh was persistently taunted by the BJP and other critics of being Prime Minister only in title with Sonia being the real power behind that thorny throne. Over the past three years, Rahul has allowed his ailing mother to be accused similarly of being, as the newest ex-Congressman Ghulam Nabi Azad put it, a “nominal figurehead”. By all indications, the Wayanad MP appears perfectly at ease with the next Congress president being subjected to the same jibe.

The more imaginative and, perhaps also optimistic, lot within the Congress believes that a non-Gandhi party chief at this moment would actually be beneficial for the Gandhis. The rationale behind such an assertion is rather a simple one: the party has no chance to regaining power at the Centre in the 2024 Lok Sabha polls and that Modi’s continuing popularity will ring in another consecutive victory for the BJP. As such, why should Rahul take over the presidency now and be blamed for leading the Congress into another foreseeable rout two years from now when he can sit back and rebuild his portfolio while someone else with a less charismatic surname rules in his stead and, when the time comes, willingly takes the fall for the imminent failure.

Also read: Congress plans ambitious Bharat Jodo Yatra, but not without controversies

The Congress – or whatever is left of it after another crushing defeat and in the face of overambitious and expansionist regional outfits – can then bring Rahul back at the helm, hoping that 2029 will be a better dash for power given that Modi will by then be 79-year-old, hopefully not at the top of his game and facing heavy anti-incumbency.

That’s a lot of conjecture over events that may unfold seven years from now for a party that, in all fairness, can’t guarantee what its fate would be even seven days from today. More importantly, such wild imagination discounts the fact that irrespective of who leads the Congress into battle in 2024, the blame for the loss will be laid at the doorstep of the Gandhis, particularly Rahul, as the accusation – illusory or real – that he remote controls the party is unlikely to die down.

When he quit the Congress last week, Azad alleged in his resignation letter that “proxies are being propped up to take over the leadership of the party” after the party’s presidential election concludes. While Azad’s parting shot at his party of 50 years may be described by many as the rant of a disgruntled or even ungrateful leader, fact is Rahul makes the accusations hurled at him believable.

To be fair to Rahul, the legacy of his surname will never allow him to really be just another ‘ordinary Congress member’. Yet, if he really wants people to believe that he isn’t interested in positions of power – and the Congress presidency is certainly one, at least for now – Rahul needs to let the new Congress president take centre-stage in the party’s activities, even if just for the sake of pretence. Else, he should just throw his hat in the ring for the party’s presidential contest and be prepared for the brickbats that will anyway come his way.