Rahul Gandhi and the hall of mirrors problem

Rahul Gandhi's Bharat Jodo Yatra begins on September 7, 2022. (Illustration by Suneesh K.)

On September 7, Rahul Gandhi, along with 117 Congress politicians, will start a grueling 3,570-km trek from Kanyakumari to Kashmir. He will walk six to seven hours per day over a period of five months and sleep every night in a container cabin. The Bharat Jodo Yatra (Unite India March) will cover 12 states and two union territories.

According to the Congress, the yatra is meant to provide an alternative to the “politics of fear, bigotry and prejudice” and “the economics of livelihood destruction, increasing unemployment and growing inequalities”. It is also planned as a massive mass contact exercise ahead of the elections scheduled for nearly a dozen states till the end of next year, and of course the 2024 general elections. A news report quoted a Congress leader saying that during the march, Gandhi will “listen a lot and speak less”.

But will all the physical strain that Rahul Gandhi intends to put himself through achieve anything?

Some may believe that Congress’ fortunes can’t sink any further and can only improve from here on, but I am not so sure. Since managing an all-time low of 52 seats in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections (of which 31 were from just three states—Kerala, Punjab and Tamil Nadu, and it may have won eight seats in Tamil Nadu mainly due to its alliance with the DMK), the party has lost every assembly election and has been wiped out in important states like Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal. It is also likely to lose Rajasthan, one of the only two states where it is in power, when assembly polls take place a few months from now.

The undeniable truth is that Rahul Gandhi has been an abject failure at his job. Yet he continues to call the shots in the party while refusing to accept the post of the party’s president. Power without any official accountability. To put it crudely, he wants to have its cake and eat it too. Even after 18 years in active politics, he remains prone to making a faux pas or a strange statement almost every time he opens his mouth. For instance, “Poverty is a state of mind. It does not mean lack of food, money or material thing.” Or “India is the Saudi Arabia of the 21st century,” while speaking about the benefits of India’s youthful population.

Dozens of magazine cover stories have been done over the last 15 years, asking: Has Rahul (finally) come of age? (Disclosure: I am guilty of this too, in 2009, as the editor of a magazine). But he is actually two years minus 15 days older than Yogi Adityanath.

This man keeps taking holidays in undisclosed destinations—according to a Home Ministry statement in Parliament, he travelled abroad at least 247 times between 2015 and 2019, an average 62 trips in a year—even when crucial elections are on or important party meetings have been scheduled. In fact, in July, he preferred a “personal visit abroad” to being present at a high-level party meeting called to discuss…the Bharat Jodo Yatra.

Will he able to go through this five-month ordeal without taking a holiday break? That may be a more difficult test of endurance for him than anything else.

To be fair to him, he has, when not on holiday, tried a lot of different things. He went to Bhatta-Parsaul in Uttar Pradesh to join a farmers’ agitation against the Mayawati government’s land acquisition plans to construct the Yamuna Expressway. He has courted arrest many times. He has cycled to Parliament to protest against high fuel prices. He has cooked on a YouTube culinary channel, performed push-ups in a contest with high school kids, deep-sea dived in Kerala. But none of it seems to have worked, even though the media covered each event extensively.

The Yamuna Expressway was built, halving road travel time from Delhi to Agra, increasing incomes and employment, and reducing fuel pollution. Politicians courting arrest has become a tired joke. After all, all these arrested leaders are going to get 5-star hospitality at the police station and will be let off within a few hours.

When he cycled to Parliament, the sight of his government-appointed commando guards running to keep pace with him spoilt whatever effect his agitprop was supposed to achieve. And his cooking, push-ups and diving got no votes for the Congress; they merely generated a lot of admiring tweets from posh teenyboppers.

And the behaviour of his sycophants has long become predictable and utterly boring. How many times will the party keep passing resolutions, after every election defeat, that everyone in the Congress, from senior leaders to rank and file workers, are to blame, but not the Rahul Gandhi?

The Bharat Jodo Yatra raises many questions, and one of the most obvious ones is: Just a few months ago, Rahul Gandhi claimed in Parliament that India is not a nation, but a union of states; so who or what exactly is he trying to unite?

But a much more important issue, in practical terms, is whether this five-month-long gamble makes much political sense. One, given the sorry state of the Congress’ grassroots organization in most states, how large a crowd will Rahul Gandhi be able to muster as he walks through India, other than idle onlookers out for an afternoon stroll?

Two, given our short attention spans, how long will it be before the people and the media lose interest? The news cycle will continue to evolve, controversies will keep appearing, TV news channels will keep trying desperately to find something to boost their viewership every night. How on earth does Rahul Gandhi plan to stay in the news? It is very probable that very soon, unless he finds something interesting to do or say every day, the people will simply move on to more engaging things, and he will be left trudging his way in the wilderness. And he will not even be able to quit halfway without losing face.

The Bharat Jodo Yatra is a bad idea. Rahul Gandhi, who has little political equity left, could have done many better and more useful things. Like taking a five-month holiday from politics and his coterie of advisers and sycophants to take a long hard look at himself, his career, and the reasons why the Congress is becoming more irrelevant by the day to the nation—or the union of states. But that would really be asking for too much from someone who seems to have trapped himself in a hall of mirrors.