Must stop winking in the dark

Barely four months ago, a businessman from Mumbai, greatly disappointed with Narendra Modi, was instead full of the choicest abuses for Rahul Gandhi. The business community is routinely a cowardly lot, afraid to take on any ruling dispensation and although his business had been ruined by first the demonetisation and then the badly executed Goods and Services Tax, he did not dare mouth any profanities for Narendra Modi in public. Privately, though, his opinion of the man he had once whole-heartedly endorsed in 2014 was rather colourful. But his disappointment with Gandhi was not for what he had done but rather what he could have done - and didn’t. That is, take on Modi in more decisive terms.

As the Gujarat elections drew to a close, this businessman had done a complete about-turn on the newly elected Congress president. He now sees a lot of hope in Gandhi and his Gujarati pride was not hurt even one bit as Rahul took on Modi during the polls, asking him a question a day to which Modi had no answers. “Rahul is on the right track. He must keep his finger pressed on Modi’s nerve until 2019. He is our only hope for the future,” he said with some visible longing.

So what changed in just 120 days? Did Rahul Gandhi? Or did the businessman? Or was it a general feeling of ennui with Modi? It could be a bit of all but the astounding part is how Rahul Gandhi has emerged as the hope of many people in this country at the end of the Gujarat elections, whatever its outcome.

While it is true that Modi has scored self-goals with his demonetisation and GST, a big reason for people’s changed view of Gandhi is also his new-found visibility and sheer affability in the face of Modi’s rudeness, abuses, boorishness and economy with the truth. Those qualities had been mistaken by the people for the attributes of a strong leader, especially when compared to former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s low-key personality and Rahul Gandhi’s own preference for his own, perhaps darkened, ivory tower.

Social media has had a big role in changing the discourse in this country both in 2014 and now, three years later. Congress leaders were earlier dismissive of criticism that they ran lacklustre governments saying they didn’t care about armchair critics sitting in posh drawing rooms who did not even come out to vote during elections. Where it mattered - among the poor and the voters - people knew and were familiar with the Congress party’s work and its workers who represented them down to the block and village levels and would always stand by the party.

But that was in the era before social media. While it is well known that Modi and the BJP have made exemplary use of these new forms of communication, the Congress failed to realise that its block and village level committees were things of the past and now even villagers were influenced more by social media groups than work on the ground.

But even long decades before the advent of the Internet, old Gandhian Kakasaheb Gadgil, a contemporary of Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru and father of former party spokesperson VN Gadgil, used to exhort his partymen to widely publicise their good works among the people. “Good work without publicity is like winking at a girl in the dark. She wouldn’t even know,” was his refrain.

That is essentially what both Rahul Gandhi, who led the Congress’s 2014 campaign and the then UPA government, had been doing - hiding their light under a bushel and hoping their good work would shine through to the people. In other words, winking in the dark at a time when Modi was winking at every Indian through his loud proclamations on their television screens. No one even knew then what Rahul Gandhi stood for or against or even what he was about, except for being a much-hated dynast.

Rahul Gandhi’s reluctance, particularly to keep his interactions with both the media and others off the record, while driven by modesty, has done him more harm than good in the past. He was always ahead of others on various issues, including in his warnings of drugs eating into youth in Punjab and the use of the phrase ‘escape velocity’ in relation to poverty alleviation, a term common among western economists in this context but not heard of in India until Rahul Gandhi’s use of the term before a group of villagers at an election rally. Clearly, it was the wrong audience. He would have been better understood by our own economists and the businessmen who have now gone from abuse to praise of the Congress leader.

However, only two comparative examples are needed to demonstrate how his reluctance to engage with the people has damaged his image, reputation and interests in the past. After a meeting with management students in Mumbai in January 2016, which he barred the media from, he got heavily trolled for allegedly linking Steve Jobs to Microsoft. What he had actually said was, “One day you will be the Steve Jobs and Microsofts of this country”. Trolls made out he had said , ‘Steve Jobs of Microsoft”. The Congress’s disdain for social media then kept the myth going until a video of the original statement emerged a few days later. But recently during the Gujarat campaign when Amit Malviya, the head of the BJP’s IT Cell, posted a doctored video depicting Gandhi as saying, “I will set up a machine for you where you can feed a potato at one end and harvest gold at the other,” the glee among trolls was short-lived. For within an hour of that, the Congress had circulated the original video wherein Gandhi had been critical of Modi for fooling Adivasis by promising them gold in exchange for potatoes.

But even as Gandhi now shrugs off the tag of immaturity and masters social media, that itself could be a pitfall in many ways. India has zoomed into the IT age but there is a whole generation of Congress workers in rural areas who have still not mastered the mobile telephone. From many conversations with such workers, the cause of their disillusionment with their party president emerges - they have to email him for appointments and they do not yet know how to operate an email account. They would much rather write him old-fashioned letters or speak to him directly on the telephone and Rahul Gandhi needs to make himself easily accessible to this lot of party workers who may be harbouring some great ideas for the future.

At a meeting with editors in Mumbai, Rahul Gandhi had said he was looking for the next big idea for the country and his party had activated his think tank for the purpose. But if he cares to take a leaf out of his great-grandfather’s book and return to the practice of holding “shibirs” - brainstorming camps - which every party worker from every village in the vicinity could attend - he may find that answer sooner. After all, the idea for the cooperatives in Maharashtra was thrown up at one such shibir by Vithalrao Vikhe Patil, the grandfather of current leader of opposition in the Maharashtra Assembly, Radhakrishna Vikhe Patil. Vithalrao was among the first Padmashree award winners in the country for that idea which became and still continues to be the backbone of the Congress in the state which the BJP has been unable to break despite its best efforts. Pandit Nehru had especially flown down from Delhi to visit him in Ahmednagar because he could not fathom how a man who had studied only up to the fourth class could come up with such a brilliant concept that had escaped the best brains in the country at the time.

Rahul Gandhi, then, must find his own mix of the old and the new, the whizkids of his think tank and the earthy, rooted partymen who may have some lasting solutions. Although his temple visits in Gujarat drew much flak from the BJP, in this, he is more like his grandmother than either of his parents or even Pandit Nehru. Gandhi needs to redefine secularism as pluralism and his high profile temple visits were a step in the right direction. He must belong as much to the Hindu as to the Muslim, as much to the Christian as to the Parsi, Sikh, Buddhist, Jain or other minorities. He must represent every Indian, rich or poor, high caste or low for that was the Congress of Mahatma Gandhi -inclusive and secular.

Gandhi has been courageous to take on the party at its lowest ebb. He not only has an uphill task in reviving the Congress but also in ridding India of its toxicity and bring it back on an even keel. Whether or not he becomes the next Prime Minister of India is of no consequence to Indians. But most of them, like the businessman and former Modi bhakt, are vesting a lot of hope in him. He faces a task of messianic proportions. If he fails, he fails not just himself, he fails India.