Rahul Gandhi talks big, avoids direct face-off
Congress vice president Rahul Gandhi’s ‘aggressive' speech at the All India Congress Committee session on Friday may have energised the party cadre for whom the address was meant, but it remains to be seen if it will similarly impact voters of the country. After all, Mr Gandhi listed those very ‘achievements' of the party-led Government which have failed to cut ice with the electorate in recent months, which is evident in the drubbing that the Congress received at the hustings. Given that he has not been named the party's prime ministerial candidate, it leads one to wonder whether he prefers to merely talk without accepting accountability for actions. Nobody is going to buy the Congress's argument that it did not want to emulate the Bharatiya Janata Party, which is why it decided not to name its prime ministerial candidate for the coming lok Sabha election.
The Congress knows it is going to lose the poll and, therefore, wants to shield Mr Gandhi from the humiliation. By making him in-charge of the election campaign, the blame for the defeat can be put on obliging regional satraps and other party leaders. If the party does even reasonably well, and even if that performance is limited to certain pockets of the country, the Congress can attribute full credit to him as the poll campaign head. The party may defend the decision not to name him as its prime ministerial candidate by the logic that everybody knows he will be the Prime Minister if the Congress-led UPA returns to power. There is a difference in biting the bullet and pretending to do so. The Bharatiya Janata Party did the former by anointing Mr Narendra Modi as its candidate for prime ministership. The party had to go through some turbulent moments in arriving at the decision, but it showed the spine to move ahead. On the other hand, although Mr Gandhi would have faced zero opposition from within the Congress, the party has developed cold feet. Apart from the fact that the Congress stares at a defeat and thus does not want to expose Mr Gandhi, the other major factor that must have weighed on senior Congress leaders' minds is the prospect that the coming electoral battle could turn into a Modi versus Rahul contest, in which the Congress vice president would be at a disadvantage.
Unlike the BJP's candidate, Mr Gandhi does not have a track record of performance in either governance or electoral successes. While Mr Modi has blazed a new trail in Gujarat, the Congress vice president has barely made his presence felt in Parliament even. While Mr Modi has been speaking in meeting after public meeting about the need for good governance, Mr Gandhi has been invoking the family, harping on the past and sounding hazy in the articulation of ideas and vision for the future. Mr Modi has many positives to present while the Congress leader has to desperately think of one. The latter has been trailing far behind Mr Modi in personal ratings in most opinion surveys done recently, which is an indication of things to come.
Despite the Congress's best efforts, its vice president cannot be altogether protected from accountability. If the party fails to do well — and it is widely expected to perform miserably — Mr Gandhi will be answerable for not just the choice of candidates but for his handling of the election campaign as well. We have seen how he led the party to defeats earlier in the Uttar Pradesh and the Bihar Assembly elections, and more recently, in the polls to four States.