Rahul Gandhi, the Congress leader who wanted the throne of the second-most populous country in the world, could not prove himself worthy of it despite a two-decade-long career in politics. He got multiple opportunities to prove himself, but he failed every time. Instead of going among the people, staging dharnas, rallies, and roadshows, Rahul Gandhi has mostly kept himself busy among ‘intellectuals’ of foreign countries and of India.
The Congress scion constantly seeks the approval of elites instead of focusing on his acceptability among the masses of India. Recently, in a virtual interaction with Harvard University professor, Nicholas Burns, he criticised the policies of the Modi government.
However, this is not the first time when Rahul Gandhi has shown his ignorance about ‘mass politics’ by seeking the opinion/approval of the foreign dignitaries. In 2009, Rahul Gandhi took the then British Foreign Secretary David Miliband to Amethi to show him the poverty and misery of the country and told him that “This is the real India.”
Today Labour Party, to which David Miliband belongs, is obliterated in the United Kingdom and so is the Congress party in India.
Amid the ongoing state assembly elections, Rahul Gandhi has probably done fewer rallies in West Bengal and Assam than Amit Shah, who, despite having the responsibility of the Home Ministry in such testing times gets the time to campaign in the states. At a time when the election campaign is at its peak, Rahul Gandhi is busy seeking the approval of American intellectuals as if that would win votes for the Congress party in Kerala, Tamil Nadu, West Bengal, or Assam.
Similarly, before the 2019 general election, Rahul Gandhi interacted with the students of Delhi University (typical ideology and idealism-driven students with little grasp of the ground situation of the country) more than the voters of his constituency.
During the Coronavirus-induced lockdown when the migrant labourers were suffering (this was a golden opportunity for any opposition leader to put the Modi government on backfoot), Rahul Gandhi was busy interacting with America based intellectuals like Raghuram Rajan, Abhijit Banerjee, and Kaushik Basu instead of getting on the ground and fighting for his ideas and ideology.
During the interaction with Kaushik Basu, he scored many self-goals including accepting that Emergency was a mistake of Indira Gandhi. Now keep the political ideology and idealism aside and think purely from the angle of realpolitik – despite the socialist policies which destroyed the economy of the country, the citizens, especially the traditional Congress voters still respect Indira Gandhi for breaking Pakistan into two.
As a Congress leader, Rahul might have said that given the situation at that time, Indira Gandhi was forced to impose an emergency but in the present context, it might look bad. This way he could have saved his ideological position as well as traditional Congress voters, but instead, he went for something that gave him approval in liberal intelligentsia (whose total population in the country is less than that of Amethi where he lost in the 2019 general election) but cost traditional Congress voters.
The Congress party failed to win the 2019 general elections despite the endorsements from these so-called ‘intellectuals’ and posted one of the worst tallies. However, the US-based trio of Raghuram Rajan, Abhijeet Banerjee, and Kaushik Basu has not yet given up on Rahul Gandhi because he is the only person who entertains them.
The endorsement by these so-called intellectuals means nothing to the common people of the country (a majority of them do not even know their names) and their approval would not fetch Rahul Gandhi even 100 votes, and he fails to understand this despite his two-decade-long career in Indian politics.
