Kalavati, Dalit dinners, and now 'jai kisan': There's nothing new about populist Rahul 2.0

Two speeches in the Parliament, one brief intervention, a trek to Kedarnath, a visit to a Delhi hospital where Gajendra Singh died after hanging himself at an AAP rally and a trip to Punjab in the cattle class of a train. By Rahul Gandhi’s career strike rate, this much activity would have been sufficient for at least four years. But after warming the backbench for almost a decade, Rahul seems to have made up his mind: he is going to get out in the field and score quickly. Rahul’s frenzied—by his laidback standards and rare cameos—political activity since his return from the latest sabbatical is a clear indication that he has made the transition from a reluctant, part-timer to a professional politician. Rahul has sorted himself. Now that he has said ‘I do’, you can expect Sonia Gandhi to soon pass on the president’s crown to him and walk into the sunset; little sister Priyanka—like father Rajiv who made way for brother Sanjay—can wait. [caption id=“attachment_2218748” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  File image of Rahul Gandhi in Parliament. PTI image[/caption] Now that the decade-old dilemma of ‘will, he won’t he’ has ended, it is time to move to the next question: can Rahul 2.0 (or whatever version it is) make it as a politician? Can he succeed after a string of failures? Rahul may have reinvented himself, but he is not trying to reinvent the wheel of Congress politics. Like grandmother, the only Gandhi to have made a successful comeback, he has gone back to the formula of politics of farmers, garib and yatras. Left-leaning politics, championing the cause of the poor and the underprivileged is an old Congress template. It worked well for the Congress for several years, before Narendra Modi’s neo-liberalism and strategy of carrying the middle-class and urban India along trumped it in the 2014 election. There is no guarantee that Rahul will succeed just because Indira did. But you can see that he is trying to carve out a constituency for himself. His repeated references to farmers, their problems; attempts to talk about them at available forum are indications of Rahul’s desire to speak to the rural voter and those who live on the margins of urban India. In theory, this isn’t a bad strategy. As pointed out by Firstpost earlier, the Congress has realised it doesn’t stand much of a chance with the urban middle class and elite. It knows its existing culture of dynasty-based entitlements and politics of doles and freebies is largely unacceptable to this section. But the Congress believes the Narendra Modi government has given it an opening by acquiring the reputation of being pro-corporate and anti-poor. Modi’s monogrammed suit, the controversy over the land acquisition bill and his frequent foreign jaunts have convinced the Congress that it can revive itself by restarting the debate around haves and have-nots and making the PM seem like a representative of the rich and the privileged. Several ground reports, including the latest cover story in Outlook, suggest farmers are getting disenchanted with Modi. The noise around the land-acquisition bill, the agrarian crisis in the country and the inadequate government response to crop damage due to rain and hailstorms has made rural India uneasy. There is anger brewing among Jats, who play an important role in the elections in at least four north India states: Rajasthan, Haryana, Punjab and UP. In Rajasthan, the Congress is making inroads because of the failure of Vasundhara Raje’s government to live up to expectations. In Delhi, Arvind Kejriwal has become a poor caricature of himself. The iron is red hot. So, Rahul is trying to highlight this Bharat vs India divide; to position himself as a politician worried about the hinterland in comparison to the PM who cares very little for India. “Pradhan Mantri ji ka Hindustan mein tour laga hai, kuch dino ke liye woh yahan aaye hain. He should now go to Punjab to speak farmers_,”_ Rahul said in Parliament on Wednesday. Though borrowed, this is another soundbyte like the ‘suit-boot ki sarkar’ jibe that would have the desired impact. The problem with Rahul’s strategy is that he is been there, done that before. His faux anger, speeches, train yatras, aam aadmi acts all give a sense a déjà vu. Almost a decade ago, he had made Kalavati the country’s talking point, several years ago he had made night-halts at the homes of Dalits and farmers and ridden on pillion to villages to interact with people. Not even the stubble has changed. But none of this added any gravitas to Rahul’s political image or on the electoral prospects of the Congress. The rare night-outs in rural India were seen as sabbaticals and PR events because Rahul lacked consistency of approach and sincerity of purpose. After every visit to a village, he would disappear for long periods, often for a foreign holiday. And rarely did he follow an issue or put in the required political struggle to take it to a logical conclusion. Rahul is lucky that he is getting another chance. The media is giving him importance, cameras are following him and newspapers are putting him in headlines. Amongst people, there is renewed interest in him, even if just out of curiosity. Rahul’s redemption lies only in being consistent and faithful to the politics he is pursuing. If he runs away again, abandons the cause he has picked up, this could well turn out to be his last act.