Finding India

There is a bit of Irish folk wisdom that goes, 8220;You8217;ve got to do your own growing, no matter how tall your grandfather was8221;. Rahul Gandhi must know all about it. He often has to fight the perception that he is too shallowly rooted in this country, that he was just a young man with a famous last name who was plucked out of his life in London and given the keys to the family8217;s traditional base in Amethi.

And now, he sets out to comb every corner of the country in order to revive the Congress8217;s fortunes and strengthen his own brand recall. Rahul Gandhi will discover a very different nation than the one his great-grandfather immersed himself in and wrote about, or the one that Mahatma Gandhi found by third-class train travel. For the Congress, the hope will of course also be that more and more of India discovers Rahul Gandhi. Benefits for the party from this exercise will be known with the next elections. But the idea of touring India is one recommended to the entire political class. All political parties still organise meets in different parts of the country; but, with convenient flight connections and alienating security cordons, the idea has been drained of its original objective of periodic re-acquaintance with the India that resides along dusty side-roads.

Much is wrong with the civil service today, but it has a fine tradition that our legislators could adopt: the Bharat darshan. Too often they start to think of themselves as members of Parliament from such-and-such constituency, not members of India8217;s Parliament. This journey could bring them closer to what they stand for; it will flesh out some of the abstractions 8212; that all of us construct to wrap our minds around India. So hit the old village road, we say.