[Mr. Gandhi appears poised to
preside over the most devastating defeat in the history of the Congress party,
which has governed India
for much of the past six decades. Analysts who have watched Mr. Gandhi struggle
against a vast political tide as well as his own seeming ambivalence find
themselves comparing him to characters in works by Shakespeare and Vyasa, the
great Hindu sage.]
By Gardiner Harris
 |
|
Times correspondents report on
the incumbent Congress party and the key
players in the fight to lead the
world’s largest democracy.
CreditDaniel Berehulak for The
New York Times
|
The question, asked in a
pre-election review meeting two years ago by a party worker unhappy with Mr.
Gandhi’s attitude toward politics, led Mr. Gandhi to shrug and admit that he
could not name anyone, said a flabbergasted Shakeel Ahmad, 60, a
second-generation Indian National Congress party leader in the politically
vital state of Uttar Pradesh who was at the meeting.
Mr. Gandhi has represented the
area since 2004, “and he does not know a single name?” Mr. Ahmad asked.
Politics is the Gandhi family’s business. The clan has produced three prime
ministers, including India ’s
first, Jawaharlal Nehru. Mr. Gandhi, long groomed for high office, seems to
have inherited few of the political skills for which his forebears were
renowned, Mr. Ahmad said.
The Nehru-Gandhi Dynasty
“Can you teach a fish to swim?”
he asked.
The question is being asked with
increasing urgency among members of the Indian National Congress, the political
party that Mr. Gandhi’s family has led since India ’s
independence in 1947. The party is staring down what recentpolls have predicted
will be a landslide for the opposition Bharatiya Janata Party, a Hindu
nationalist organization led by Narendra Modi, one of the most controversial
political figures in Indian history.
The results of the six-week
election process are scheduled to be announced on May 16. The odds of Mr.
Gandhi’s becoming the next prime minister have dropped so low that Mumbai
bookies have stopped taking bets on him.
Mr. Gandhi appears poised to
preside over the most devastating defeat in the history of the Congress party,
which has governed India
for much of the past six decades. Analysts who have watched Mr. Gandhi struggle
against a vast political tide as well as his own seeming ambivalence find
themselves comparing him to characters in works by Shakespeare and Vyasa, the
great Hindu sage.
“It is a tragic drama just like
‘Hamlet,’” said Inder Malhotra, a political columnist. “It is the end of a
dynasty because this fellow cannot make up his mind. He can’t even decide
whether to be clean-shaven or have a beard.”
Mr. Gandhi, 43, was for years India ’s
absentee crown prince, a member of Parliament who rarely spoke in public,
disappeared from public view for long stretches and had a reputation for
partying. He was expected to replace Manmohan Singh as prime minister, but his
own ennui and poor political skills led to repeated delays in his elevation,
said Sanjaya Baru, a former media adviser to Mr. Singh, echoing the comments of
many others.
In a recent memoir, Mr. Baru said
that Mr. Singh ultimately failed as a prime minister because he allowed himself
to be viewed as a seat warmer for Mr. Gandhi, even though Mr. Gandhi played
almost no role in the government.
“I was at the center of power for
four and a half years, and Rahul was a no-show,” Mr. Baru said in an interview.
“He was not a presence.”
Then last year, Mr. Gandhi became
the vice president and official prime ministerial candidate of the Congress
party. His mother, Sonia Gandhi, has said at rallies that she offered up her
son to the nation’s service.
But Mr. Gandhi has appeared
reluctant to embrace political life. He refused to call himself a candidate for
prime minister, and when pressed he suggested that the reason was the
assassinations of his father and grandmother.
“In my life I have seen my grandmother die, I
have seen my father die, I have seen my grandmother go to jail, and I have
actually been through a tremendous amount of pain as a child,” he said in a
televised interview.
Those sympathetic to Mr. Gandhi
say that he will not be unhappy if his party loses the election. Rasheed
Kidwai, who wrote a biography of Sonia Gandhi, said that Mr. Gandhi believed
that his own father, Rajiv, became prime minister too early in life and made
terrible mistakes as a result.
“From Rahul’s point of view, he
is not in a great deal of hurry to become prime minister,” Mr. Kidwai said. “I
think in the back of his mind, the example of his father is always there.”
The Gandhi family’s latest
decade-long reign atop India ’s
government was bound to create some anti-incumbency feelings, Mr. Gandhi said
in another television interview. But the governing coalition also gave voters
plenty of other reasons to want change, including a sputtering economy, a host
of corruption scandals, and a weak prime minister.
Congress party insiders said in
interviews that to win, the party needed to tar the opposition as an
unacceptable and even dangerous alternative.
With Mr. Modi as the principal
opponent, this strategy should have been fairly easy to execute, they said. Mr.
Modi was the chief minister of Gujarat , a state in
western India ,
when more than 1,000 people died in riots in 2002, and he has been linked
through a top aide to murders of Muslims by a police assassination squad.
But Mr. Gandhi has until recently
shied away from mounting a frontal attack on Mr. Modi’s record. He scolded
Congress party leaders when they criticized Mr. Modi too sharply, and in an
interview he avoided discussing the 2002 riots despite being prompted several
times.
Leaders of the Bharatiya Janata
Party can scarcely believe their good fortune.
“We thought he was the natural
inheritor,” Arun Jaitley, the leader of the opposition in Parliament’s upper
house, said laughingly of Mr. Gandhi in atelevised interview. “But I don’t
think that’s how things are working out to be.”
In recent days, with most of the
nation’s voting already completed, Mr. Gandhi and his mother changed tack and
finally started attacking Mr. Modi directly. But many analysts say the change
has come far too late.
Despite the disorder in the
Congress party, few are ready to write the Gandhi family’s political obituary.
Indian politics is difficult to predict, and polls are often wrong. The Gandhis
have long relied on votes from India ’s
vast numbers of rural poor, and some believe that those voters — especially the
women — will still turn out in force for them. At a recent rally in Mr.
Gandhi’s constituency, Amethi, a huge share of those gathered to shower him and
his sister, Priyanka Vadra, with rose petals were women, which is unusual in
northern Indian political gatherings.
And in a culture in which many
politicians serve into their 80s, Mr. Gandhi has decades to reinvent himself.
“Indian politics is like an unending
cricket match,” said Shekhar Gupta, the editor in chief of The Indian Express.
“There are always new innings.”
Suhasini Raj contributed
reporting from Amethi , India