Politician as parachute artist: Congress gambles on Rahul

It’s difficult to slip away from the bonds of the “family business”.  Just ask Ratan Tata - or Rahul Gandhi.

The Tata scion was, by his own admission, not at all keen to take to business. He graduated in architecture from Cornell University, and after a management program from Harvard, landed a job at IBM, very sure that he never wanted to return to India - or to the illustrious empire that his extended family had built over generations.

But the ties that bind pulled him back into the fold: JRD Tata advised young Ratan to turn down his IBM job offer, and packed him off to Jamshedpur, where he did the rigorous hard grind on the factory shop-floor along with blue-collar employees. Over time, he was given management charge of companies within the Tata fold, but made a hash of it: the verdict within the family was that the young Ratan just didn’t exactly have it.

History would, of course, prove them wrong. As group chairman, Ratan Tata brought a cohesive corporate unity to the Tata empire, and with a string of high-profile acquisitions turned it into a global multinational. Now on the threshold of retirement, he can claim that he has proved his early critics wrong.

Rahul Gandhi, who is today on the threshold of taking on a “greater role” for himself in the Congress party and the government, too has shown himself up to be a reluctant politician, one whose many faults have been subjected to savage criticism in the media, and within the political establishment.

As a teenager, Rahul Gandhi told his father Rajiv Gandhi, who had given up a career in flying commercial airplanes to take to the family business of politics following his brother Sanay Gandhi’s death, that he wished they could all go back to the happier, pre-political days.

But Rajiv Gandhi told his son firmly that “there is no going back.”

“I can’t (go back), because now I have a belief in my people,” Rajiv told Rahul .

Over time, of course, Rahul Gandhi too has more readily embraced the rigorous of his family business, although there is much about his “cameo roles” and his frequent disappearing acts from the political arena that convey a lack of earnestness and a commitment to the job.

In Parliament, for instance, his record reflects delinquency of a high order . Right from attendance to participation in debates, Rahul Gandhi’s record is spectacularly sub-par, well below the average across MPs from his home-state of Uttar Pradesh, and across India. The number of questions he has asked in Parliament since 2009: zero.

Perhaps he doesn’t need to ask any questions. Perhaps, as his party suggests, Rahul Gandhi has all the answers.

Which is why Rahul Gandhi hasn’t had to work his way up gradually within the party or the government. He is the ‘parachute artist’ politician.

It’s worth bearing in mind that this is the self-same party whose leaders  had in 2007, written Rahul Gandhi off as a loser. Gandhi family insider Nachiketa Kapur had then said of Rahul Gandhi that he was “out of touch”, had “no close friends or advisers”, someone who was “arrogant and rude and doesn’t accept guidance from anyone.” In Kapur’s estimation, Rahul Gandhi “has no future, no talent for politics and will never be Prime Minister.’

(Kapur is the political aide of Satish Sharma, one of the Gandhi family’s fierce loyalists and political fixers; it was Kapur who, according to a leaked WikiLeaks cable , had shown a US consul in New Delhi a cash hoard of Rs 50-60 crore lying around the house - to buy MPs’ votes for the Manmohan Singh government to survive the vote of confidence in July 2008, after the Left parties withdrew their support.)

Even today, and even for faithful party followers, Rahul Gandhi’s fast-track rise to the top, in whatever capacity he decides, represents the triumph of feeble hope over bitter experience.  There is nothing in Rahul Gandhi’s recent record as an MP and as the Congress’ chief campaigner in State Assembly elections to suggest  that he will be a political game-changer for the Congress. On the other hand, all his recent interventions in the political arena since the 2009 elections have only resulted in resounding losses.

So, what does the party hope to achieve from its ‘parachute politician’? The manifest effort is to change the political narrative in the Congress, which has been bogged down in the past three years over the coalition government’s indefensible record of corruption, mismanagement of the economy, lack of governance, and a sense of policy paralysis. That effort hinges on dissociating Rahul Gandhi from the UPA 2 government’s abysmal record in office - and turn the page on it.

That enterprise is unlikely to succeed. But it is a measure of the Congress’ immense desperation that it sees the ascendance of Rahul Gandhi, whom its own functionaries saw not long ago as a loser, as the only way to “save” the party from electoral ignominy.