[Just being a member of
the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty usually has been enough to win votes and public
confidence. Mr. Gandhi’s appearances are regularly carried on India’s news
channels, most of them photo opportunities or tightly scripted speeches.
Handsome, regarded as modest and serious-minded, he is popular and has long
been offered by party strategists as a symbol of generational change — even
though he is now almost a generation older than the young voters he is supposed
to attract.]
By Jim Yardley
 |
Mustafa Quraishi/Associated Press
Rahul Gandhi with his mother, Sonia Gandhi, president of India’s top party,
at a memorial to Indira Gandhi last week. More Photos »
|
NEW DELHI — India’s governing party
has no shortage of problems: a sinking economy, corruption scandals and a
rising anti-incumbency mood among voters. But perhaps the greatest uncertainty
facing the party, and to some degree all of India, is Rahul Gandhi, the anointed
next-generation leader.
For decades, the Indian
National Congress Party has billed itself as the party most capable of holding
the fractious country together, while the Nehru-Gandhi political dynasty has
held the Congress Party together. The family has produced three prime ministers
and one very powerful daughter-in-law, Sonia Gandhi, the party
president, who has carefully sought to advance her son, Rahul.
But if this is supposed
to be Mr. Gandhi’s moment, it is unclear that he wants to seize it or what he
will do with it — or if a chaotically changing, fitfully modernizing India is
still enthralled with the Gandhi mystique. The Gandhis remain the country’s
only national political brand, proving resilient over decades, but their appeal
now seems tarnished, just as India’s global luster has also suffered.
To understand Mr.
Gandhi’s unique position in India’s political landscape, consider the events of
just the past few days: Eager for a jolt of energy, the Congress Party-led
government announced a major cabinet reshuffle on Oct. 28. Many
analysts thought Mr. Gandhi might take a cabinet post to burnish his
credentials as a future candidate for prime minister. But he declined.
Then, Mr. Gandhi seemed
poised to assume a bigger role in the Congress Party, in a newly created job
second only to his mother’s. That still may happen, but by week’s end, even as
Indian media reported that Mr. Gandhi was quietly exerting more political
influence, it was unclear if there would be any new job at all. Party spokesmen
said Mr. Gandhi was already second in command, anyway.
Mr. Gandhi, 42, has said
nothing on the subject. On Sunday, he appeared at a big Congress Party rally,
taking a few shots at the opposition. But often he is conspicuously absent in
the noisy swirl of Indian politics, a silence that has allowed critics to
question whether there is much to him besides his name.
“We did not get the
chance to have Rahul’s analysis on any critical issue facing the nation in
Parliament,” said Mohan Singh, a leader in the regional Samajwadi Party, at a
news conference in Kolkata in September. “When one does not hear him speak, how
can one say the country will be secure in his hands?”
Just being a member of
the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty usually has been enough to win votes and public
confidence. Mr. Gandhi’s appearances are regularly carried on India’s news
channels, most of them photo opportunities or tightly scripted speeches.
Handsome, regarded as modest and serious-minded, he is popular and has long
been offered by party strategists as a symbol of generational change — even
though he is now almost a generation older than the young voters he is supposed
to attract.
Mr. Gandhi remains an
enigma. His vision for the country is unclear, his political talents are in
doubt, and his ability to win votes is no longer assured. He avoids the media
except at staged events — he did not respond to interview requests for this
article — and his extreme privacy about what he will do, and when he will do
it, creates uncertainty even in his own party.
“People are waiting for
Rahul,” said Sam Pitroda, a special adviser to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh with longstanding ties to
the Gandhi family. “Everybody is waiting for him to set the tone of the party,
to set the tone of the government.”
For the past three
months, the government has scrambled to save the sinking economy and position
itself for national elections, which are scheduled for 2014 but could come
sooner. Faced with a possible downgrade to the country’s credit rating, the
government pushed through a handful of key economic measures in September and
has sought since then to project a reformist image. The sense of crisis has
eased, but India’s global image — along with that of the Congress Party — has
been dented.
The Congress Party
spearheaded India’s freedom movement and has held power for much of the
nation’s history. Jawaharlal Nehru, Mr. Gandhi’s great-grandfather, was the
country’s first prime minister. Mr. Gandhi’s grandmother Indira Gandhi and his
father, Rajiv Gandhi, were also
prime minister, and both were assassinated — tragedies that have made the family
synonymous with national sacrifice.
Mr. Gandhi’s
inaccessibility is partly attributable to concerns about his safety. But it
also shields him from having to take stands on the tough issues of Indian
politics. Neither his mother nor the prime minister is especially comfortable
rallying public opinion behind government policies, leaving the party without a
charismatic communicator in India’s rapidly changing media culture.
“Rahul Gandhi is an
iconic leader,” Salman Khurshid said in an interview before he became the
country’s foreign minister during last month’s cabinet changes. “Mrs. Sonia
Gandhi is an iconic leader. But because the circumstances of the country have
changed so much, you don’t have a storyteller.”
Meanwhile, the Gandhi
family has found itself under attack on another front. The anticorruption
campaigner Arvind Kejriwal recently released documents claiming that Mr.
Gandhi’s brother-in-law, Robert Vadra, profited handsomely in improper real
estate deals — allegations that Mr. Vadra has denied. And on Thursday, another
activist, Subramaniam Swamy, accused Mr. Gandhi and his mother of profiting
from a different land deal. In a statement released by his office, Mr. Gandhi
called the accusation “utterly false” and threatened legal action.
Mr. Gandhi’s political
standing was highest after the 2009 national elections, when his campaigning
helped the Congress Party win a second term, as party strategists gleefully
talked about how the “Rahul brand” would attract votes across the country.
But he has struggled
since then. His most public defeat came this year in elections in Uttar
Pradesh, India’s most populous state, where voting is often conducted along
caste lines. Mr. Gandhi tried to play this game, selecting many candidates to
attract certain caste constituencies, yet many of his choices did not win.
He has also been
criticized for his relentless courtship of Muslim voters, including by the
writer Salman Rushdie, who canceled an appearance at an Indian literary
conference in January after protests against Mr. Rushdie by Muslim groups in
Uttar Pradesh.
“It didn’t even work,
Rahul,” Mr. Rushdie said during a March speech in New Delhi, according to
Indian news reports. “It didn’t even work. Years and years of kneeling down
before every mullah you could find, and it did not even work. Must feel sick.”
As a campaigner for the
Congress Party, Mr. Gandhi often pops up, sometimes unannounced, at local
disputes across the country. During such forays, he has worn the traditional
clothing of the rural common man and sported a beard or a rough three-day
stubble. In other appearances, however, Mr. Gandhi has sometimes sent another
signal by going clean-shaven and dressing in modern, stylish clothing. His
trips have received national headlines, but critics say they are little more
than stunts.
Last year, when Mrs.
Gandhi flew to New York for an undisclosed medical procedure, Mr. Gandhi was
expected to exert his leadership. But the party and the government struggled
and responded clumsily to the huge anticorruption protests led by Anna Hazare.
Mr. Gandhi’s attempt to defuse the situation with a rare speech to Parliament
fell flat.
“As far as politicians
go, he doesn’t seem to get the pulse of politics,” said Aarthi Ramachandran,
author of the book “Decoding Rahul Gandhi.”
Despite his problems,
Mr. Gandhi remains the party’s unquestioned future leader. He has won praise
for modest changes like promoting internal elections for party posts. One of
his mentors, Digvijay Singh, a party stalwart, dismissed the criticism of Mr. Gandhi’s
silence on many national issues, saying he is careful to defer to the prime
minister and other senior leaders.
“If you expect him to
react to every political situation, he’s not cut out like that,” Mr. Singh
said. “He prefers to work within a system, within a team. He reacts only to
those issues which he has been assigned.”
One powerful minister,
Vayalar Ravi, said the Indian public still deeply admired and trusted Mr.
Gandhi. “We all look at him now as a leader,” Mr. Ravi said. “He’s the hope.”
Hari Kumar contributed
to this report.
