Rajiv Gandhi did not deliver on promises, so will Rahul?

Those of us who have been around a fair bit in this world will need no reminder of this, but Rahul Gandhi, who made an emotion-laced  coming-out speech at the Congress chintan shivir retreat in Jaipur on Sunday isn’t the first person with photogenic facial dimples to charm diehard Congress supporters - and more than a few members of the media brigade. A generation ago, Rahul Gandhi’s father Rajiv Gandhi, the original Mr Dimples who had been living a charmed life,  became Prime Minister in tragic circumstances following the assassination of his mother Indira Gandhi, and attempted to channel the power of India’s youth and usher in a generational change in Indian politics.

In 1985, the year the Congress party turned 100, Rajiv Gandhi delivered one of the most searing indictments of the political and administrative “system” as it existed then. Speaking as an “outsider” to the system (which he truly was), Rajiv Gandhi was particularly harsh on the Congress party, which, he said, had “shrunk” from a party that had once fired the imagination of the masses to a party that had lost touch with people and was being controlled by “power brokers” and “self-perpetuating cliques.”  “We are a party of social transformation, but in our preoccupation with governance we are drifting away from the people. Thereby, we have weakened ourselves and fallen prey to the ills that the loss of invigorating mass contact brings.”

It was pretty strong stuff (you can read the entire speech here ), and there was an earnestness about Rajiv Gandhi as he set about trying to cleanse the corrupt and rotten system, much of which was the product of nearly four decades of (virtually uninterrupted) Congress rule at the Centre.