A lonely prince: Rahul Gandhi’s crusade against Modi’s BJP

A viral video clip featuring Indian opposition leader Rahul Gandhi getting a haircut in a rundown barbershop in Uttar Pradesh’s Rae Bareli constituency shows the two opposite sides of the 53-year-old scion of the Nehru-Gandhi family, which has ruled the country for a significant part of its post-independence years starting from 1947.

On the one hand, some Indians are swooning over the Cambridge-educated politician—who’s leading the charge against the right-wing coalition headed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi in the ongoing general election—for his affability and next-door-neighbour mannerisms.

Gandhi comes across as a friendly person showing genuine-sounding interest in the barber’s life (“who cuts your hair?”). He sticks to asking questions and lets the barber do all the talking. He laughs at his jokes, and seeks his input on what his community needs the most (“work opportunities”).

The clip ends with the barber applying cream on Gandhi’s face. A member of the great unwashed touching and rubbing the face of India’s political royalty that has “no peer in the world” makes for a strong visual in a country beset with casteism.

But on the other hand, the clip has given Gandhi’s detractors fresh fodder to mock the “spoiled prince” of the world’s biggest democracy for his desperate attempt to regain political capital that his 138-year-old Indian National Congress party has lost rather rapidly over the 10 years of Modi’s premiership.

That Gandhi dusts off his shirt after the haircut and walks away without even offering to pay in a presumably staged photo-op is taken as a sign of arrogant entitlement harboured by the fifth-generation political dynast with a storied family legacy.

A follow-up interview by one YouTuber shows the same barber praising Gandhi and his party profusely but refusing outright to vote for them in the history’s largest electoral exercise currently taking place in the fifth biggest economy of the world.

Who’s Rahul Gandhi?

In terms of political clout, the Nehru-Gandhi family is India’s equivalent of America’s Kennedys, Clintons and Bushes, all rolled into one.

Gandhi’s great-great-grandfather, Motilal Nehru, played a prominent role in the independence movement as Congress party president in undivided India under British rule.

His great-grandfather, Jawaharlal Nehru, was one of India’s founding fathers who also served as its first prime minister from 1947 to 1964. A statesman of global stature, Nehru is credited with making India a secular republic, thus ensuring equal constitutional rights to myriad religious, ethnic and racial minorities in one of the world’s most diverse countries.

Nehru’s daughter, Indira, married a Gujarati politician of Parsi origin named Feroze Gandhi and took her husband’s surname. She went on to serve as prime minister for a total of 15 years. In 1984, she was killed by her Sikh bodyguards, who were seething with anger over the military storming into the Golden Temple – a spiritual centre for Sikhism – to kill Sikh insurgents in Punjab.

Gandhi’s father, Rajiv, became prime minister—third from the Nehru-Gandhi family—after Indira’s assassination. He served in office for five years and was killed in a suicide attack at age 47 in 1991.

Even though Gandhi’s Italian-born mother, Sonia, never served as premier of the world’s most populous country, she nonetheless holds the record of being the longest-serving president of Congress, the big-tent party that has ruled India for five of its nearly eight decades of existence.

Despite dwindling electoral popularity, an ostensibly secular Congress remains one of the few bulwarks against the Hindutva ideology preached and practised by Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which is expected to win a majority of parliamentary seats in the ongoing general election.

Gandhi is often called a reluctant politician for entering electoral politics in his mid-30s. Having studied at some of the best educational institutions in India, US and UK, Gandhi did consultancy work in London before returning to India after 15 years in the early 2000s.

He won a seat in Lok Sabha, lower house of parliament, by a wide margin in the 2004 election. His mother led Congress to victory in the same election, but chose not to become premier herself. She nominated Manmohan Singh, an experienced technocrat with a proven track record in finance, to lead the coalition government consisting of centre-left political parties.

Heir we go again

The Nehru-Gandhi family has long been accused of nepotism and promoting hereditary politics. Supporters, however, argue that their leadership has been a unifying force within the Congress party as they’ve been democratically elected by party members and the public.

Congress is currently leading the INDIA electoral alliance in the 2024 polls against the ruling coalition led by Modi’s BJP.

“The Gandhis are the glue that holds the Congress party together,” says Smita Gupta, a New Delhi-based journalist who’s covered Gandhi since his formal entry into politics 20 years ago.

“In the 2004 election, Gandhi came as a ray of hope for a lot of people who believed in the Congress party but had grown disillusioned with it. After the death of Rajiv Gandhi (in 1991), the party had begun to shrink in the 1990s,” she tells TRT World.

“His was a fresh face. He was young, he was handsome, he was dimpled, and he reminded them of a happier past. And all he did was stand up on this Jeep, smiling and waving to people and acknowledging their greetings. What he said on the stage was not that important really; what was important was that here was a young man from a family that people had tried and tested,” she says.

On his part, Gandhi has made a real effort in the last two decades to wash away the charge of hereditary politics.

His bio on social media platform X introduces him as merely a member of Congress and parliamentarian. The description is technically correct since he doesn’t hold any leadership role in the party. His party won two elections (2004 and 2009) and formed governments in the centre after he formally joined politics. But he never held any cabinet position in those 10 years of power.

“I am the symptom of this problem (of dynastic politics),” he said as he set about reorganising the party at the grassroots level by introducing elections for positions in its youth wing.

Even his mother has stepped down as president of Congress, which is now led by Mallikarjun Kharge, a seasoned politician belonging to the Dalit community, which is at the lowest rung in the Hindu caste system.

Yet Gandhi is Congress and Congress is Gandhi. In a diverse country of 1.4 billion people, he’s the only politician in the 2024 election to contest on more than one seat in two different parts of the republic. In that way, Gandhi is the only pan-India politician with a following across the length and breadth of the world’s largest democracy.

That Gandhi is an important figure in Congress by dint of his inheritance is a no-brainer. But to what extent his politics determines the politics of today’s Congress is a different question altogether.

According to Swapan Dasgupta, former member of Rajya Sabha or the upper house of parliament, Congress is an “old, entrenched organisation” that has traditionally had a multiple number of inputs into its formation. “It's never been a strictly ideological formation, but an umbrella body,” he tells TRT World.

Referring to Gandhi’s repeated references to social equity and redistribution of wealth in public rallies, he claims that the Congress leader seems influenced by the “radical trends” that exist mainly in the United States.

“His approach to these questions suggests that these are individual issues rather than the issues that’ve been thoroughly thought out and dissected within Congress,” he says.

Dasgupta says Gandhi is trying to resuscitate Congress by promising income sustenance as welfare as opposed to the ruling BJP, which aims to create the welfare architecture in India as a form of empowerment.

Gandhi rarely gets himself involved in the nitty-gritty of administration in the states where Congress is in power, nor does he seem interested in how Congress deals with national issues in parliament, he says.

“There are times when Gandhi retreats almost totally from involvement and then there are times when he gets fully into it… there’s a degree of erratic behaviour, which accompanies his interventions,” Dasgupta says.

Failed politician?

Congress took a rough beating in the last two elections (2014 and 2019) at the hands of Modi’s BJP, which is hoping to win more than 400 of 543 seats that are up for grabs in the ongoing polls.

Gandhi’s party still retains its secular outlook even as Hindu nationalism has taken deeper root in India, with Modi-led BJP coming to power 10 years ago and expanding its parliamentary majority in 2019.

Members of BJP have said the party would change the country’s secular constitution to reflect the extremist Hindutva ideology if it receives a two-thirds majority in parliament.

Dasgupta says Gandhi hasn't been able to make much out of the “most famous brand name in Indian politics” in the last two decades.

“He hasn't been able to link with an aspirational India. India that his grandmother built, his great-grandfather built, that India is fast eroding. India that was defined by poverty and backwardness, where you had to be kind or have a certain sense of noblesse oblige, that India is fast fading. It's being replaced by an India with a tremendous desire to get on with the world. Gandhi hasn't been able to find that pulse,” he says.

India remains a lower-middle income country by the yardstick of per capita income, even though its economy, estimated at $3.7 trillion, has grown at roughly seven percent a year in the last decade to become the fifth largest in the world.

According to Rasheed Kidwai, an author who’s written books on the evolution of Congress and its leadership, Gandhi hasn’t been able to develop a “vested interest” within Congress, which is causing him problems at the organisational level.

“He isn’t like his mother, grandmother, father and great-grandfather. They were all very good at extracting loyalty. Gandhi is a very lonely person in the Congress organisation,” he tells TRT World.

His party hasn’t done well electorally since Gandhi became its public face. But Kidwai says Congress is failing Gandhi, not the other way around.

“Congress members have been too dependent over the years on the Nehru-Gandhi family. They thought that they’d make them win seats. And in the process, the Congress organisation became very weak,” he says, pointing out the pan-India popularity of Gandhi, a rarity in India where politics usually revolves around local leadership.

But consistent failures on the electoral front haven’t deterred Gandhi from throwing himself at mass mobilisation campaigns reminiscent of pre-independence India.

As part of his 2022 Bharat Jodo Yatra, which translates to Unite India March, Gandhi walked from southern to northern tips of India—a journey of over 4,000 kilometres in almost 150 days—to mobilise his supporters against communalism and divisive politics of the ruling BJP.

Early this year, Gandhi led another march, this time from eastern to western parts of India, to highlight issues like rising unemployment and the cost-of-living crisis.

Gupta, who’s covered Congress for decades as a political reporter, says the two cross-country marches have been a huge learning experience for Gandhi as he was able to make a personal connection with thousands of people across the country’s length and breadth.

“As for public speaking, he may not be riveting. He may not be an Atal Bihari Vajpayee or a Jawaharlal Nehru. But he's certainly a very good speaker today. He can hold his audience. His speeches over the last few weeks have been extremely cogent,” she says.

So what does the future hold for Gandhi?

Kidwai says Gandhi will live to fight another day if Congress wins 100 seats, from the present tally of 52, and becomes a principal opposition party after the 2024 polls.

Otherwise, he’ll become a subject of ridicule—for the time being, at least.

“In India, politicians excel at the age of 60 onwards. So Gandhi’s time will start from 2029,” he says.