With charges of unusually profitable and seemingly irregular land deals in Gurgaon re-surfacing against Robert Vadra, son-in-law of Congress president Sonia Gandhi, it is inevitable that direct attacks on the Gandhi family will be a feature of the coming election season. There are only about eight months to go for voting day.
This is too little time for the charges against Vadra to be proved or conclusively refuted. In any case a legal conviction may not be possible for all the wrongdoings he is accused of, presuming the charges are correct in the first place, since he is not a public servant. Nevertheless, the stench and suspicion will remain. There is no getting away from that.
While the Vadra land deals make for an alluring episode, the alleged cronyism they point to is a minor paragraph in the Congress’ narrative of problems. After nine years, the United Progressive Alliance government faces a natural anti-incumbency. However, the concern is the 2014 campaign could become not just a referendum on the UPA’s governance but also on the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty. The BJP and the Congress’ rivals are determined to do this as they expect conditions are fertile and, to a certain degree, the voter will buy into the logic that the economic slowdown, slipshod administration in New Delhi and the political and other motivations of Mrs Sonia Gandhi and Rahul Gandhi are linked.
This may or may not be entirely true, this may or may not be entirely fair — but it is a perfectly legitimate intervention in electoral politics. Given this, the family that has led the Congress for most of India’s post-Independence history faces its toughest challenge. May 27, 2014, will mark the 50th anniversary of the death of Jawaharlal Nehru, the jewel and most glittering member of the dynasty and a man whose public standing and achievements need to be distinguished from the lesser mortals who have followed him. If elections take place as per schedule, the golden jubilee of Nehru’s passing could come in the same fortnight as a defining judgment on those who now use his name.
What has gone wrong for the Congress leadership? The separation of powers between Mrs Gandhi and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh was meant to insulate her — and her family — from the ebbs and flows of governance and shield her from direct criticism. Inconvenient or unpopular policies could then be blamed on an insensitive Prime Minister, rather than the well-meaning governess-general.
Not very persuasive in the first place, this approach has fewer and fewer takers today. Indeed, on economic policy, it is Mrs Gandhi and her handpicked advisers, such as the theoreticians in the National Advisory Council, who are recognised as instrumental in creating an environment where business was mocked, reforms were blocked and the India manufacturing story, long delayed anyway, was simply killed. The idea that the dynasty and its guidance counsellors could merrily propose big spending programme after big spending programme and pretend growth was not their business was bizarre and extremely self-serving. Instinctively, it boxed India into a black-and-white categorisation of very rich urban dwellers and very poor rural folk: Jor Bagh and Jhumritalaiyya.
This bipolar view almost entirely ignored the growth of and the expectations revolution among the new middle classes. These were the millions of Indians who had benefited from the sizeable economic accretion following liberalisation. They were linked to the urban economy (60 per cent of the gross domestic product) even if they weren’t natives of urban India. They lived in the vast space between absolute poverty and obscene wealth. It was not until January 2013 and the Congress’ Jaipur conclave that Mr Gandhi even referred to “middle-class” aspirations. For nine years before that the rhetoric had been on “do tarah ke Bharat (two types of India)” and of an absolute rich-poor divide.
India’s middle classes, varied and divergent as they are socio-economically and in terms of income and education, were completely missed. This reflected an inorganic, top-down imagining of India and would not have been the experience of politicians who had actually worked their way up or merely worked in India (as even Rajiv Gandhi did). The middle classes that have benefited from economic expansion don’t represent a majority of the electorate. Even so, their vote is crucial for national parties to win enough seats to run a government in the manner they (the national parties) want. In 2009, this section voted for the Congress. The Congress spent the next four years deliberately misreading that mandate, a misreading that began with the party’s president and vice-president.
The second factor troubling the Congress leadership is that Mr Gandhi has simply failed to take off. Much as party spokespersons may ascribe meaningful philosophy to his speech at the Confederation of Indian Industry earlier this year and describe him as wildly popular among India’s youth, the fact is as a vote catcher he has proved a repeated failure since 2009, when at least part of the Congress’ success in Uttar Pradesh could have been attributed to him. Increasingly, Mr Gandhi’s folksy, inchoate interventions, peppered with pop sociology and political science of the kind found in Competition Success Review, are leaving not just ordinary folk but even his party colleagues mystified.
It is possible he has a 20-year horizon before him. Others are not so lucky. They have a little over six months to fix an election plan and win or lose a Lok Sabha seat. If much of this period is to be spent hiding the commander from Opposition fire, then the Congress campaign is going to be on the defensive from moment one. What is not helping is that the party’s chief challenger and the BJP’s electoral mascot is attempting to combine the UPA’s economic failures with its tradition of dynasty and privilege and occasional private practice in the property markets of Gurgaon. He is going to contrast this with his own underdog status and humble origins, and suggest he has a better understanding of the hopes and energies of the new India.
The Congress’ fear is not that such a strategy could make Narendra Modi Prime Minister in 2014. It is that such a strategy has the potential to shatter the Nehru-Gandhi mystique irretrievably.
