Opinion Without Rahul

Congress vice president Rahul Gandhi has requested time off, his party has said, “to reflect on recent events and the future course of the party”. His absence in the ongoing budget session will surely be unremarkable, given that Rahul has never been conscientious about attending Parliament anyway. Rahul’s leadership of his party has also been noticeable mainly for its reticence. Even as the Congress has plunged to new lows after its Lok Sabha rout, he has made no visible attempt to admit responsibility, acknowledge mistakes, enthuse demoralised cadres. There has been no noticeable effort to strategise with other parties of the Opposition on how best to push the Narendra Modi government on the mat and on its toes, especially after the BJP’s Delhi setback, or on the land acquisition ordinance now, which seeks to dilute the UPA’s showpiece legislation and frames an issue on which Rahul himself had made one of his guerrilla interventions at Bhatta Parsaul. It may well be that Rahul intends to return with a radical new roadmap, but for now, the question can reasonably be asked: Will anyone miss Rahul Gandhi while he is away?

The Congress VP’s official leave application presents a formal opportunity. This time, while he is away, Rahul could confront the question he seems to have evaded for long: whether or not he has a taste for the labour of politics, or, as Max Weber put it, the “slow boring of hard boards”. The Congress did not just dip to a Lok Sabha tally of 44, it did not lose serially in states because of a rote anti-incumbency — in fact, the big change in Indian politics in the last decade and a half has been the return of incumbent governments that are seen to have performed. Nor is this a cyclical phenomenon, and it is not going to be a matter of simply waiting out its turn — experience has shown that the Congress has found it very difficult to revive once its vote share in a state dips below the 20 per cent mark and that is a predicament it faces most recently in Maharashtra and Delhi. The Congress is in decline because of several reasons, but largely because of a remote and disengaged leadership that has ceased to think and intervene politically, or simply to take charge and work hard.

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The party that once presided over a one-party dominance system appears to have lost not just its ideological coherence and political conviction, but its very will to power. It is now being pushed aside by other parties that have greater drive, ambition and vigour. Both Rahul and the Congress could use this break from each other to mull over what has gone wrong, if it can be set right, and what that will take.