The circumstances in which Rahul Gandhi has taken over as president of the 132-year-old Congress are vastly different from the ones in which his mother Sonia Gandhi had assumed charge as head of the Congress 19 years ago. Mrs Gandhi had taken the baton from Sitaram Kesri. She had been begged to do so by the party cadres in order that hope may be rekindled — and it was. Under Mrs Gandhi’s stewardship, the Congress defeated the BJP, led by Atal Behari Vajpayee, in 2004, denying the vastly popular PM a second consecutive term as head of the first NDA government.
During the time when Mrs Gandhi was party president, the Congress-led UPA ran the government at the Centre for two consecutive terms with Dr Manmohan Singh as PM. That’s an enviable record. And then came the fall against the challenger Narendra Modi. The Congress returned with worst-ever figures for the Lok Sabha in 2014 — a mere 44 seats.
As the new party chief, it falls on Mr Gandhi to change this shallow equation, in 2019, between the two principal national parties. The BJP, under Mr Modi, appears way ahead of the Congress, no matter who its leader is. Also, Mr Gandhi’s arrival on the scene is apt to elicit a laugh in the BJP, not just because a dedicated BJP technical army was tasked to use social media to call him scornful names and those stuck.
Here is a man who, as Congress vice-president leading the party’s poll campaigns, has lost many state elections, one after the other, since the last Lok Sabha poll. Few stop to ponder that this might have been the most likely scenario under any other leader too as the Congress is on a downhill trajectory, especially after 10 years in power on the trot.
The exit polls for the just-concluded Gujarat Assembly election vastly favour a winning run for the BJP. No matter what the result, one cannot deny that the poll campaign crafted by Mr Gandhi did give the seemingly invincible Mr Modi and his companions a very hard time. Everyone acknowledges this, including the BJP top brass. The BJP did Mr Gandhi a favour by paying him extraordinary attention during the campaign.
The Congress president appears to have at last found his feet as a leader. On Friday, Mrs Gandhi commented that her “role” now was “to retire”, possibly suggesting that she might not even contest the next Lok Sabha poll. The Congress Party is thus for Mr Gandhi to shape, whether he loses Gujarat big time, as some exit polls suggest, runs close to Mr Modi, or takes the state away from him. The Congress chief will have to pay attention to democratising and extending the party organisation and reinvent the Congress ideology for the times we live in.
