Delhi polls | Coalition dharma holds back Rahul from taking Kejriwal head-on

Were it not for his likening Prime Minister Narendra Modi with AAP convenor Arvind Kejriwal, Congress leader Rahul Gandhi’s public meeting in poll-bound Delhi’s Seelampur, on Monday night (January 13), would have had nothing to write home about.

Repetitive, desultory, disjointed and vague, Rahul’s election speech at the Jai Bapu, Jai Bhim, Jai Samvidhaan rally – his first for the Congress party’s Delhi poll campaign – did little to boost his party’s uncertain poll prospects but managed to generate a riposte from Kejriwal on X. The former Delhi CM said he did not wish to respond to the “many abuses” that Rahul hurled at him as his fight is to “save the country” while the Lok Sabha’s Leader of Opposition was merely fighting to “save his party”.

Also read: Congress left alone as INDIA allies SP, TMC back AAP in Delhi polls

Nothing new to offer

If Rahul’s hope was to accomplish with his rambling and monotonous poll speech a spike in the Congress’s electoral fortunes while deftly negotiating the tricky alleys of an increasingly unstable INDIA bloc, of which both Congress and the AAP are constituents, he achieved neither. Instead, his tedious reiterations of the necessity and merits of a caste census, his fight against Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s patronage to a bunch of crony capitalists, the burden of rising prices on common citizens, et al made him look like a leader who may be committed to his ideas and idealism but has neither anything new to offer to his audience nor the felicity of expression to repackage his earlier sermons.

That Rahul would hold his punches against Kejriwal was widely anticipated considering that in his avatar as the Lok Sabha’s LoP, he now has to constantly weigh in the repercussions of his statements on the INDIA bloc. Yet, his speech left little doubt over how difficult the Congress leader finds straddling simultaneously the expectations his party colleagues have from him and those that coalition dharma demands of him.

‘Kejriwal no different’

As such, while Rahul hit out at Kejriwal for being “no different from Modi”, claimed that like the PM, the AAP convenor too “never speaks a word against Adani” and even dared Kejriwal to “publicly take a position in favour of caste census”, he made only fleeting mentions about the issues that really plague Delhiites. Delhi’s alarming levels of pollution – be it air or water – were brushed off by the Congress leader in a couple of sentences, merely asking the people present if Kejriwal had made Delhi clean, done anything to reduce pollution or eradicate corruption.

While leaders of the Congress’s Delhi unit, several of whom spoke at the rally before Rahul’s delayed arrival, have been going all out to corner Kejriwal on the mounting allegations of corruption against him and his AAP colleagues in the Excise Policy and ‘Sheeshmahal’ cases, Rahul made no mention of these.

Also read: Delhi polls | Cong, AAP turncoats are BJP's trump card to break Kejriwal's citadel

Though he invoked the memory of late Sheila Dikshit and the development Delhi witnessed during her 15-year reign in an incoherent attempt to contrast it with the AAP’s governance of over 11 years, Rahul did not hold Kejriwal to account over the numerous allegations the latter had made against Dikshit when his AAP made its electoral debut back in 2013. The Congress leader was also did not deem it necessary to question Kejriwal over what happened to the AAP’s promise of a Jan Lokpal Bill, which Kejriwal and his AAP brigade once propped up as a panacea against all corruption in public life only to forget as soon as they came to power.

Not targeting AAP

These notable omissions seem all the more glaring when juxtaposed with Rahul’s claim about Kejriwal adopting the “same strategy of fake promises” as Modi. A Congress candidate present at the Seelampur rally later told The Federal, “If you (Rahul) could go all the way to say Modi and Kejriwal are the same then why couldn’t you list all the false promises, failures and corruption of AAP”.

A key reason for the Congress choosing Seelampur as the site for Rahul’s first Delhi poll rally was that the constituency has a sizeable Muslim population and falls within the Northeast Delhi district which had witnessed riots against the community within days of the AAP’s return to power in 2020. The AAP leadership’s dubious silence and inaction through those riots and Kejriwal’s open and continued pandering to ‘soft Hindutva’ has visibly chipped away at the AAP’s popularity in seven assembly constituencies of Delhi, including Seelampur, where Muslims could swing the poll results.

Also read: ‘Rs 2026 crore loss’: CAG report jolts AAP ahead of polls; exposes Kejriwal, says BJP

Grappling for clarity

Yet, while Rahul spoke about his Bharat Jodo Yatra and dished out, once again’ his ‘mohabbat ki dukaan’ platitudes, he shied away from directly addressing the Muslims and their concerns; choosing instead to club them under the convenient umbrella term of minorities. For the victims of the northeast Delhi riots, Rahul offered not a word of comfort. This, at a time when the Congress, which appointed Muslim leaders Qazi Nizamuddin and Danish Abrar as in-charge and co-in-charge for Delhi, is desperately hoping that the Muslims of Delhi would vote overwhelmingly for its candidates in the upcoming polls.

How many more public meetings Rahul or other members of the Congress’s top leadership will address in Delhi in the coming weeks before the February 5 elections is unclear as of now. What is clear though is that the Congress high command continues to grapple for clarity over whether it needs to treat the AAP as an adversary or an ally while leaders in the Delhi Congress struggle helplessly for electoral relevance.