Balancing act

Though reviled and ridiculed as an irrelevant child of dynastic privilege by his detractors, Rahul Gandhi remains the leading voice of the Opposition. Last November, he said the ruling BJP had spent crores to ruin his image. Although he has come a long way from the day he impulsively tore up an ordinance, embarrassing his own government, his destiny is intertwined with the fortunes of the Congress party. The Bharat Jodo Yatra did help reinvent his image to a certain extent, but the perception of the Nehru-Gandhi scion as a reluctant leader refuses to go away. Scepticism about his capabilities, ideology and his vision for India is still widespread.

Strange Burdens: The Politics and Predicament of Rahul Gandhi examines the two-decade-long political career and the persona of Rahul. Senior journalist Sugata Srinivasaraju analyses Rahul’s ideas and leadership from the time he joined politics in 2004. The author traces the evolution of the Congress leader and the many insurmountable challenges he has had to reckon with. Sugata states that Rahul’s ambivalence towards power may have been conditioned by his personal trauma of having suffered the assassinations of his grandmother and his father. As a teenager, he led a cocooned life under the watchful eyes of security men. His predicament is that he can neither shake off his dynastic legacy nor harp on his family’s sacrifices.

Finding Rahul a “fascinating subject of study”, Sugata depends on the sources available in the public domain to delve deep. He doesn’t typecast his subject or draw conclusions. The book brings into sharp focus the contrasting ideological narratives that pervade today’s polity. The RSS and BJP have always questioned the suitability of Rahul as a leader while Prime Minister Modi mocks him as a dynast at every opportunity. They question his roots and his mixed parentage. Rahul’s claim of being a sacred-thread-wearing Kashmiri Brahmin and his visits to temples have only drawn derision from the saffron brigade. BJP, the self-styled sole custodian of the Hindu faith, brands him either godless or ‘Western’ to keep him on the edge, a charge Congress has failed to effectively counter. 

Sugata argues that Rahul and the Congress party lacked cultural imagination and strategy to effectively counter the majoritarian agenda or “cultural narratives manufactured in bigoted factories.’’ With a larger-than-life image, Modi’s mythologising of the past and stress on civilisational pride has thus worked greatly. He recounts how during the 2014 and 2019 elections, the BJP invented a compelling story of majoritarian victimhood and told it myriad times.

Rahul presented the Bharat Jodo Yatra as a mission to spread love and harmony and ostensibly unite a nation torn asunder by bigoted ideologies and hate. The long march did enable Rahul to emotionally connect with the masses, but the Congress has failed to fully exploit the goodwill generated, the author believes. Rahul Gandhi’s fierce opposition to crony capitalism has been interpreted by some as anti-business. His stand on economic policies is marked by a certain level of confusion. Messaging is not his forte. Sugata points out that Rahul’s concept of the ‘union of states’ as a counter to BJP’s ‘one nation’ did not connect emotionally with the public. His ‘Idea of India’ has also not resonated with the masses. Rahul relies on reason not emotions in his speeches, the author opines. Strange Burdens is a political analysis with empathy. The book does not catalogue Rahul’s successes and failures. It stands out as an honest effort to understand the leader’s persona and captures the growing support for him as an alternative to Modi. A good read for all.