Brand 'Rahul' Palmistry In The Pink City

The Congress' fortunes in 2014 will hinge on how Rahul Gandhi plots his strategy at the Chintan Shivir in Jaipur. This is an attempt to make the 'Brand Rahul' for Congress party.

Translated into English, the word ‘chintan’ means to reflect or meditate upon. Even the most ardent admirer of the Congress, India’s Grand Old Party, will have to admit that it is in dire need of some chintan. It has simply lost its way after a famous victory in the 2009 General Election. The party meets for two days in Jaipur for a Chintan Shivir it hopes will give it a strategy for rejuvenation and make it battle-ready for 2014.

This is the party’s first Chintan Shivir in almost 10 years. If the list of invitees is any indication, it will rewrite the narrative of the Congress in a manner that has not happened for some 30 years. It was in 1980 that Sanjay Gandhi’s youth brigade took charge of the Congress and a number of Sanjay’s followers became key MPs or chief ministers. In the following two or three years, Rajiv Gandhi, Sanjay’s brother, left his stamp on the party too. After that, there has been no organised generational change, not till now.

This time, of the 350 invitees for the Chintan Shivir, about 150 are from the Youth Congress and the National Students’ Union of India and are being referred to as the Rahul generation. In that sense, the party is betting on the future and on an attempt to understand and appeal to an electorate that is younger than ever before in India’s history.

However, several conundrums remain and it is not as if simply a new lot of people and new faces and names will fashion amagic wand. Officially, the issues to be discussed at the Chintan Shivir have been divided into five categories:

• Political challenges
• Socio-economic challenges
• India and the world
• Organisational strength
• Gender issues

While this is a broad spectrum, the meat of the discussion will be on winning power in the set of state elections that will culminate with the 2014 General Election. How does the party win back non-Congress-governed states? How does it defend Congress-run states? What should it do to overcome the defeatism that has gripped even senior Congress ministers in recent months as the countdown to the Lok Sabha election has begun?

For better or worse, the party believes its record in government is not as bad as is being projected. In the past nine years, the UPA government has pushed ahead with 42 flagship welfare programmes — such as the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Programme, the Mid-day Meal Scheme, the Jawaharlal Nehru Urban Renewal Mission, the National Rural Health Mission, the Rajiv Gandhi Swasthya Bima Yojana — and there is a perception that these achievements have not been correctly transmitted. A gap between the government and the party has been diagnosed as the biggest problem.

An idea that has been mooted in the run-up to the Chintan Shivir is to appoint individual secretaries of the Congress as monitoring agents for specific flagship programmes of the government. This is being planned to bridge the gap between the government and the party, and also to put a system of oversight to check on tardy implementation or leakage of funds, which has emerged as an area of worry. The idea of such close coordination is a good one in theory. Yet it also runs a risk. In the final year of the government, with too many people attempting too many things, it could equally become a recipe for confusion.

Nevertheless, the party believes this is a chance worth taking. A sneak preview of this approach was provided recently when Rahul addressed presidents of District Congress Committees on the direct cash transfer scheme. The scheme has just begun to be rolled out by the UPA government in 51 districts across India.

It may be too late to redress this, but the Congress does realise that its principal problem is that the government and party leadership are seen as out of sync with a citizenry that is getting younger and more restless by the day. Youth voters, worried at what a slowing economy is doing to their future, are taking to the streets on one pretext or the other, the immediate cause — such as the Delhi gangrape incident — being the trigger for a larger anxiety.

A government leadership that is not communicative or demonstrative and is seen as ageing is proving to be a handicap in this situation. All this has fuelled the feeling that the Congress is out of touch with contemporary India and its concerns.

This background is apparent in the design of the Shivir. The 350 invitees have been divided into 16 groups, with four groups to discuss four different issues under each of the four broad categories reserved for brainstorming. One of the groups will discuss issues related to social media. It is telling of the state of politics as well as the state of the Congress that a ruling party has to devote significant time and political capital to try and formulate a response to social media challenges.

The Congress feels its point of view is virtually absent on Twitter, Facebook and other avenues of social media. In contrast, the BJP/Hindu Right, the new Left, the Islamic groups and even free-market middle-class youth are all visible and active on these forums.

It has taken the party some time to realise that social media is not some fringe activity confined to a small elite, but is increasingly influencing traditional media and general drawing-room discourse. Since Parliament is non-functional much of the time — due to disruption — many parties and political individuals use Twitter or blogs to convey their message. The Congress has scarcely ever attempted this.

The social media issue is a sample of the larger problem of communication and unambiguous messaging. Senior Congress functionaries admit these are two issues that require immediate attention. Whether it was the Anna Hazare and Baba Ramdev protests of 2011 or the tumult following the Delhi gangrape case, what could have been defused with astuteness and deft communication was allowed to balloon into an existential crisis.

Absurd statements from the home minister and the prime minister’s week-long silence (in the case of the rape protests) and a contradictory position whereby party spokespersons on television were abusive while government negotiators were bending over backwards (in the case of Hazare and Ramdev) ended up crippling the Congress. This has severely alienated the party from the young voter and the urban voter. These were important constituencies for the Congress in 2009. Especially in a period when the party is headed for a series of state elections where it is in direct competition with the BJP — including in Delhi — this could be very damaging.

Business corporations can run clever marketing campaigns and improve their public communication, but eventually it is the substance of their product that matters. The entire debate about party-government relations, poor messaging and so on is in some senses an attempt to ignore the elephant in the room: the readiness of Rahul Gandhi for the top job. For the past two years, there has been a constant buzz in the party about Rahul becoming working president or even president and being anointed the de facto No. 2.

In the run-up to the Chintan Shivir, Information & Broadcasting Minister Manish Tewari categorically said the Congress was ready to fight the 2014 election under Rahul’s leadership. A senior minister, considered close to Rahul, was asked why the young Gandhi would risk leading the campaign in a tough election, with a perceived anti-incumbency mood. “He has no choice,” said the minister, “how long can he wait?”

Yet, despite this buzz and despite such words, there has been no initiative on the ground for Rahul’s anointment. Congress functionaries down the line are waiting for an official announcement so that they can gauge their position in the party vis-à-vis Rahul. That the organisational reshuffle, which will run parallel to Rahul’s takeover, is being delayed time and again is not helping matters. As elections draw closer, precious time is being wasted.

There are also larger questions related to Rahul. Can he galvanise the party? It is a question giving sleepless nights to Congress strategists. While his imminent elevation is being described as the event of the year, in private conversations, party members admit Rahul’s reclusive nature and his brush with politics thus far have not been anything to crow about. There are also turf battles afoot. With the takeover of the Rahul group, veteran party managers, including the closest aides of Sonia Gandhi, could be pensioned off. Undercurrents of this are already being felt in the party.

It would have been easy to dismiss all this if everybody were convinced Rahul was a sure-shot winner. The fact is his debacle in Uttar Pradesh — the nature of the defeat, the failure of his strategies and the missteps in the campaign — have all come back to haunt him. He could not escape the pulls and pressures of different power centres in the party. He even had to sacrifice his youth candidates for so-called pragmatic choices imposed upon him by Parvez Hashmi and Digvijaya Singh.

Former Bihar chief minister Lalu Prasad Yadav interceded on behalf of his relative Jitendra Yadav and ensured Rahul gave him the ticket from Bulandshahr. The Congress was unhappy about this, but Rahul persisted. Jitendra Yadav lost by 18,000 votes. All this has got people wondering as to whether Rahul is his own man or simply too impressionable. It is not a good reputation to have in a cold-blooded business such as politics.

IT IS an old aphorism that the road to Delhi goes through Uttar Pradesh. In 2009, the Congress won 21 of the 80 Lok Sabha seats in the state and expected Rahul to push it higher in the 2012 Assembly election and then in 2014. Today, retaining that 2009 tally looks tough, and since Rahul has focussed so much energies on UP, the state is emerging as the ultimate test for him. For better or worse, the Assembly election campaign is also being studied to try and understand his way of doing politics.

The stories that are emerging are not encouraging. While the 2012 UP campaign was on, Parliament was in session. One morning in Delhi, a Congress insider told HNN, Rahul summoned Congress MPs from the state to the war room on the capital’s Gurudwara Rakabganj Road. Digvijaya was also present at the meeting and Rahul was furious. “Why were the MPs not in UP?” he asked.

One MP raised his hand to make a point. Digvijaya told him to keep quiet and brusquely asked all the MPs to pay attention to their respective zones. Once again, the MP raised his hand and spoke up this time: “Who do we meet in our zones? We are not from these zones. We had no say in ticket distribution. The District Congress Committee presidents don’t engage us, the candidate is busy campaigning. The only people we meet are the ones who did not get a ticket and they gherao us and shout slogans.”

Before other MPs could start airing their grievances, Rahul was whisked away. Party insiders now say the Uttar Pradesh campaign ended up seeing number crunching, pie charts, Excel sheets and pure statistics given precedence over human instinct and gut politics. If Rahul repeats this in 2014, it will be a problem.

There is a realisation that Rahul will perennially be sequestered from blame and so others will have to play scapegoat in case of a setback. This again is something that is leaving Congress functionaries uncomfortable. The example of Mona Tiwari, daughter of senior Uttar Pradesh Congress leader Pramod Tiwari, is cited.

During the Assembly campaign, Mona was made responsible for media coverage. She was kept in the loop for all events, rallies and public meetings. In the three month- long campaign, she and her team ensured media coverage for about 200 different events. Party insiders were quite happy with the coverage. However, when the results came out, Mona and her team were the first to be blamed and given a dressing down. It was now argued that media overexposure had sunk the Congress.

Rahul's backroom acumen or the absence of it is one thing, his effectiveness as the face of the Congress is another. What is his brand identity? What does he stand for? Which is his demographic constituency? The Congress is nonplussed and will be hoping for Jaipur to provide some clarity. It is sobering that the groups Rahul wooed so assiduously in Uttar Pradesh — such as the predominantly Muslim weaver community in the eastern part of the state, whose representatives he even took with him to meet the PM — have had no followup interaction with him or his party.

Bihar is another case in point. Rahul toured the state and managed the campaign before the 2010 Assembly election. The Congress won four seats out of 243. Over two years have passed. Rahul has not been back to Bihar even once.

The Congress campaign in Bihar was a disaster. According to a senior party member from the state, “More than 60 percent of tickets were given to rank outsiders.” Several people complained to Rahul about four rooms in two Delhi five-star hotels — Shangri La and Le Meridien — which had been booked in the names of top functionaries of the Congress’ Bihar unit and where party nominations were virtually being sold, but there was no corrective measure.

“There were several representations to him (Rahul),” remembers a Bihar Congress member, “but I’m astonished no action was ever taken. This kind of blind belief doesn’t augur well for realpolitik… And why has he stopped visiting Bihar after that? You can’t be a tall leader by indulging in shoot and scoot politics.”

To top it all, Mehboob Ali Qaiser, whom Rahul promoted as state unit chief in the teeth of opposition — and who even suffered the mortification of losing in his Assembly constituency — remains at the helm of the party in Bihar.

If Bihar and UP are being singled out for special mention, it is because Rahul was more or less in charge of the election campaigns in these states. As such, these precedents are the only ones available for the average Congress member or adherent to judge him. His political interventions — such as the Lok Sabha statement calling for the Lokayukta’s office to get constitutional status — have been few and far between, and have either left people confused or had limited political impact.

His views on, for instance, Telangana, which is a big problem plaguing the party in a major state it rules (Andhra Pradesh) are not known. On economic growth and concerns of urban youth, Rahul has offered little and made no substantial public statements. These are the issues and themes that will make or break the Congress in 2014 and the party is keen Rahul expresses an opinion.

No doubt, Rahul has some pet issues and constituencies he wants to be seen as associated with — farmers, the rural poor, Panchayati Raj (major legislation for which was pioneered by his father). On their own, none of these is a negative and they are all potential vote winners. Nevertheless, they require rigorous effort on the ground, a robust organisation, and have to be measured against specific political and electoral outcomes.

When Rahul raised the issue of the killing of sarpanches by militants in the Kashmir Valley, he made all the right noises and his aide Jitendra Singh, then Minister of State for Home, travelled to Srinagar several times to talk to the state government. This was not appreciated by the National Conference — Congress’ partner in Jammu & Kashmir. The political message that went out was Rahul and Omar Abdullah were at loggerheads. The fact that a Delhi-based politician was seeking to intervene and seemingly push around a Kashmiri leader was liable to give rise to emotive interpretation in the Valley.

While Omar and Rahul went out of their way to speak of their bonhomie in later days, this rush into a local issue in Kashmir alarmed a lot of people in the Congress. The problems of the sarpanches in J&K are not conventional Panchayati Raj issues such as in, say, Kerala or Haryana. The entire episode gave the Congress no electoral leverage either in Kashmir or anywhere else. Once again, it led to puzzling questions about Rahul’s motivations and his politics.

The deliberations of the Chintan Shivir will be kept secret — to be leaked out, no doubt, as Congress members return to Delhi — but the murmurings under the surface will be related to the long-delayed organisational reshuffle. A sizeable section of young leaders in the Congress feels there is resistance from current incumbents who don’t want a new team to be empowered. What will happen to the 60-somethings who now run the party?

The idea of the young replacing the old is good in abstraction, but in reality this could be a big hindrance for the Congress, as fading away into the twilight is not something Indian politicians are ever ready for. Be that as it may, change is inevitable. Two-thirds of the All-India Congress Committee’s office-bearers are above the age of 65. They can resist the transformation, but at some point before 2014, Rahul has to assert his supremacy over them. After that, it’s over to the people.