Opinion A Prince searches for answers
The defeat marked the lowest point in Rahuls career as a politician so the heir to the Gandhi dynasty did well to order an appraisal.
Sometimes it is little things that tell a big political story. An interesting example of this came last week in the questionnaire that Rahul Gandhi placed before his defeated candidates from Uttar Pradesh when he summoned them to Delhi to review their dismal results. The defeat marked the lowest point in Rahuls career as a politician so the heir to the Gandhi dynasty did well to order an appraisal. But,the sort of questions that he put before his party men were questions that you would not expect in a high school political science class. Who is the block president of your constituency? Was he or she helpful? Who was the best worker in your constituency? Did the PCC (Pradesh Congress Committee) help you? And,many others of similar simplicity.
If Rahul Gandhi is seriously interested in reviving the political party he inherited,as heir to Indias most powerful political dynasty,he could begin by sacking those who wrote the questionnaire. They sound like a bunch of apolitical amateurs who believe it is possible to analyse complex political issues simply by feeding data into a computer. Even as someone who believes hereditary politicians have harmed Indian democracy more than anything else I felt sorry for Rahul after reading the questionnaire. After nearly ten heady years in Indian politics,years in which he has often been projected as Indias future prime minister,has he really understood so little?
Does he not see that if he is really interested in reviving Indias oldest political party,he needs to get beyond trivial questions and start asking serious ones? Of these the most serious of all is why does Congress no longer seem to understand what voters want? This would lead inevitably to an important answer that could become the first building block for revival.
Since I am in sympathetic mode,I offer a little help. Congress has lost touch with ordinary people because between the Dynasty and the people there now exist layers and layers of powerbrokers and sycophants. When these worthies are asked to select candidates at election time,they nearly always push forward family and friends who nearly always are people who should never be in public life.
The only way to reduce the power of sycophants and power brokers is to initiate,without any delay,a structure based on inner party elections much like the American primaries. This is advice that should be taken by every Indian political party since in imitation of Congress they have nearly all become believers in hereditary democracy replete with their own sycophants and powerbrokers. The Bharatiya Janata Party,that has whiled away so many years in opposition in the Lok Sabha,could have charted a new course but did not. It chose instead to copy Congress in the sycophants and power brokers sphere without noticing that there was no Dynasty to glue these dismal layers together.
So we have a funny moment in Indian political history in which voters have changed,India has changed,but there is no change at all in a corrupt political order that has long been rotten at its core. The reason why politicians have such a bad name in todays India is because the kind of people that are rising to the top are by and large an unsavoury,ugly lot who would never have got anywhere near the top if they had not had politically powerful relatives.
Luckily for Rahul,this is true today of all political parties which is why Congress has survived as long as it has despite offering not a single new idea to voters in decades. But,increasingly,as the old equations of caste and creed break down,from Kashmir to Kanyakumari,voters are demanding real change from the people they elect. They vote back those who have brought change to their lives and they vote out those who have not done enough.
Those who designed Rahuls aggressive,angry campaign in UP believed in an old fashioned way that the magic in his surname could conceal the absence of a real agenda for reform. His choice of Jawaharlal Nehrus old constituency,Phulpur,as the starting point of his campaign indicates that he believed this too. He seems not to have understood how much the times have changed and how much more they could change before the 2014 general election.
The days of dynasties,charisma and computerised selection of candidates could well be over. So could the days when silly questionnaires could masquerade as a real exercise in political analysis. From the vantage point of us the people this is a change for the better but from the vantage point of political princes,it may not be. One way or another political parties that do not understand the need for real change in their structures face a bleak future.
Follow Tavleen Singh on Twitter @ Tavleen_Singh
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