And Now, 'Rahul' The 'Prince of Hearts' Uses Emotions, Joy

By Kaveri Bazmee (Guest Writer)

We've seen Rahul Gandhi as the sipahi of the underprivileged in Niyamgiri. We've seen him as the angry young man tearing the Samajwadi Party manifesto in Uttar Pradesh. Now we see him as the potential martyr. "They killed my grandmother. They killed my father," he said at Churu on October 23, without specifying who the nameless they were. "Now they will probably kill me too."
As a campaign strategy, it cannot be smarter. Rahul may like to play the anti-establishment card, but he knows, as well as us, that he is the Establishment with a capital E. Which is why he plays the family card at every rally now. Whether it is mother worrying about the weather when his father used to fly, or whether it is his grandmother protecting him from his "papa's kadaa kanoon", he doesn't let anyone forget his  famous last name.

For Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi who refers to him repeatedly and sneeringly as shahzada, this is the ultimate retort. Yes, he is the shahzada, he seems to say, but he feels pain just like the rest of us. He carried the anger at his grandmother's assassination with him for 10-15 years, he said. For the first time, he gave voters a glimpse of what it must have been like to live in the strange world of privilege and protection. 

He recalled how he first heard of his grandmother's assassination, 'It was like my heart had been torn apart." He went to pick up Priyanka, his sister. When they went home, to his grandmother's house, they saw the blood of Indira Gandhi and her killers Beant Singh and Satwant Singh. "I used to play with those who killed dadi. I was angry with them for a long time after they killed my grandmother," he said.

Modi will find it hard to beat that sort of emotion. He can only do it with reason and logic, not with the kind of grandstanding that he has done occasionally, harping on the Prime Minister's weakness or on Rahul Gandhi's tearing of the ordinance. Rahul will repeatedly refer to his family's way of doing politics, the relationship with the nation being of "pyaar" and izzat." He will again say what he did at Churu, that BJP practices the politics of hatred. "They stoke fires - in Muzaffarnagar, Gujarat, Kashmir. We have to do the firefighting."

It's the BJP's worst nightmare and the Congress' Great White Hope. It's Modi as the Dark Lord of Hatred. And Rahul as the Prince of Hearts.