In the furious debate in Britain over sending Prince Harry to Iraq, a royalist voice angrily remarked on a television show, “We cannot barter our future for an uncertain present.” The Nehru-Gandhis are India’s answer to the House of Windsor, and Rahul Gandhi is our very own Crown Prince. Which is perhaps why in the aftermath of the Congress’s UP election debacle, the decision to send Gandhi junior to campaign in the state has attracted such fierce responses.
The Congress loyalists have insisted that the UP result is no reflection on Rahul’s capability and he remains the prime minister-in-waiting. The opposition has gleefully suggested that Rahul’s political ambitions have come unstuck and the Nehru-Gandhi family surname is no longer a ticket to power. The truth, as is often the case, lies somewhere in-between. 
Let’s be honest: The UP election was never going to be a referendum on Rahul Gandhi’s leadership qualities. So, even while Rahul embarked on his own discovery of UP by landcruiser, and addressed over a hundred (large and small) meetings in the state, he was never pitched as a future chief minister of UP. He was, at best, the Congress’s star campaigner, whose presence would help increase the party’s vote share. As it turned out, the Congress vote share actually marginally declined and its seats also went down. 
For one, it reveals the limitations of  charisma in today’s politics. To believe that Rahul Gandhi would draw in the votes by a mere wave of the hand on a whirlwind roadshow just a month before elections was not just gross political misjudgement, it exposes a certain naivete on the part of his campaign managers. That he often invoked the name of his “dadi-ma” and  father in his speeches was again a bad error, stemming from a lack of understanding of  the realities of contemporary politics.
A majority of voters, particularly in the caste cauldron of UP, vote in the direction of the party which provides opportunities in the present and hope for the future, not one which attempts to live on past glory. Constant references to "my family"  provoked irritation among voters anxious for a better life for their own families. 
A Rajiv Gandhi could harness his own politics to his mother’s legacy in the 1980s, simply because Mrs Gandhi, especially after the circumstances of her death, was a larger than life figure. Rahul Gandhi has no such legacy to draw upon. A Rajiv Gandhi could make the transition from airline pilot to prime minister in double quick time because he lived in the TINA era of politics.
 A Rahul Gandhi cannot hope for a similar benefit in this era of coalition politics and regional satraps. A Rajiv Gandhi could get away with his limited Hindi vocabulary (remember, the classic “chahe hum jeete ya loosein”), because he lived in the age of Doordarshan’s monopoly. In today’s clutter of news channels, there is no place to hide. Which is why every stray remark, be it on Bangladesh or Babri Masjid, gets magnified and endlessly debated. 
And yet, UP 2007 is less an indictment of Rahul Gandhi and more a failure of  the party which he hopes to lead one day. The Congress has no cadres and is a ‘‘sick company’’ in today’s UP. From being a vote-rich company in the 1980s (remember, the Congress won all 85 seats in UP in 1985) to being reduced to a minor rump, the decline has been steady and startling.
The real ominous sign for the Congress though is that the disease of Uttar Pradesh is now in danger of spilling into an epidemic across the country. Take Goa for instance, the next state to go to the elections in just a few days from now. On election eve, the Congress resembles a disjointed, tattered army struggling to get its act together. How else does one explain the ridiculous situation of the Congress chief minister’s son fighting as an independent, and then getting the official party candidate to “withdraw” in his favour?
Or of a senior minister in  the Rane government leaving the party after getting nominated on the grounds that his wife too must be given a ticket? Or the party’s mercurial MP, Churchill Alemao, breaking away to form his own group in the hope of damaging the Congress?
Tiny Goa may count little in the larger national picture, but the fact that the Congress could be losing another state in which it is in power should be enough cause for alarm. From Lucknow to Panaji, the common thread is that the Congress is operating like a ‘‘closed shop’’, an ageing family business that is simply unable to respond to the aspirations of  a more youthful population.
Somehow, one senses that after her masterly “sacrifice” of  2004, Sonia Gandhi has lost the plot. What the Congress desperately needs now is a 60s-like ‘‘Kamaraj plan’’ in which ministers from the UPA government are brought into the party fold even while some of the more promising, younger faces are projected more vigorously.
Unfortunately, the proposed organisational reshuffle of the Congress is now like a business plan which never seems to take off, a direct casualty of an existing structure where decision-making is routinely deferred and where lines of  communication to the ‘‘Supreme Leader’’ are increasingly cut off. 
Most successful companies in India are forced to come up with career growth plans to retain young talent. A family-run company like the Congress private limited needs to come to terms with the new realities of managing its employees and supporters. A family-run business can only succeed if it empowers its managers and stakeholders in the fullest possible manner.
 A regional party like the DMK may yet get away with family raj because of the limited area of  its influence. An umbrella, national party like the Congress cannot. What it needs now is  to appoint some tough new CEOs and provide them opportunities to grow.
Simply trotting out family charisma at election time without providing opportunities for new talent in the party is a recipe for disaster.
 Maybe Rahul Gandhi needs to “professionalise” the Congress structure, not by relying on laptop managers, but by building a core team of political leaders who are connected to the people. He should, in a sense, be the face of this new Kamaraj plan. We must hear from him more often,  he must be seen to take political positions more consistently.
 There is a rapidly changing India that exists beyond Amethi. Let Rahul Gandhi go and engage with it now, not a few months before the next election. And this time maybe we could have fewer dimpled photo-ops, and a more searching examination of his political abilities. After all, he is 36 years now. Time to get rid of the cotton wool.
(The writer is Editor-in-Chief of CNN-
IBN and IBN 7)