Opinion Rahul goes rural,so does Congress
The choice of Rahuls rally venues and the sub-text of his speeches reflect the mood.
The Congress had swept urban India in 2009 with Manmohan Singh emerging as the poster boy of the upwardly mobile city-dwellers. But as it gears up for the 2014 elections,Rahul Gandhi for one is focusing all his energies on rural India. At least that is the sense one gets when you listen to the young party vice-president in carefully chosen rural and semi-urban settings.
The choice of Rahuls rally venues and the sub-text of his speeches reflect the mood. He has so far addressed rallies in the remote tribal hamlet of Salumbar in Rajasthan,Maoist-affected Jagadalpur in the heart of Bastar in Chhattisgarh,Muslim-concentrated Aligarh and Rampur in Uttar Pradesh and the farmer-belt of Sangrur in Punjab.
He is set to address rallies in Hamirpur and Salempur in Uttar Pradesh.
Contrast this with his main political rival,Narendra Modi,who has held rallies in Jaipur,Hyderabad,Delhi and Bhopal and is going to address meetings in Patna and Kanpur. Besides,Modis campaign machinery is active 24×7 to reach out to the growing netizen vote bank,concentrated mainly in the urban centres.
Rahuls political lexicon has always been rural-centric be it his support to the farmers agitation in Bhatta-Parsaul,his stand against land acquisition in Niyamgiri hills or his famous sleepovers at Dalit homes but his party did not hesitate from reaching out to urban masses last time around despite its main poll plank being the rural job guarantee scheme and farm loan waiver.
Howsoever,Congress spin masters may argue,corruption,slide in the economy and the foreign policy issues remain a talking point among the urban middle class and the Congresss gameplan to focus on the rural folks perhaps betrays a realisation that urban India could be a difficult terrain this time.
The thrust of Rahuls speeches over the last month has been that the Congress and BJP represent two schools of thought one which gives primacy to the poor and backward in its developmental model and the other which only talks about growth and industry. Needless to say,he has been aggressively hard selling the food security and land Bills,which he believes are going to be the game-changers.
His rhetoric and selection of locations to make his point appear as an attempt to paint the BJP and Modi as pro-industry or champion of the neo-rich in a country that still does not detest poverty. However,in his enthusiasm to differentiate the Congress and himself with its prime challenger,despite the fact there was not much difference between the economic outlook of the two,the Gandhi scion appears to have so far given urban locales and its idiom a complete go by.
Manoj is special correspondent based in Delhi
manoj.cg@expressindia.com
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