Rahul Gandhi continues to be at the centre of political news and debates. After the unstoppable flow of negative commentary, there is now a discussion of Rahul Gandhi, rather than “Pappu”. In part, he has earned this new place in the political arena through the Bharat Jodo Yatra and his relentless attack on the character of the regime and its ideological brotherhood. In part, however, the role is being thrust on him by his detractors. His survival in the din of media cacophony owes much to the smart-looking but spiteful analyses by BJP leaders and spokespersons and distasteful campaigns in social media upheld by the so-called educated middle classes.
More recently, the BJP made it a point to bring Rahul to centrestage by raising the issue of his speeches and interactions during his UK visit. The purpose was, of course, to avoid discussion on the Adani issue where the BJP is on the backfoot. But the side effect of that too-clever-by-half tactic was to keep Rahul in the public eye and allow him to both claim victimhood and also reiterate his comments made in the UK. This was a repeat of what the BJP did a little earlier, when it chose to get his comments during the speech on the President’s address expunged. So, on the heels of the Bharat Jodo Yatra, Rahul remained in the news and got an opportunity to present himself against the current regime. That he has failed to cultivate a clear, pro-poor constituency or to take up concrete issues like unemployment to mobilise the public remains his and his party’s major limitation.
Now the ruling of the Surat court in the criminal defamation case and his disqualification as an MP, has again ensured that he will be the topic of discussion both among detractors and supporters. Whether he chooses to find legal loopholes or uses the opportunity to take the moral high ground, for the coming weeks, Rahul will continue to be the political hot topic. For once, his party would be wanting to deflect attention away from him and back on the Adani issue!
But let us not worry much about the future course of Rahul Gandhi as a person. The question that should make us curious is not Rahul’s personal political trajectory; it is why the BJP finds it necessary to singularly focus on him (besides the earlier vile attacks on Sonia Gandhi). A simple answer, of course, is that Rahul being the de facto “face” of the Congress party, maligning him can lead to demoralising of the ordinary Congress workers. A related reason could be to show non-BJP voters the futility of investing their political hopes in a bankrupt leader and party. Thirdly, ridicule of Rahul is also directed against the possible efforts towards a loose understanding among the Opposition because the more Rahul is criticised, the more steadfast the Congress becomes in projecting Rahul as an alternative to Modi.
But beyond these tactical factors there are two interrelated substantive factors why the BJP loves to hate Rahul so much. They are less related to Rahul the person, and more about the century-old concerns of the Hindutva project.
Even before his Bharat Jodo Yatra, but more emphatically through the Yatra, Rahul has come to represent a sane view of Indian society and its ills. It is irrelevant whether he has a cogent policy response ready with him for addressing these ills. But he sought to appeal to the collective conscience of citizens — a conscience that has been shadowed by the assault of propaganda over the past decade. The citizens are dazed and dazzled by the darkness ushered in by the regime. Rahul’s Yatra was an experiment to stir that conscience, not by showing the light but by underscoring the darkness. As this writer has argued previously, that was not a grand success. But darkness does not like, nor tolerate, even the possibility of any light. That is why the Yatra angered the ruling party and its supporters. Rahul’s Yatra showed the possibility of a collective conscience willing to be awakened.
But of course, this is only the more immediate factor. It does not fully explain the BJP’s obsession with Rahul. The second reason for this obsession, though connected to the point about collective conscience, goes much beyond Rahul (or Sonia) Gandhi. It is about the foundation of India’s nation-state made of diversity and democracy. In ideological circles it is almost mandatory to overplay the differences among Gandhi and Nehru, Gandhi and Ambedkar, Nehru and Patel and so on. What these rival camps of devoted and honest followers of each of these and many other stalwarts of the founding of the Indian nation-state ignore is the larger ethos they all shared. That ethos is constitutive of the Constitution.
But equally, that ethos sought to uphold a homegrown, modern variant of Indian civilisation. The diversity India cherished in the mid-20th century was not something borrowed from the west, but was built on Indian history and practices. The democracy that India adopted in the mid-20th century deftly combined and integrated modern principles of political equality and India’s own practice of handling dissent.
Since the last one hundred years, then, a battle is on: On the one hand, there are efforts to arrive at an Indian version of the nation-state based on the Constitution and on the other hand, efforts to transform India into an un-Indian nation by purging the Indian characteristics of diversity and adopting those (that the west has by now rejected) which insist on ethnic/communal uniformity. While the current regime strives to bring in the latter imagination, it posits onto Rahul and the Congress the former vision. This explains the irrepressible hatred of Nehru who happened to represent and guard the former imagination.
After 10 years in power, the BJP has done everything to change the mindset of India. It is still not sure if that change will remain in the face of more systematic ideological opposition and particularly in the absence of state power. Rahul — by design or by accident — represents a challenge to both its ideological position and its brazen exercise of state power. This has put the BJP in a bind. To ignore Rahul would mean conceding space to him and to a counter-ideology. The BJP is averse to that co-existence of differences. But to continue to target Rahul can only lead to expanding the space he can occupy. By ignoring him, the BJP risks the reconfiguration of collective conscience of India and by suppressing him, it risks the stirring of precisely that collective conscience. Either way, it faces a “pappu aa gaya centrestage” moment.
The writer, based at Pune, taught Political Science and is chief editor of Studies in Indian Politics
