As Leader of Opposition, Rahul Gandhi is an Influencer Posing as a Capable Policymaker

He’ll likely remain a politician for life, proposing policies that promise Disneyland. At least the reels are good!

If the uproar over Rahul Gandhi’s US visit and the remarks he made there has tapered off, it shouldn’t have! Gandhi and his social media staff must be cursing their luck, thinking their leader, despite doing a lot of things right – their opinion – is called out for one odd comment that lands a bit astray, and pushed into a corner by the media that’s still, despite the election results, feeling overwhelmingly beholden to Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Gandhi’s remark on Sikhs fighting to wear the turban in India was expectedly picked on by the ruling BJP. Dare I say, rightly so! It was a foolish remark, one you’d expect from a novice politician with no sense of the pulse of the nation, its history, ethos, geography, everything.

For someone who’s literally walked the length and breadth of the country over the last two years with his famed ‘Bharat Jodo Yatra’ and ‘Bharat Jodo Nyay Yatra’, Gandhi still exhibits a strong tendency to come off as incredibly tone-deaf when surmising about India and its people. Sikhs are a community synonymous with valour and sacrifice, values Sikhism preaches and holds dear. To make statements that paint the community as one that’s feeling terrorised, to the extent that they’re having to ‘fight’ to wear their turbans, is unlikely to land well with a proud Sikh.

Worse still is that mentioning Sikhs was merely a euphemistic device for Gandhi, who lacks the moral courage and aptitude to openly talk about hate crimes against Muslims and Christians. Besides coming off as incredibly shallow, Gandhi’s statement was emblematic of a leader who’d say anything to get out of answering a tricky question, instead of saying the right thing, which he’s not allowed to speak, lest he mangle his party’s Hindutva-lite stance and puncture his newfound image as the sharp and tactical politician, which he’s not. In fact, one should wonder if Gandhi has a sincere response to any question.

During an interaction at Georgetown University in Washington DC, Gandhi changed track mid-sentence while answering a question about infighting among his alliance partners. “By the way, it’s not I.N.D.I Alliance. It’s I.N.D.I.A Alliance,” he corrected the student who’d asked him the question.

“What does the ‘A’ stand for?” the student countered.

Gandhi stumbled before saying ‘Alliance’.

“Doesn’t that make the ‘A’ redundant?”

Gandhi responded, saying the Alliance's goal was to “communicate to the people of India that India is being attacked.”

A response that wouldn’t have been a deflection would have gone like this: “I appeal to everyone to not be as pedantic as the BJP here. Yes, the A stands for Alliance and perhaps calling us the I.N.D.I.A Alliance would make the A redundant. But we’re fighting elections for India and trying to preserve an idea as grand as our beautiful country, so what’s the fuss over an extra ‘A’ in our acronym. If they still have an issue, they should call us ‘The I.N.D.I.A’. That does the job, right? The ‘The’ before the acronym helps not confuse us with India, our country, while also communicating the idea that we’re an entity. A few well-meaning news publications spell our Alliance’s name this way. In contrast, those who’re BJP lapdogs, basically all mainstream TV news channels, are parroting what’s dictated to them by a certain someone in the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO).” Had he put it this way, Gandhi might have had the crowd eating out of his hands, hanging on to every word he’d have uttered thereafter.

The above critique may seem harsh, and perhaps a bit too rigorous in that I’ve picked on Gandhi’s response to what I’m sure was an unscripted query. His keenness to appear for such interactions with university students and members of the Indian diaspora must be valued and appreciated. Yet, it’s only when we put ourselves in the shoes of the Leader of Opposition (LoP) and imagine articulating a response that we’d have liked to hear that we realise the ineptitude of the politician that’s being foisted onto the country as an alternative to Modi.

The liberal intelligentsia has always portrayed Gandhi as a well-meaning politician with a beating heart, too much of a saint for the job he’s found himself in. His gain of influence over the last two years with his yatras and a bulkier social media presence, coupled with the whole ‘nafrat ke bazaar mein mohabbat ki dukaan’ gimmick, was meant to further solidify that image. It may have achieved that objective to some extent. But for the keen-eyed, it has also revealed an underlying truth: Gandhi is an influencer posing as a capable policymaker. As a policy wonk, he’s stuck in a time warp, which explains why his ideas often contradict some agenda he’d spelt out on some other forum on some other day when his mood was something else.

When in the US, he’s more enlightened than his party has ever been about the primacy that must be accorded to manufacturing and industrial growth, even though UPA governments did precious little to reform archaic laws that inhibited India’s industrialisation. The case for enabling low-skilled, labour-intensive manufacturing stems from the belated realisation that this is the only sector that can generate enough jobs for India’s humungous workforce. Manufacturing growth goes hand-in-hand with unleashing the animal spirits of the private sector and letting markets do their job with minimal government intervention. Yet, when on the campaign trail in India or on his yatras, Gandhi returns to his party’s socialist roots that paint the industrialist as the baddest guy ever and the root of all ills. Beyond the allegations of crony capitalism directed towards Modi, which are justified until proper investigations reveal otherwise, Gandhi also leverages his Adani-Ambani diatribe to get the youth feeling victimised about not getting government jobs, armed forces recruits and senior citizens for being robbed of their pensions, farmers for not getting assured purchase from the government at a minimum support price (MSP), the middle-class for having to pay high taxes, workers for not getting ‘decent’ minimum wages, and so on.

Parallelly, Gandhi scoffs at the privatisation of government assets and public sector undertakings (PSUs) and claims that a future Congress or I.N.D.I.A government can successfully run trains and airlines while keeping all the above promises to the electorate vis-à-vis public sector jobs, pensions, minimum wages, and reduced taxes. Couple this with Congress-ruled state governments’ ruinous ideas of reserving jobs for locals, more freebies for women, and a return to the fiscally dangerous old pension scheme (OPS), and Gandhi makes us envision a fantastical Indian state, suddenly freed of the frills of having a limited budget and needing to maintain a low fiscal deficit. Let that sink in again – Gandhi wants us to believe that India, with a nominal per-capita GDP of $2,410, ranked 136th in the world amongst lower-middle-income countries, with the forming of an I.N.D.I.A government at the Centre, will suddenly have more money to spend on all of the above.

Populism may be par for the course in politics. But the fact that Gandhi’s policy ideas are, at their core, fiscally improper and threaten to take us back to our socialist past, which kept us a poor country for ~50 years until liberalisation in the ’90s, is unlikely to win him any support from educated, woke Indians, including NRIs – whom he engages with on academic subjects. They see the duplicity! Gandhi’s obsession with a caste census, the logical conclusion of which would be an increase in reservation, runs counter to the ideal of meritocracy that the middle class holds dear. No amount of empathy with the middle class and their SMEs over their rising fuel prices, direct taxes and GST is going to make them forget that Gandhi’s desperation for power has compelled him to tease a return of Mandal politics in an India of the 21st century, which should have moved on from politicians urging an increase in caste-based reservation as a solution for inequity.

The Congress will say it’s a marker of the party’s commitment to the welfare of the backward castes. It’s actually a symptom of the political opposition's abject intellectual bankruptcy — having to resort to an old divisive politics that, in turn, fuels upper-caste resistance and victimisation and provides more fuel to the BJP’s destructive Hindutva politics.

A genuine commitment to social welfare should start with publicly condemning the spate of hate crimes against all minorities and devising a narrative that would help erode the apathy of India’s well-off populace. In a country that’s slowly unravelling along religious lines, with the expeditious mandate of BJP-ruled state governments, the political opposition must counter the brazenness of hate crimes in states such as Uttarakhand and Himachal Pradesh, with an equally vocal and in-your-face secular rhetoric. ‘Mohabbat ki dukaan’ is a gimmick that screams risk aversion. Gandhi must ruminate on its uselessness and come up with something better.

Parallelly, the Congress must spell out a pragmatic path to economic prosperity. Painting idealistic visions of a future I.N.D.I.A government and a maximalist welfare state that will do everything, as governments do in Scandinavia, for a country the size of India, goes beyond being a blatant lie – it becomes an insult to people’s intelligence. Instead, Gandhi must start talking about the dangerous obsession with public sector jobs and why the youth must look beyond a state-sponsored safety net. Low-skilled, entry-level jobs in manufacturing and services should be made to seem more appealing than they do today. The Modi government should then be pulled into the dock for failing to drive investment and scaring off the private sector.

The LoP should go beyond his party’s political mandate and do the country’s work here by building a positive perception amongst young Indians about looking out for themselves and not seeking ‘protection’ from the government, skilling up, hustling through jobs and working in factories. Entrepreneurship (not the distress-induced pakoda kind) needs to be encouraged; more than that, inter-state migration for jobs must be bolstered at a frenetic pace for India to imagine the recurrence of its high-growth years of 1991-2011 – the Congress enabled much of it. It should take credit for it and simultaneously tease a return of the chaos of UPA coalition politics that brought about India’s best growth years.

Unfortunately, Gandhi, on most days – far from seeming cognisant of the realities outlined above that must be communicated and made more salient – is a concoction that’s part Jairam Ramesh, part Supriya Shrinate; never his own person, thus never for us.

He’ll likely remain a politician for life, proposing policies that promise Disneyland. At least the reels are good!