UP to Una, power to privilege: Rahul ruminates, Congress broods

The Congress won two seats in the polls, and the BSP one. But that’s not the only reason Rahul Gandhi’s recent speech at a book release function in Delhi has come across as typically muddled to his detractors. If Mayawati bristled in public, the Congress wondered in private over the message the senior leader was trying to send when he seems poised to return as party president any day now, by sheer default.

The most striking of Rahul’s observations was on Una, Gujarat. Since 2014, a recurring theme in his speeches has been “love” being the weapon to defeat “hatred”, while accusing the BJP of dividing people. In 2018, he famously hugged Prime Minister Narendra Modi in Parliament to illustrate his point. He has also said many times that he has forgiven his father Rajiv Gandhi’s killers, which he repeated at the book release event.

Trying hard to parse Rahul’s surprising and uncharacteristically harsh reference to Una, a leader said the remarks may have been well-calibrated, and that is why the BJP had not reacted to them as expected. “Generally, they latch on to whatever he says. Perhaps Rahul’s remarks were intended to trigger a response from the BJP. The flogging of Dalits happened in Gujarat, which goes to elections later this year. They would not want a conversation around that topic,” the leader said.

However, as far as conversation starters go, Rahul did hand one to the BJP, on him being the ever reluctant leader of a party that is desperate for leadership. At the event, he said: “I have a problem. It is strange. I was born in the midst of power… I am not interested in it. I sleep at night… trying to understand my country… (I) love this country. Like a lover who wants to understand the person he loves… I try to understand.”

In 2013, in his maiden speech as Congress vice-president, Rahul had first termed power a “poison”, going on to express the same in various other ways.

But Rahul’s qualms regarding power are difficult to digest now, when the Congress has failed to find a replacement for him at the top, even as the prospects of the party coming even close to power look fainter and fainter.

“His speech was not appreciated in the party. He is the most trenchant critic of the RSS and the BJP in the Opposition ranks. So, what is his fight for, if not power? What message will this send to our cadres and leaders?” one leader, who is interestingly considered close to Rahul, said.

On comparisons with Sonia Gandhi stepping aside to let Manmohan Singh become Prime Minister in 2004, another leader pointed out: “She sacrificed power when it was in her grasp. The Congress was in a position of power. Her decision had an impact. What are we now? Is power anywhere in sight? So, what is the point of saying all this?”

To others, Rahul’s remarks were symptomatic of his flip-flops. Having expressed disinterest in power, he had in May 2018, while campaigning for the Assembly elections in Karnataka, said he was ready to be PM if the Congress won in the 2019 elections.

The Mayawati remarks also caused much consternation as they left the Congress open to the BSP charge that it could hardly be the one to cast stones. Congress general secretary in-charge of UP Priyanka Gandhi Vadra’s assertion before the elections that they would fight alone was seen more as a compulsion, on account of allies being reluctant to tie up with a party seen as a spent force in the state.

Mayawati’s riposte also drew attention to Rahul’s own failures in UP – where he failed to retain the family pocket borough of Amethi in 2019, and where in 2016, he made the loud claim of going it alone, only to join hands with the SP months later.

Interestingly, in 2007, Rahul himself had called the Congress’s alliance with the BSP in 1996 a mistake, promising that it would not be repeated. “The alliance was a sell-out,” he had said. ”There would be future alliances with other regional parties, but not as the one we had in 1996.” In 2013, Rahul had accused Mayawati of not letting other Dalit leaders grow.

Around the same time, he had talked of the need for “escape velocity” of Jupiter to take Dalits to success. On a more pedestrian note, he had promised to create a Dalit leadership at every level of the party.

If the first was mere rhetoric, Congress leaders wonder if that is the entire substance of it. Rahul has often accused PM Modi of indulging in theatrics and drama. However, a leader said, his own acts have often carried the same empty flourish, listing “his symbolic tearing of an ordinance brought by our government seen as meant to protect convicted lawmakers, his hugging of Modi, his bike ride during the Bhatta Parsual land agitation, his claim of 74 mounds of ashes there with bodies inside”.

And now, his talk of seizing a knife and stabbing in the chest a person who threatened a family member.