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By Rahul Bhattacharya/The Economist
New Delhi, May 2: On a chilly morning this January, India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, gathered over 8,000 luminaries – industrialists, film stars, athletes, seers – in Ayodhya to inaugurate an imposing temple, dedicated to the Hindu god Ram. The ceremony marked the culmination of a 34-year campaign by the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (bjp) to build a temple on a site once occupied by a 16th-century mosque. The mosque was destroyed in 1992 by a Hindu mob; subsequent riots across the country led to the deaths of 2,000 people.
Staged a few months before India’s general election, the celebrity-studded jamboree was also meant to signal the might of Modi and the bjp, the Hindu nationalist party that he leads. To many – certainly the bjp – this spectacle marked the emergence of India, where 80% of the population is Hindu, as a Hindu state. This is the aim of a century-old project of religious nationalism known as Hindutva. Under Modi, the bjp had won large parliamentary majorities (with less than 40% of the vote) at the previous two general elections. It is the favourite for a third victory in elections that conclude this summer.
Around 1,300km (800 miles) away, in the north-east of the country, Rahul Gandhi, India’s most prominent opposition leader, was stuck behind barricades of metal and bamboo. At a dusty junction in Assam, he attempted to negotiate with a phalanx of surly police officers: “What mistake have I made? What crime have I committed? Talk to me.” They didn’t respond.
It was 8.30am and Gandhi, who seemed impervious to the cold, was wearing his trademark short-sleeved white polo shirt, cargo trousers and trainers. This was the ninth day of a roadshow that would see him tour 6,700km in two months across the breadth of the country – known as the Bharat Jodo Nyay Yatra, or the Unite India Justice March. Except now, a short distance from the birthplace of Sankardev, a 15th-century Hindu poet and saint, he was blocked.
Gandhi is the 53-year-old scion of the Nehru-Gandhi family that controls Congress, India’s “big-tent” party that welcomes voters of all stripes. In the world’s largest democracy – 970m people are eligible to vote in seven phases from April to June – he represents the liberal challenge to the bjp’s majoritarian ideology. All the indications suggest that Congress will lose the election, but Gandhi has emerged as the most vociferous critic of Modi’s growing authoritarianism.
In the world’s largest democracy, Gandhi represented the liberal challenge to the BJP’s majoritarian ideology
In March, as the elections drew near, tax authorities froze Congress’s main bank accounts, leaving it gasping for campaign funds. Two popular opposition chief ministers, who belonged to parties that had joined with Congress in an alliance that branded itself india, were jailed on corruption charges. Gandhi described Indian democracy, in its current form, as “a lie”. Even if the bjp wins a thumping victory as expected, he has positioned himself as the defender of India’s secular constitution and its endangered institutions. The depth of his commitment will determine the vigour of multi-party democracy in the country.
Congress, once the natural choice for India’s diverse electorate, is hindered by the fact that Gandhi, despite being in the game for 20 years, has always struggled with basics of politics: organising, cutting deals and enthusing voters. His relationship with power is complicated, moulded by the tragedies his family has suffered. “The power so many people seek is actually a poison,” he said in 2013 – an attitude more conducive to self-improvement than electoral success.
To some Gandhi is a symbol of nepotistic delusion; to many a man whose legacy had trapped him in the wrong job to the detriment of the progressive cause. He is not even technically the party leader any more, having given up the presidency in 2019. (Mallikarjun Kharge – a veteran leader from the Dalit community, the lowest rung in the Hindu caste system – is the first non-Gandhi in the post since 1998.) Yet Gandhi is still the face and de facto head of Congress – the fate of his party hangs largely in his hands.
This was Gandhi’s second epic yatra, or march, in as many years – part of an effort to reinvent himself and his ossifying party. These long journeys, in which he conversed and commiserated with ordinary people, were an attempt to portray Gandhi, a generation younger than Modi, as the potential leader of a mass movement. By walking and driving thousands of miles to encounter millions of Indians, Gandhi seemed to find his footing not just as a moral voice but a kind of listener-in-chief. In his first impromptu meet-and-greet of this yatra, at a tea shop in Manipur, a state racked with ethnic strife, Gandhi calmed an agitated youth with the therapeutic approach that is now his signature: “Why are you disturbed? What are the symptoms?” An aide encouraged a young woman into the circle. “Go on, sister, go, whatever is on your mind, tell him.”
The bjp has taken note. After Gandhi’s first yatra, which finished in early 2023, a cabinet minister acknowledged in private, “Now he has become a leader.” This was part of the reason the bjp used the state apparatus in Assam, which is ruled by the party, to thwart Gandhi on the morning of the Ayodhya temple consecration.
From the scrum at the barricades Gandhi smiled up at the people gathered on roofs and balconies, the dimple in his right cheek softening the set of his face. Party workers began a hymn to Lord Ram, singing the version popularised by Mahatma Gandhi (no relation of the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty). It includes a reference to Allah – a pointed expression of the idea that God is one. Rahul Gandhi sat down among them, clasped his knees, closed his eyes and listened. The crowd circling him jostled to record videos. Compared with the events in Ayodhya, it made a quaint scene – much like liberalism in India today.
Over the previous eight days, Gandhi had traversed an ethnically diverse and electorally slight territory, reiterating his commitment to pluralism. “What you speak, who you worship, what you eat, your marriage traditions, these are your traditions, these are nobody else’s business.” He received ceremonial receptions, dozens of traditional dances, hundreds of shawls. At the end of long days on the road, he would wind down with a session of ju-jitsu.
But he was repeatedly prevented from campaigning. Barred from Guwahati, Assam’s biggest city, Congress workers overturned a set of barricades. “We broke the barricade and threw it away, but we will not break the law,” Gandhi told the Congress workers from atop his bespoke bus. “You are lions. Recognise your strength.”
Rahul Gandhi is of the fifth generation in a political lineage that stretches back a century, to two-time Congress president Motilal Nehru, a successful lawyer of Kashmiri origin. Motilal’s son, Jawaharlal, a protégé of Mahatma Gandhi, was India’s first prime minister from independence in 1947 until his death in 1964, by which time he had shepherded the country towards a plural democracy. Nehru was especially mindful of the perils of Hindu supremacism. In 1948, when a Hindu fanatic assassinated Mahatma Gandhi – blaming him, among other things, for acceding to the partition of the former British colony of India into two independent countries, India and Pakistan – Nehru banned the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (rss), a fascist-inspired Hindu nationalist movement and the parent organisation of the bjp.
To some Gandhi was a symbol of nepotistic delusion; to many a man whose legacy had trapped him in the wrong job
Indira, Jawaharlal’s only child, married a Parsi born as Feroze Ghandy who changed the spelling of his surname in tribute to the Mahatma. Indira grew into a charismatic leader – she served as prime minister for 16 years over two spells – though one who muddled her father’s democratic ideals. In 1975, facing popular unrest and a potential ousting as prime minister, she suspended democracy for 21 months. Thousands of activists, including those from the rss, were arrested; many more, Modi among them, went into hiding. Today’s government often invokes these events whenever Gandhi attacks its own democratic shortcomings.
During that period, known as the Emergency, Indira allowed her younger son Sanjay to run loose with coercive schemes, such as mass slum-razing and forcing vasectomies on the poor. His death in a plane crash, at 33, prompted Rahul’s father Rajiv – until then content to work as a commercial pilot for Indian Airlines – to join Indira in politics.
Rahul was 14 when he suffered his first big loss. In 1984 Indira was gunned down by her Sikh bodyguards as payback for ordering the army to besiege the Golden Temple in Amritsar – the spiritual seat of Sikhism, occupied at the time by separatist militants. On the morning of her assassination she had reminded her grandson, a bespectacled boy with bee-stung lips, of a promise that he had made to her: he was not to cry when she died. “I loved to play badminton,” Rahul would tell Congress workers decades later. “It gave me balance in this complicated world. I was taught how to play in my grandmother’s house by two policemen who protected my grandmother as my friends. Then one day they killed my grandmother and took away the balance from my life.”
Rajiv, with a mere three years’ political experience, was sworn in as prime minister on the evening Indira was killed. He took the job with a sense of fatalism. His Italian-born wife, Sonia – Rahul’s mother – tried to convince Rajiv to decline. But even if he were to do so, Rajiv told her, he “would be killed anyway”.
Indira’s assassination had a dramatic effect on Rahul and his younger sister Priyanka. After her assassination, they were kept at home to be tutored. As family friends described it, they grew up “in a cage”, surrounded by security personnel and the same five friends.
Seven years later, Rajiv’s prophecy came to pass. His tenure as prime minister was plagued by misadventures, such as sending Indian troops to fight Tamil separatists in the Sri Lankan civil war. By 1991, he was out of power. On the campaign trail in Tamil Nadu, a 22-year-old Tamil Tiger placed a sandalwood garland around Rajiv’s neck, then detonated 700g of explosives stuffed inside her denim vest. His body had to be stitched together for the last rites.
At the time, Rahul was 21 years old and a student at Harvard. As he took the train to Allahabad, the Nehru hometown, to immerse Rajiv’s ashes at the confluence of the Ganges and Yamuna rivers, something stirred within him. The railway tracks were lined with people paying their final respects. “In their faces I saw a sense of loss,” he later said, “and I felt that as my father’s son I had some responsibility.”
Although Gandhi draws inspiration from a range of spiritual sources – publicly he calls himself a devotee of the Hindu god, Shiva – those close to him say Buddhism has exerted an especially strong influence. Meditation, I was told, had helped him deal with the traumas of his life. He manifests Buddhist principles such as compassion and non-attachment. When he saw images of the slain leader of the Tamil Tigers in 2009, his first instinct was pity: “There’s someone looking at him right now the same way I looked at my father.” In 2023 Gandhi was evicted from his grace-and-favour bungalow that he lived in as an mp after he was sentenced to two years in prison for his involvement in a defamation case regarding Modi. A friend checked to see whether he was okay. “Material things I’m not attached to,” he replied. (His sentence has since been suspended and the bungalow re-allotted to him, but there are reports he is seeking to move to a different one.)
In the Indian context, the Buddha represents more than kindness and renunciation: he is regarded as a radical. He was a heterodox thinker, espousing a philosophy that paid no heed to Hindu gods or the social institution of caste, a hereditary gradation of Hindus based on traditional occupation and notional purity. To the oppressed, the Buddha is a symbol of equality. Shortly before his death, B.R. Ambedkar, the chief architect of India’s constitution, converted to Buddhism along with half a million of his fellow Dalits (once called Untouchables). Now Gandhi wants to make compassion and equality into a viable politics. In practice this would mean creating a national coalition across caste lines, using welfare inducements that historically served Congress well. The question is whether Gandhi, with his privileges, is convincing as a messenger.
Gandhi entered the electoral fray in 2004. He had recently returned to India after 15 years abroad, having studied at Harvard and Cambridge and worked at a management consultancy in London. Gandhi won his mother Sonia’s seat in Uttar Pradesh by a landslide, while she moved to a nearby stronghold. Even though the bjp had been widely expected to retain power, Congress came to office at the head of a coalition.
Gandhi wants to make compassion and equality into a viable politics. The question is whether Gandhi is convincing as a messenger
Sonia, as Congress president, had the prime ministership for the taking, but declined. Instead she nominated Manmohan Singh, a Sikh economist, who as finance minister in the 1990s had opened up the economy and unleashed the rapid growth that has transformed India over the past three and a half decades. Singh and other party leaders urged Gandhi to take on a role in the government but he also refused. He once spoke about committing not to “interfere” – a choice of word that reveals a sense of both privilege and self-awareness, as well as his ambivalence towards holding official power.
Taking up the role of general secretary instead, Gandhi set himself the task of making Congress less nepotistic. He seemed sincere. “I am the symptom of this problem,” he said about the preponderance of dynasties in Indian politics. The irony was that in order to change things he put himself in charge – the circular logic of a party, as one veteran Congress leader quipped, akin to “a public limited company with private ownership”. The results betrayed naivety. He introduced elections for positions in Congress’s youth wing but this led to influential families pouring millions of rupees into campaigns to promote their progeny. Some even canvassed by helicopter.
Even back then Gandhi had an appetite for the campaign trail. During the 2009 general elections, where Congress bettered its showing on the 2004 results, he was estimated to have clocked up tens of thousands of miles, more than anyone else. Gandhi’s role in consolidating Congress’s success increased his clout; when he intervened, the party paid heed. In 2011 he joined farmers protesting in a state run by an opposition party against the acquisition of their land for a road – a stand that eventually led, two years later, to legislation that gave people’s land rights greater protection.
But the entrenched Congress leaders and apparatchiks, threatened by change – or simply unconvinced by Gandhi’s fanciful ideas – resisted his efforts. In 2014 Gandhi briefly experimented with American-style primaries, rather than backroom stitch-ups, to create election tickets, but the idea never got off the ground. A scheme to train young leaders never appeared either.
Neither the old guard nor Gandhi could resolve Congress’s long-running problem: a party culture where people gained status through proximity to one Gandhi or another. The national mood toward Congress had also begun to shift, thanks to a popular anti-corruption movement targeting the government over scams – ranging from bribes in staging the Commonwealth Games to the allocation of coal-mining licences.
Modi, a rousing orator and a four-time chief minister of Gujarat who had risen up through the rss, exploited these openings in the 2014 elections. Riding on his reputation as a Hindutva strongman and an able administrator – both of which appealed to conservative Indian businesspeople – the bjp accumulated a bigger war chest than Congress despite being out of power a decade. Congress fell to 44 seats – astonishingly low for a party that had never before dropped below 100.
Losing power exposed the fragility of Congress’s organisation, which relies on local leaders to draw in supporters, rather than a distinct ideology. The party was plagued by defections. According to one study, between 2014 and 2021 just over a third of all members of parliament and state legislatures who left their parties were from Congress – 177 people in total. Gandhi’s inaccessibility contributed to the haemorrhage. During his time as party vice-president and then president – a role he took over in 2017 from his mother – it was difficult for leaders to make appointments with him. He made secretive trips abroad, sometimes to meditation retreats (to maintain his sanity, say friends).
Those who have worked with him think that Gandhi’s remoteness was a sign of conflict aversion or indecision. It certainly allowed grievances and disputes to fester. He has often lacked the steel to face down established factions in order to promote talented outsiders, some of whom he had himself brought in. One prominent young leader from a humble background, whose career was thwarted by a powerful political dynasty, told me he felt Gandhi had succumbed to “the system he sought to defeat”. He, along with many others, has since quit the party.
The old guard could not resolve Congress’s long-running problem: a party culture where people gained status through proximity to one Gandhi or another
Gandhi seems to have little taste for the glad-handing necessary for political advancement. A party man, for instance, doubted Gandhi knew the names of all the state Congress chiefs. He has no inclination for scheming either; he would much rather discuss philosophy, spirituality, international relations or why gardening tools in India remain rudimentary (he argues it’s because the elites do little manual work, so aren’t interested in designing more efficient implements). Even those let down by Gandhi considered him a rarity in Indian politics: a decent man, though something of a bleeding heart. A joke went around in Congress circles that if you were ten minutes late for a meeting with Gandhi and showed him your ripped kurta from a struggle on the bus, you could have a paid post in the party. Tehseen Poonawalla, a Congress-supporting pundit, told me he wished Gandhi would be more “alpha”, because “this country wants an alpha.”
Certainly the bjp and right-wing troll farms have expended much energy to discredit Gandhi as an aristocratic dunce; countering this perception keeps the Congress press team busy. “With Rahul, we know it’s never going to be merely controversial, it’s going to go viral,” one member told me. Sanjay Jha, a former Congress spokesperson, told me that his “principal beef” with Gandhi was that he did not work hard enough on how he communicates to the public. Unlike Indira, who subjected herself to rigorous mock press conferences, or Modi, who famously likes a teleprompter, Gandhi preferred to ad-lib from a sketchy outline. And whereas Modi speaks to Hindu glory and grievance, Gandhi had nothing so emotive to offer.
In 2017, in an attempt to counter the bjp’s charge that he was anti-Hindu, Gandhi tried on conspicuous religion for the first time with a series of publicised temple visits. His mixed heritage – Hindu, Catholic, Parsi, not to mention his interest in Buddhism – ought not to have been controversial in a secular republic. Yet the bjp had turned secularism into a dirty word, and Gandhi couldn’t convince voters he was more pious than the Hindu right. Doubling down, a zealous Congress spokesman portrayed him as a “thread-wearing”, or high-caste, Hindu, undermining his egalitarian pretensions. Gandhi seems to have been sincerely committed to bringing Dalits and other oppressed groups into prominent positions in his party. But according to Yogendra Yadav, a psephologist who works closely with Gandhi, Congress’s leadership at the state level in the populous north of the country remains in the “stranglehold of the upper caste”.
The bjp, by contrast, was quick to recruit members of the lower castes, if only to counter the rise of regional caste-based parties that fractured the Hindu vote it aspires to amalgamate. It urged Hindus to close ranks against their supposed common enemies (notably Muslims), and cultivated or co-opted leaders from castes that did not find representation elsewhere. (Modi himself belongs to a community that since 2000 has been classified as one of the Other Backward Classes, a grouping that is thought to account for about 50% of Indians.) In the last general election, in 2019, the bjp even drew a third of the Dalit vote, which historically had not come its way.
In those elections Modi had considerable success in presenting himself as a kaamdaar, one who has to work to make a name for himself, rather than a naamdaar, one born with a famous name. Six weeks before the polls he reinforced his strongman image with an air strike against Pakistan in retaliation for a terrorist attack in Kashmir. The bjp, for the first time in its history, topped the 300-seat mark in the lower house. Meanwhile, Gandhi lost the family borough (but won a seat in the southern state of Kerala instead). Taking responsibility for the failure, he stepped down as Congress president after just two years in the job – hinting, as he did, that he had been undermined (“at times, I stood completely alone”).
In his resignation letter, Gandhi sowed the seeds for his next move. “I have no hatred or anger towards the Bharatiya Janata Party, but every living cell in my body instinctively resists their idea of India,” Gandhi wrote. “Where they see differences, I see similarity. Where they see hatred, I see love. What they fear, I embrace.” He’d noticed that he’d always used the word “love” freely. But never, up to then, in politics.
“I walked 4,000km because there was no other way to get our message across,” Gandhi would say about his first yatra, the Unite India March, which ran from September 2022 to January 2023. Yatras have an evocative place in Indian political history. In 1930 Mahatma Gandhi – the ultimate non-violent alpha – walked nearly 400km over 24 days in what became known as the “salt march”. (This protest against the colonial government’s monopoly on the product set off the civil-disobedience movement.) In 1983 Chandra Sekhar, a socialist who would briefly become prime minister, marched more than 4,000km to bring attention to basic issues – water provision, health care, education, communal integration. In the words of one of Sekhar’s biographers, the yatra offered a “direct perception” of truth. In 1990 a yatra of another kind, conducted on a motorised chariot by the bjp’s L.K. Advani, mobilised Hindus for the cause of the Ram temple in Ayodhya, leaving religious riots in its wake.
Stirring montages of a marching Gandhi could make their way into people’s hearts, where many still maintain a residual affection for the Nehru-Gandhis
Rahul Gandhi had positioned his yatra as a response to the bjp’s hegemony. Over the previous eight years, the party had cemented its control of state institutions – the tax authorities, the election commission, investigative agencies – as well as its hold over big media outlets, which often acted as cheerleaders for Modi. An insider told me that Gandhi believed the “fraternal bonds” in the country had frayed to such an extent under bjp rule that the “centre of the crisis lies in the hearts of the people”. He needed, therefore, to speak directly to them.
The yatra’s counter-message, in its simplistic but catchy formulation judging by the crowd’s response, was, “In the marketplace of hate, we are opening a shop of love.” It was a framing that dodged explicitly addressing discrimination against Muslims. (Gandhi’s associates say they want to avoid polarisation, which favours the bjp.) Unlike the austere yatras of yore, Gandhi’s came with dozens of lorries to house the core team of yatris, and videographers who worked to convert this arduously analogue exercise into digital content for social media. (Gandhi’s personal social-media accounts now draw around 50m followers. Modi has nearly 100m followers on X alone.) Even if the mainstream press largely ignored the yatra, stirring montages of a marching Gandhi embracing everyone he met could make their way into people’s phones – and perhaps back into their hearts, where many people still maintain a residual affection for the Nehru-Gandhis.
India is one of the longest countries in the world, but Gandhi insisted that its entire length be covered on foot, his adviser Yadav told me. “If we have to do it, it has to be tapasya” – in the spirit of ascetic fervour or penance. In a talk in Cambridge, Gandhi described in almost mystical terms how he courted discomfort in order to “shut himself down” so he would be better at listening: “You started to hear with your hands, you started to listen with your eyes.” His attitude seemed to inspire trust in those who encountered him. A pair of sisters grabbed his hands on the yatra, and told him they had been gang-raped by five men. Gandhi wanted to inform the police, but they refused. “We just wanted our brother to know what has happened to us,” they said.
Many ordinary citizens, sometimes tens of thousands at a time, joined the yatra for short durations. Some continued to walk for months. Prabjot Singh, a Sikh from Delhi, teamed up with some fellow marchers to form Mohabbat ka Langar, or Kitchen of Love, which feeds the destitute. A bank employee told me how despite having to sleep rough and face police harassment he was revitalised by the feeling “that we were struggling for something every day”. A poor farmer pointed at his feet: he was wearing the worn-out slippers in which he had walked the whole country. It seemed that Gandhi had finally found an emotional register that resonated.
Every morning, the marchers would set off at 6am. In December 2022, as the march entered the bitter northern winter, Yadav, the former psephologist, sent a half-serious text to Gandhi to say he would organise a strike if timings were not revised. Gandhi did not reply, but instead responded in a public meeting: “If a farmer can get up at four in the morning to water the field in this cold, why can’t we get up and walk?” In the physical exertion of the march Yadav discerned a message to the party: “It needs to be jolted into doing things.”
In the eyes of party members and outsiders alike, the march had a number of political limitations. The young ex-Congress leader told me that the yatras had turned Gandhi into a foot soldier, rather than a general: “From the top you can cover much more ground than when you are on the ground itself.” Some supporters thought that all the love talk was ineffectual. “Politics is like jungle warfare, you can’t spread love while the bjp keeps winning. We’re out of touch!” Poonawalla, the exasperated commentator, said. One newspaper headline went: “A journey in search of a destination”.
The criticism did not discourage Gandhi. Five months after he started, he reached Kashmir, his family’s ancestral land. There, ignoring the local security advice, he kept walking, kept inviting people into his cordon. He made his final speech in snowfall, having waved away an umbrella, his beard wild. Something about him had shifted in the eyes of the country. Where he could once be dismissed as a part-time politician, few now doubted his commitment. With the yatra, in Yadav’s words, Gandhi “had managed to earn what he had inherited”.
On his more recent, motorised yatra, Gandhi sometimes pulled up a crowd member and staged a skit on his Jeep’s bonnet. “Look there, Pakistan,” Gandhi pointed in one direction, “and look there, cricket,” pointing now in the opposite direction – having the actor whirl one way and another. This, he explained, was Modi and the compliant press distracting the common man, while billionaires picked his pocket. On occasion Gandhi even wielded a long stick as he played Amit Shah, the home minister who is in charge of the police and investigative agencies. The crowds laughed and hooted.
Congress may have branded this reinvented Gandhi as “Jan Nayak”, the people’s leader – but it was Modi who had won the people’s trust
For this march Gandhi shifted his message from compassion to equality, setting out Congress’s platform for the election. The 21 richest people in the country, he told the crowds, had as much wealth as the bottom 700m Indians. This figure comes from an Oxfam report of questionable methodology. However, he is right to note that inequality in India has been rising. Some scholars think it is higher than it has ever been. Gandhi was not just going after wealth disparities. In speech after speech, he spoke about the woeful lack of representation of lower castes and other minorities – who are approximately 80% of India’s population – at the highest echelons of society.
The crowd heard Gandhi’s promise of a caste census with interest rather than excitement: it would be a complex and drawn-out exercise, and Gandhi had only begun championing it last year. In contrast, when Gandhi addressed more tangible concerns, such as leaked exam papers for extremely competitive government jobs, he drew cheers from the predominantly young and male crowd. (University graduates are suffering particularly. The unemployment rate for those aged 29 or younger with degrees is nine times higher than for those who are illiterate.)
In mid-March, two months after it began in the north-east, Gandhi’s Justice yatra ended on Mumbai’s shoreline, where he paid his respects at the Ambedkar memorial, behind which sat a statue of the Buddha. Then he read the preamble to the Indian constitution, which promises citizens economic, social and political justice – the party’s rallying call for the coming elections, the dates of which had been announced that afternoon. Few opinion polls or observers give Congress an optimistic prognosis. Congress may have branded this reinvented Gandhi as “Jan Nayak”, the people’s leader – but it was Modi who had won the people’s trust, persuading them that he had improved not just their lot but India’s, and that many of the country’s ills could be traced back to the Nehru-Gandhi family.
Rahul and Priyanka may well be the last generation of the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty: Rahul is single, and Priyanka’s children, in their 20s, are by all accounts unlikely to take up the mantle. If Congress is routed again, the family may well face louder calls to leave politics. Should Gandhi ever manage to lead Congress to power, he will have worked harder for it than anyone in the lineage since his great-grandfather Nehru, who spent nine years in prison while agitating against British rule.
How might that happen? Time and faith, suggested a candid young Congress functionary. “The yatras are a way for us to survive,” he told me. “So when the bjp goes down, we are still around, our ideology is still alive.” But success may require more than waiting for public disenchantment to set in or for the bjp to implode. Congress requires reforming and Gandhi must make tough decisions if he wants to preside over its rejuvenation and challenge Modi’s illiberal excesses. Rahul Gandhi is still in for a long march. ■
Rahul Bhattacharya is a novelist and journalist.
photographs: keerthana kunnath
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