Can Rahul Gandhi re-invent the grand, old party?

Rahul Gandhi is due to take over as Congress president soon, possibly as early as next month. Sonia Gandhi herself put an end to speculation on Friday evening and confirmed Rahul Gandhi’s promotion from the post of party vice president to the office of president of the ageing and somewhat lustreless Congress that is struggling to re-invent itself in Indian politics.

Rahul Gandhi would be the sixth Gandhi to be crowned as the Congress chief. From Moti Lal Nehru down to Rahul, there have been six (Motilal, Jawaharlal, Indira Gandhi, Rajiv Gandhi, Sonia Gandhi and Rahul Gandhi) Congress presidents from the Nehru-Gandhi family. None of them inherited the mantle at a worse juncture than Rahul.

The Congress is in a crisis. It is rudderless; its liberal ideology is at a crossroads; its strength both in Parliament and in state assemblies is at the lowest ever. Even when Indira Gandhi lost the 1977 general election in the wake of the Emergency backlash, Congress numbers were never so low (154 in 1977 and 44 in 2014) in the Lok Sabah as of now. It is not just the numbers. It’s an all-round slide that the Congress is facing.

Rahul Gandhi is surely inheriting the most debilitated Congress in its 132 years of existence. Can he convert it into an election winning machine--- something that every Congressman expects and trusts a Gandhi to do? It is, indeed, a daunting task. Rahul Gandhi is facing Narendra Modi as his principal rival. Love it or loath it, Modi is the most formidable non-Congress Indian leader non-Congress parties have ever thrown up. Don’t forget that Modi won a majority for the BJP on his own, something that had not happened since 1984.

Modi is the first pan India leader of the Sangh Parivar. He has surpassed even Atal Bihari Vajpayee in stature in his own party. He is a great public orator by Rahul Gandhi’s own admission. He is clued to the 21st century demand of electoral politics as he is the most tech savvy Indian politician so far. Modi is adept in marketing himself as well as his most unpopular actions like demonetisation. Plus, Narendra Modi is backed by not only the BJP but the entire Sangh Parivar’s organisational might which has produced the most organised and effective electoral machinery now. To fight Modi, one needs to fight both the BJP and the RSS simultaneously, which in the prevailing scenario is a Herculean task.

But that is not the only challenge Rahul will have to face as the new Congress chief. Rahul’s most serious challenge is the ‘New India’ that he needs to win for his party. It is no longer the India of Mahatma Gandhi and Jawahar Lal. Neither it’s India of Indira, Rajiv or Sonia days. Gone are the days of sheer sloganeering like garibi hatao or aam admi good enough to deliver an election. The Indira Gandhi days of pro-poor politics are long over. It is a new aspirational India that is looking for much more than what it aspired in the 20th century.

A key problem with the Congress is that it is still rooted in the 20th century political model. It has failed to invent a new social engineering for the post-Mandal and post-Hindutva politics. Its experiment with soft Hindu politics failed miserably in 1989 when Rajiv Gandhi talked of Ram Rajya and badly lost the election. Hard secularism, too, is no longer selling in this new Rightist world of Modi, Erdagon and Trump.

It is an entirely new world when Communism has collapsed and market economy has made the rich one per cent of the population own over 50 per cent of global wealth. The fourth Industrial revolution with Artificial Intelligence and robots has shrunk jobs like never-before, leaving a huge army of youth jobless and ready to turn into lynch-mobs at the slightest pretext.

Rahul is entering a challenging new political, social, economic and technical world. No past ideology and no past gimmick is working any longer. It is an angry world where everyone is afraid of the imaginary “other”, where ‘Hate’ alone is selling in an insecure world.

There is no iota of doubt that multi-cultural, multi-lingual and multi-religious India can survive and progress only in its age-old idea of India where all aspirations with differences have to harmoniously coexist in a dynamic India. But how to sell this old India into a new climate of hate and imaginary “other”?

No one has really a clue about how to tackle the angry India. Modi with the Sangh training has managed to be on the right side of hate politics and succeed for over one decade now. He is still surviving. But even ‘hate politics’ has begun delivering diminishing returns. It has miserably failed on the altar of economy pushing India from 8 percent GDP to 5.7 percent while Yashwant Sinha of the BJP suspects it to be mere 3.2 percent.

Surely, the phase of ‘Modi mania’ appears to be over. But can Rahul with a debilitated Congress organisation and to some extent a divided Congress exploit it? Well, only time will tell.

But Rahul Gandhi has reinvented himself to an extent. He is no longer a ‘reluctant politician’ as alleged by his rivals. He has developed his own style of communication which is not based on rhetoric or sloganeering like Modi. It’s now sharper and more reasonable and is appealing to masses who are getting tired of high decibel Modi speeches.

Now Rahul’s challenge is to carve a new 21st century vision and match it with a new social engineering wherein all major social segments of India can find hope. But he needs to first enthuse his own party to make it fight the Modi challenge. He needs to take both the old guard and the young Turks along for his mission. He is no Indira who could split Congress twice and dump the old-guards and yet succeed as well. His success will depend on how well he succeeds in harmonising rather than antagonising the party and the people.