Dear Congress: Here are 5 reasons not to celebrate Rahul's birthday

The 44 MPs of the Congress party could line up as candles on Rahul Gandhi’s birthday cake. The Congress vice president is turning 44 today as well. But of course, that is not possible. One of those 44 MPs is Rahul himself and he, as per hallowed Rahul birthday tradition, is apparently abroad. But the grand old party is undaunted. There will be cakes and crackers report the media. Except the celebrations won’t happen outside Rahul’s residence but outside his mother’s 10, Janpath residence.  As Saroj Giri writes on Firstpost the old guard like M Kharge, Ghulam Nabi Azad, Amarinder Singh are back in charge and Congress leaders are complaining that their requests for meetings with Rahul have gone unanswered. The Mummy Returns is now playing at the Congress Cineplex . [caption id=“attachment_1578751” align=“alignleft” width=“300”]  Rahul Gandhi. PTI[/caption] But the birthday hoopla points to the party’s existential dilemma and the enduring sycophancy that accelerated its downfall. Narendra Modi might have used 3D holograms to project a larger than life image of himself during the election, but the Congress is celebrating an empty space with cakes and crackers. The irony is just too rich but one the Congress seems blissfully unaware of. Whatever “introspection” happened post the elections does not seem to have yielded much. So before Rahul’s absence makes the Congressman’s heart grow fonder here are five reminders why his birthday is no cause for celebration for the Congress. Party (dis)loyalist Rahul clearly has very open disdain for the very party he is supposed to be saving. It was not just the tearing up the ordnance drama at the Press Club that left Manmohan Singh red-faced. While his talk about “democratizing” the party and making it more meritocratic sounded good in theory, in practice he spent more time snubbing the party than rebuilding it. Harish Khare writes in Open Magazine that he would make visits to state capitals and the local Pradesh Congress committees would find out about it from media reports. Once he arrived at the capital, he would seek out the NGOs not the party workers and local leaders. “Implicit in this approach was a rejection of the traditional Congressman, who was viewed as somewhat compromised and corrupt, out to slow down a young leader on the march,” writes Khare. It’s Rahul party and he’ll snub it if he wants to. Dynasty diarrhea Rahul’s greatest asset remains his biggest liability. The family heritage is what makes the Congress unable to dump him even after he has led them from mishap to debacle to rout. He is their precious. But that family heritage is becoming the albatross around his neck. When his back is to the wall, Rahul brings up the blood sacrifice of the Gandhis but he does not realize that in 2014 India that sacrifice is ancient history. The bank of voters who will vote for the Congress out of gratitude for Gandhi/Nehrus past is a fast-drying pool. The more he harps on that story, the more desperate and out of touch he sounds. In fact, the family history boomerangs on him in unexpected ways when he goes on a show like Arnab Goswami’s and gets quizzed about the 1984 anti-Sikh riots. Rahul cannot be blamed or implicated in that bloodbath, but then again he cannot escape it because it’s all in the family. Boy in a bubble The 2014 election campaign showed how out-of-touch Rahul and his party had become. His speeches on the stumped were basically regurgitations on MNREGA 2.0. If MNREGA promised employment, UPA3 would deliver housing for all. Now Modi has shown no haste to dismantle MNREGA even if he dislikes it because it could prove a political nightmare. And a country as poor as India needs its social security nets but the point is whether something like MNREGA was benefiting the people it was supposed to reach. Or had it become a poverty sustainment program – enough to survive, too little to thrive? As Firstpost reported from Amethi, young people in Rahul’s own constituency didn’t want handouts, they wanted opportunity. “This is shikshi berozgaari (educated unemployment),” said one young man in Amethi. “That really hurts.” But Rahul just wants to promise more programs that would rain down like manna from heaven. This election he promised healthcare for all while in Amethi residents complained that if they needed a trauma centre they had to go two hours to Lucknow. The existing hospitals, named after various Gandhis, were not equipped to deal with such exigencies. A tin ear Rahul has been pilloried for his awkward figures of speech that seem to come out of nowhere and are spectacularly mismatched to the audience he is addressing. But Rahul’s real problem seems to be one of listening rather than speaking. He always claims to be listening – to street vendors, farmers, fishermen, railway porters. But it’s not clear that he pays attention. As a man who made a big deal about wanting to learn, he has shown remarkable lack of interest in doing that. His parliamentary attendance record is poor. He does whatever he wants to when he wants to, proprieties be damned. If that means leaving Mummy to hold the fort at his own Prime Minister’s goodbye dinner so be it. Even the dreaded Indian “log kya kahenge” seems to leave Rahul unfazed. Khare writes that while Rahul “listened” to the NGOs sidelining his own party, when push came to shove on election day “the NGOs had vanished into thin air; these self-serving ‘civil society leaders’ were unwilling to stand up and be counted in the Rahul or Congress column.” The hobby-ist Rahul’s biggest problem remains his wishy-washyness. He come across as an incorrigible commitment phobe even if he is well-intentioned. Sometimes like a repentant offender, he rolls up his sleeves and shows up for work, pays attention in Parliament but soon that enthusiasm dissipates. The problem for his party is that they never know whether Rahul will stick around for the long haul. When he snuck into violence-hit Bhatta-Parsaul on the back of a motorcycle he had the opportunity to create an image for himself as a dynamic rule-breaking go-getting leader of an old staid party. But he frittered the opportunity as he flitted from issue to issue. Ultimately his youth became his liability – giving him the reputation of an immature political dilettante. His party yearns for a leader but Rahul lacks the one necessary quality of a leader – follow-through. If had followed through with his promises to even the one Dalit family with whom he shared a meal, he would not the butt of as many jokes. Instead a woman who had shared a meal with him, complained that the Congress ignored her pleas for help when Samajwadi Party goons set her home on fire. At his birthday bash the Congress would do well to think about its MIA birthday boy because he is just missing a party. But his party is missing a real leader. And in Rahul’s case, they’re not missing very much.