Rahul Gandhi in Gujarat: BJP's strategic confusion suggests Congress VP gradually gaining traction

There is something curious about BJP’s Rahul Gandhi strategy. Its senior leaders go out of their way to portray the Congress president-in-waiting as a bit of a dilettante and use derision and ridicule as a political strategy. For instance, Union I&B minister Smriti Irani recently told a TV channel that BJP will distribute laddoos the day Gandhi formally takes over as Congress chief – implying that his ascension will benefit BJP. These are not off-the-cuff mockeries. These are deliberate statements, aimed at serving an important purpose.

BJP’s aim, it would seem, is to make Gandhi the butt of public ridicule. For that reason, the party goes out of its way to highlight the Gandhi scion’s gaffes, inconsistencies and goof-ups in public speeches whenever it can, helped no doubt by the fact that the Congress vice-president gives ample opportunities.

For all practical purposes, and despite its dwindling political fortune, the Congress still remains the only national alternative to BJP. Therefore, if the prime ministerial aspirant of the chief Opposition party can be turned into a laughing stock, he becomes a non-serious candidate in public perception. The idea is to diminish Gandhi’s stature through humiliation and ridicule and deny Congress vice-president the equivalence that he demands with Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

The use of humiliation as a political strategy goes back a long way. In her essay Ridicule as Strategic Communication, Kristin Fleischer writes : “Ridicule and satire have a long history in warfare, and they have been deployed both offensively and defensively. In the US, ridicule was used in the Revolutionary War, both to mock the British troops and to raise the morale of the American fighters. In World War 2, domestic use of ridicule targeted Hitler, Mussolini and Hirohito.”

A more recent example of this strategy was Donald Trump’s description of North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un as ‘rocket man’, where the US president sought to make fun of the tinpot and take the sting out of Kim’s threats of nuclear warfare by referring to an Elton John number. Humour is the best antidote to fear.

As Jake Novak explained in CNBC , “Kim Jong Un’s most important commodity at his disposal is fear. That nuclear and missile program-created fear makes him a factor in a world that would otherwise not even care if he existed.” By using ridicule as a weapon, Trump was trying to rob him of that gravitas and simultaneously generate justification for his future actions among the populace.

That’s why we find minister Irani refer to Gandhi as a “non-serious leader swinging from Berkeley to Amethi.” As a political ploy, BJP’s strategy is sound.

And this is where it becomes mystifying. If the BJP’s primary aim is to hammer the notion that the Congress vice-president is a non-serious dynastic dilettante, then holding a massive public rally in Amethi to coincide with Gandhi’s campaign in Gujarat for the upcoming Assembly polls is a strange way to go about it. It may seem that BJP was trying desperately to deflect media attention from Gandhi’s Gujarat forays by unleashing fearsome firepower in Amethi where no election is scheduled before 2019.

To be clear, the BJP (as any other political party in India) has every right to hold a public rally whenever and wherever it chooses. That right is guaranteed by the Constitution. What is to be noted here is the strategic confusion. The twin ploys might be great as standalone strategies but are mutually incompatible. You cannot pretend that someone is a political lightweight and then press heavyweight leaders into service to take on his Gujarat programme. One cancels the other.

If the BJP had been convinced that the Congress vice-president is destined to remain a footnote in India’s political history, then what was the need for the party to field its president Amit Shah, Irani and Uttar Pradesh chief minister Yogi Adityanath in Gandhi’s Lok Sabha constituency? What was the need for Adityanath to call for a Rs 100 crore statue of Lord Ram in Ayodhya, when all eyes are in Gujarat for upcoming polls? Why did Shah feel the need to level charges of ’neglecting Amethi’ against Gandhi and contrast it with ‘vikas in Gujarat’?

This indicates that the BJP, though it may not admit so in public, has taken note of the fact that the Congress vice-president is slowly gaining traction among the electorate.

Darshan Desai of Firstpost , who is tracking Gandhi’s rallies in Gujarat, reports from Chhota Udaipur that the Congress leader is getting “rousing reception” from the crowd almost everywhere that he visited during the last two days — Kheda, Anand, Vadodara and Chhota Udaipur — districts in central Gujarat.

His public speeches too have become sharper, interspersed as these are with one-liners like ‘Amit Shah ka beta bachao’, which reportedly got a good response. Controversies haven’t left him though, as his comment “RSS shakha mein aapne kabhi mahilaon ko Delhi hain? Mainey tou nahi dekha, kya aapne shorts mein mahilaon ko shakha mein dekha hain? Mainey nahi dekha” (How many women have you seen in RSS shakhas? Have you ever seen women in shorts at RSS shakhas? I have not) gave space for BJP to level charges of “debauchery” against him.

Speaking to Times Now , minister Irani said Gandhi’s remarks were “debauched” and stemmed from a “lack of understanding of Indian culture”. She added that the Congress president-to-be was nearly 50 and should be responsible for what he says. “Women empowerment doesn’t come from the clothes we wear but it is the mindset that we leverage”.

Gandhi’s remarks were certainly in poor taste, if not debauched, and created an impression that he is unaware of RSS’ women wing, but still the Congress leader seemed to be tapping into the winter of discontent against BJP. He might be hoping to benefit from a combination of anti-incumbency in Gujarat and Modi government’s recent steps to formalise the economy and push in structural reforms that have introduced large-scale disruption.

It might be premature at this stage to suggest that Congress would be able to turn this crowd response into votes but the ferocity of BJP’s response to Gandhi leaves little space for doubt that the party is feeling uneasy. If the Congress manages to wrest Gujarat away from BJP, or even turn in a significantly better performance, the road ahead to 2019 could be interesting.