Rahul (9 page)

Of course, Digvijaya Singh would repeat these assertions at different fora, including the Congress Party’s plenary sessions. He said this as early as mid-2005, and changes in the Congress seem to have followed this pattern. Digvijaya remains among Rahul’s closest advisers from the Congress old guard, while Kanishka has, over the years, emerged as his closest confidant outside the Gandhi family.

Kanishka Singh’s proximity to Rahul allows him to get his ideas across more often than not. He also prepares Rahul’s daily schedule and clears appointments. ‘He is Rahul’s Man Friday,’ revealed a source from within the set-up, ‘the real shadow, who goes with him everywhere and sits next to him in the aircraft on all official trips.’ To get through to Rahul, you have to go through Kanishka. He is equally at ease in Hindi and English, and he is the man who screens the leader’s office mail and gets in touch with those who need to be contacted. The list can sometimes include chief ministers and corporate heads.

When Akhilesh Das, Rajya Sabha MP and former minister of state for steel, quit the Congress in May 2008 to join Mayawati, he blamed the ‘coterie around Rahul Gandhi’ in his letter to Sonia. The disgruntled Das went on to allege that Kanishka Singh’s father was appointed Rajasthan governor despite being close to the BJP because of his proximity to the Congress’s generation next.

The team’s management wonk, Sachin Rao, is closer to his boss in age. He was in the software solutions business before getting an MBA from the Michigan Business School in corporate strategy and international business. A project with management guru C.K. Prahalad turned Rao’s interest towards poverty and the possibility of looking at the bottom of the pyramid (BoP)—the vast base of India’s socio-economic structure—as a viable opportunity that has been ignored. After a couple of farm sector projects with multinationals, he joined the Centre for Civil Society in Delhi. Soon, he was spotted by Rahul, whose own exploration of the ‘real’ India—visiting Dalit homes in Amethi and hauling bricks along with labourers in Rajasthan—drew lessons from Rao’s experience in understanding poverty.

In the Congress organization, there are many others on whom Rahul relies. Congress secretaries Jitendra Singh and Meenakshi Natarajan, both Rahul’s age, have worked closely with him in overseeing the affairs of the IYC and the NSUI, respectively. Jitendra, a royal from Alwar in Rajasthan, studied engineering in Germany, and was twice elected as Congress MLA from Alwar before joining the team. He is now the party’s Lok Sabha MP from Alwar and, since July 2011, a junior minister in the crucial ministry of home affairs. Rahul ensured that both Jitendra and Meenakshi got tickets for the Lok Sabha elections of 2009, as he did for Tanwar and Manicka Tagore, who are also part of the 12 Tughlaq Lane clique.

Tanwar came to the Lok Sabha by winning the election from Sirsa, the home ground of former Haryana chief minister Om Prakash Chautala. Tagore is a school-teacher’s son who rose from the ranks of the NSUI to the IYC and ultimately to Parliament defeating the virulent Marumalarchi Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (MDMK) chief and known LTTE supporter Vaiyapuri Gopalasamy (also known as Vaiko) in his own backyard.

Meenakshi did an MSc in Biochemistry and got a law degree from Indore before taking the plunge as a career politician. She is now the Congress MP from Mandsaur in Madhya Pradesh, a traditional BJP stronghold. Though her parents are Tamil, Meenakshi was born and brought up in Madhya Pradesh and is fluent in Hindi. Her father, a railway employee, moved to the central Indian state from their home town in Tamil Nadu.

There is something remarkable about the way in which these young men and women, handpicked by Rahul Gandhi, have won seats against formidable opponents. While making electoral choices, voters, it seems, were willing to give youth a chance over more traditional attributes. This understanding is also to a very large extent the base on which Team RG is formulating its future plans. The young MPs are completely engrossed in building the youth units of the Party into formidable fortresses that will help the Congress fight Opposition parties. But their performance as legislators has been rather poor.

Consider this: Jitendra and Meenakshi have done nothing much when it comes to participation in parliamentary proceedings or law-making. Till the end of the budget session of 2010, Jitendra had participated in only two debates and asked no questions of the ministries. Meenakshi had participated in just three debates and posed five questions. Ashok Tanwar rose to political prominence within the Congress student circles, and became NSUI president for establishing the student body’s presence in Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU). But, since being elected to the Lok Sabha in 2009, Tanwar has shown no signs of his alma mater’s culture of debating every issue under the sun. He had not participated in a single debate till the end of the 2010 monsoon session of the lower house. Nor had he bothered to ask a single question. By contrast, the average MP has asked an average of 62 questions in the 15th Lok Sabha till May 2010 and participated in 8.6 debates.

Note that the IYC and the NSUI are the foundations for Rahul Gandhi’s grand plan of tapping youth power for a stronger, stand-alone Congress and, ultimately, for nation-building. The programmes of these two organizations highlight the need for youth to participate in politics, but the MPs in charge of these programmes may not be setting the best examples on what to do after a young man or a woman does make it to Parliament.

Meanwhile, the relationships that his father Rajiv Gandhi nurtured have been renewed. Sam Pitroda, who ushered in Rajiv’s telecom revolution and is currently chairman of the National Knowledge Commission, is a key adviser. Jairam Ramesh, who was minister of state for commerce in UPA-I and became environment minister and, later, rural development minister in UPA-II, arranged most of Rahul’s interactions with experts in the field and outside the government. During the first run of the UPA, cabinet minister Mani Shankar Aiyar helped Rahul by drawing on his own experience of working in the government, and as a bureaucrat and a diplomat. The idea was to keep the prime-minister-in-training engaged not only with the Indian heartland, but with things happening elsewhere in the world. On questions of how prime ministerial authority is effectively exercised, Rahul relied on Prithviraj Chavan, former minister of state in the PMO (the prime minister’s office). Chavan was later appointed Maharashtra chief minister. Few Congressmen doubt that this elaborate exercise (of educating a PM probable) is merely a matter of curiosity. Perhaps, Rahul Gandhi would do well to ponder one of the dictums of Harvard, a place of brief sojourn in his journey: Never confuse the idea of authority with the authority of ideas. For, apart from resisting the label of a dynast, he has to fight the irony of his address—Tughlaq Lane.

On 13 August 2010, the monsoon session of Parliament was under way. Both houses were in session that Friday. But elsewhere in the Parliament House complex, in the annexe to be precise, a rare exercise was taking place: an eight-hour training session for a select group of young and emerging Congress leaders, including four dozen MLAs and MPs from all over the country.

Szarita Laitphlang spent most of the day at the session. The previous evening, she had been shopping for her ten-year-old son who was studying at a boarding school in Assam. He was home, in Kolkata, on vacation. ‘I have to catch the morning flight. He will be sleeping when I get home,’ she said, her eyes sparkling with excitement and longing. The excitement was in anticipation of the three days she would spend with her son. There was also fatigue etched on her face probably as a result of the long session she had just attended, and the realization that, at the end of the three-day break, she would have to plunge into her new assignment as one of the Congress Party’s coordinators in the coming West Bengal elections. All forty-two of the young MLAs who attended the session were also bound for West Bengal. Each was in charge of a particular territory in the eastern state for the 2011 assembly elections and was also responsible, at the same time, for setting the tone for the state Youth Congress elections.

On the same day, Vijay Inder Singla, Lok Sabha MP from Sangrur, explained the IYC’s new election model to the assembled MLAs. He told them about the wave of democracy that was silently sweeping through the Congress youth outfits, the IYC and the NSUI. Around the same time, these young MLAs were also witnessing the organizational elections within the Party. These elections, however, were only in name. That Sonia Gandhi would again be party president was a foregone conclusion. (Sonia was re-elected Congress president for a record fourth term on 3 September 2010. With that she became the longest-serving chief of the Indian National Congress.)

At the state level, elections in the Congress are held by consensus or by passing a one-line resolution authorizing the Congress president to nominate the state party chief. The consensus, too, is directed by New Delhi. That is the culture of the Congress. But, as these MLAs learnt at the meeting, the IYC’s democratization was a process aimed at changing that culture. In contrast to the parent Congress, the IYC adopted the new election model in 2008 and, in December, Singla became the first state-level president to be replaced through an election. He went on to contest the 2009 Lok Sabha elections, getting a ticket at Rahul Gandhi’s behest. He defeated his heavyweight opponent, former union minister Sukhdev Singh Dhindsa of the Shiromani Akali Dal. Dhindsa had won his first election and become a legislator in 1972, the year Singla was born.

The training session in the Parliament complex, where Singla was one of the main speakers, was a prelude to the MLAs’ tour of West Bengal. Szarita would travel ahead of them and be a part of the team that organized public meetings for Rahul in early and mid-September 2010 and, along with these rallies, the IYC’s membership drive. The entire process would consume three months. ‘Then I will get to meet my son again,’ she added. Since most politicians work long hours, one could ask, what was so different in her case? Well, for one, Szarita wasn’t even a Congress member yet. She was thirty-three and just a part of the IYC. Except for the brief period in which the IYC was talked about, and infamously so, under Sanjay Gandhi, it had just been a place for politicians’ kids to hang out in before they were old enough to be in the grand old party. But now, Rahul Gandhi had begun using it as a tool to set the stage for inner party democracy in the Congress.

Rajeev Satav, IYC president and Maharashtra MLA, who had also been present at the training session, said he would probably be the last nominated president of the youth outfit: ‘The nomination culture is changing.’ The IYC was attracting fresh blood. ‘The election process that is on will change the IYC forever. Nominations were replaced by elections in 2008. By the time we finish the IYC membership drive and elections, we will have about two crore IYC members with their own elected representatives at various levels,’ Satav added.

Before the end of 2011, the IYC hoped to finish the first round of its recruitment and election process in all the states and union territories. ‘We will have a large pool of dedicated young men and women without a criminal background, raring to go,’ said Singla. Rahul Gandhi had entrusted Singla with the task of overseeing the elections to the IYC as an ‘election commissioner’.

The IYC elections make for a tedious process. Several weeks pass between the beginning of the membership drive and the completion of the elections. Membership is opened for thirty days. Those who apply are screened for criminal antecedents by FAME—the Foundation for Advanced Management of Elections—formed by the likes of former chief election commissioners J.M. Lyngdoh and N. Gopalaswami, and former adviser to the Election Commission K.J. Rao. After the scrutiny is over, elections take place at the gram panchayat or municipal ward level. Then follow the assembly-and state-level elections.

‘Until FAME endorses it, the election is null and void,’ explained Singla. The first election was held in December 2008 in Punjab. Rahul himself supervised it with Lyngdoh and K.J. Rao. The election resulted in Ravneet Singh Bittu, grandson of assassinated Punjab chief minister Beant Singh, being elected as the new president. Bittu was backed by one former chief minister, and his opponent by another. Despite the elaborate exercise in democracy, a dynast had emerged as the new president. But in the process, the state Youth Congress got itself over three lakh new members. ‘That was the first election,’ said Singla, adding, ‘As awareness of the process spreads, we have more numbers enrolling for membership and more first-timers coming to the fore.’ He had just come back after supervising the Bihar Youth Congress elections in the first week of August 2010. To underline the effectiveness of the process initiated by the election system, Congress leaders cited the example of Lallan Kumar, the new Bihar Youth Congress president who did not belong to a political family.

There are many others who are first-timers in politics with no political lineage or baggage. Szarita’s family, for instance, runs a small business in Shillong and she studied English literature at St. Mary’s Convent in Shillong before getting herself a Microsoft certification as a software professional. But things changed when she was picked up in the talent search conducted by Rahul Gandhi and his associates before the election process began. A Khasi tribal from Meghalaya, she was appointed national coordinator of the IYC’s Aam Aadmi ka Sipahi (AAKS: the common man’s foot soldier) initiative for the North-east. Ten districts of Assam were chosen for the pilot programme which was formally launched by Rahul Gandhi in July 2009. The AAKS hoped to push thousands of new IYC recruits into the rural hinterland and become the Congress’s main plank of social participation and engagement with the poor. But it never went beyond the pilot stage.

Abdul Hafiz Gandhi, a former national secretary of the IYC, comes from that background—rural and poor. He belongs to Mou village in the Patiyali assembly constituency of what was once Etah but has been renamed Kanshiram Nagar by the Mayawati government. Abdul’s father is a marginal farmer, tilling five bighas of land in the village. His uncle was a cement contractor and he helped Abdul move to Delhi at the age of six in the hope of a better future. From the village school, Abdul moved to an English-medium school in an east Delhi locality. ‘At that time, I spoke no English and even my Hindi dialect was the butt of jokes,’ he recalled. One glance at his Facebook profile and you know he has come a long way since then. ‘Whenever I go back home, I travel to the villages in my area and meet the people there. They are very poor. I want to do something for them. That is why I have chosen politics as a career,’ he said.

After an integrated five-year Bachelor of Law degree from the Aligarh Muslim University (AMU), Abdul could have become a lawyer and pulled his family out of poverty. Instead, he completed his masters and then chose to pursue an MPhil and a PhD on scholarship at Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University. His research involves assessing the impact of the Right to Information Act, a key showcase legislation of UPA-I.

‘When I was at AMU, I filed a case in the Supreme Court seeking the restoration of the students’ union there. The SC dismissed my plea but we started an agitation. The vice chancellor agreed to our demand and I became the students’ union president in 2005,’ said Abdul. Spurred by the success of the agitation, he entered student politics and decided to study further. ‘Despite being the union president, I topped the JNU entrance exam for MPhil,’ he said to underscore the point that political and academic success need not be mutually exclusive. In 2009 and early 2010, Abdul toured Madhya Pradesh to do the spadework for the IYC elections to be held in late 2010. His work in Madhya Pradesh done, Abdul was moved to Jharkhand with a similar brief: to prepare the ground for the Youth Congress elections there. On his way back from Jamshedpur to New Delhi in September 2010, he took the opportunity to visit his native Patiyali constituency which had been hit by floods. He wants to contest the 2012 assembly election from there.

True to Rahul Gandhi’s formula of preparing the ground early, Abdul began preparations for the elections in 2009. He walked through his constituency, covering village after village, meeting people in their homes and shops. By the end of 2010, he had a list of thousands of voters in his constituency with details such as their addresses, mobile phone numbers, occupation, details of the family and income. ‘These days, most people carry a cell phone. When I hold a public meeting, I send messages to people who live within a few kilometres of the venue. As a result, the numbers in public meetings have been slowly growing,’ he said. Since the 2009 elections, Abdul has had simple slogans painted on a few walls in Patiyali along with his name. ‘
Congress ke Saath Judein
(Get associated with the Congress)—Abdul Hafiz Gandhi,’ says one. Every year after the monsoons, he gets those slogans repainted. By the time the election code of conduct kicks in for the 2012 polls and bars such slogans, Abdul’s efforts will have registered with the locals.

Abdul is one of the few people who started early, cashing in on the stupendous performance of the Congress in the state in the 2009 Lok Sabha elections. From being a fringe player in the state, the Congress bounced back to finish second in the tally. Though he wasn’t even sure that he would get to contest the 2012 assembly elections on a Congress ticket, Abdul launched the preparations for an electoral plunge. Abdul’s strategy is a strong counter to Mayawati’s Bahujan Samaj Party—a party that announces a majority of its candidates several months before the elections. But the bad news for the Congress is that there aren’t too many such young men and women in the state who have begun preparing for future electoral battles.

Traditionally, the Congress, unlike Mayawati, waits and declares candidates for elections just a few days, or even hours, before the deadline for filing the nomination papers ends. The Party’s managers keep putting off declaring their candidates till the very end in the hope that those who are denied tickets will not enter the election as candidates of other political parties. Often such contenders who are denied tickets, contest the election as independents—and sometimes even win. Dealing with a rebel who contests the election as an independent is perhaps easier than dealing with someone who joins another political party and enters the fray. But there are those in the Congress who argue that rebels who enter the political arena even as independents, while incapable of winning on their own, do spoil the game. They wean votes away from the Party’s official candidate and cause electoral upsets.

In August 2011, egged on by Rahul Gandhi’s UP 2012 formula, the Congress tried to break away from the eleventh-hour principle and started declaring candidates for the UP polls. Before the month ended, the Party had announced its first list of seventy-three candidates who would contest the election in 2012 on the party ticket. Rahul, along with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, presided over the Party’s election committee meeting at which the list was cleared.

Like Abdul, Szarita is serious about politics. ‘At some point of time, I do want to be an elected representative, whether at the state or the national level,’ she said. She hopes to contest the 2013 assembly polls in her state. The decision to become a career politician had begun to take shape when she joined the Youth Congress in 2006 in her home town of Shillong. But, it was only in October 2008 that she felt she had taken the right decision. On 2 October 2008, Szarita was in Bordubi Gaon in the Madhuban area of the Tinsukia constituency in Assam as part of AAKS.

AAKS activists all over the country had been asked to go to the remotest of villages and do physical labour (
shramdaan
). It was an apparent tribute to Mahatma Gandhi and, at the same time, a good way of connecting with the poor in the remote villages. Rahul Gandhi himself participated in one such programme at Amroli village in Kota district of Rajasthan that day, hauling soil in metal and plastic pans. Of course, Rahul’s participation in the shramdaan made it to the headlines the next day and so did his statement. ‘Every single day, I feel there are two Indias. One that lives in the cities and belongs to the rich; the other India is that of the poor. We have to connect these two,’ he had famously remarked after the programme.

Meanwhile, back in Bordubi Gaon, Szarita’s team stopped at the hut of a family of tea plantation workers. It was a very poor family. Of late, an unwritten rule in the IYC is that, when working in a village, volunteers must eat with the poorest families. ‘We were carrying the rations to cook and we asked them for utensils. The village had been recently electrified but the house did not have a connection. There was a young woman in the family who was in the last month of her pregnancy. So I spoke with the local state Youth Congress and asked them to help the family with the electricity connection. I assured the family that we would try our best and left the village,’ recalled Szarita. A fortnight later, when she was again in that village, she went back to the house. They had got a connection under the Kutir Jyoti Yojana—a rural electrification scheme run by the Congress government in Assam. The young woman who had been pregnant was now a mother. And the family had named the baby girl after Szarita. ‘At that time, I was completely overwhelmed by the gesture. I felt so good about being in politics,’ Szarita said.