Rahul (13 page)

Rahul Gandhi’s Dalit agenda is to convert the anti-incumbency sentiment against Mayawati, whatever its extent, into votes for the Congress. His visits to Dalit homes were not merely educational trips as the Opposition mocked in the beginning. Consider this: On 23 September 2009, Rahul was on a less publicized visit to the state. He visited the Ram Nagar area in Barabanki district, and then Chutkaideh village in Shravasti district to spend the night in the house of a Dalit
gram pradhan
, a Pasi. ‘For one used to comforts, the thirty-nine-year-old son of Congress president Sonia Gandhi even bathed in the open, drawing water from a hand-operated water pump,’ an agency report in a newspaper proclaimed two days later. ‘It was incredible. We rarely get to see the face of the local MLA (legislator) whom we have elected. Therefore, a visit by someone like Rahul Gandhi will always remain etched in our memories,’ said Chedda Pasi, son of the Rampur–Deogan village head. The report quoted him as saying that the last VIP to visit the village, in 1997, was Arif Mohammed Khan, a one-time associate of Rahul’s father who joined the BSP after his deep disillusionment with the Congress. ‘Gandhi’s journey, aimed at understanding the way the poor live across India, was the most significant trip by the Congress MP to any place outside of Amethi and Rae Bareli,’ wrote journalist Sharat Pradhan, on 1 October 2009, for the India Abroad News Service.

It is not a matter of mere coincidence, though, that Rahul Gandhi’s surprise overnight stays with Dalits often took place in non-Jatav homes. The Congress realizes that if at all it can win Dalit votes, it will not be those of the Jatavs. On 17 May 2008, Rahul took the residents of Banpurwa village by surprise when he landed at the meeting of a women’s self-help group that provides microfinance. He chatted with the women for a long time and then asked one of them, Rekha Pasi, to serve him food at her home. In January 2009, when he had accompanied the then-British Foreign Secretary David Miliband to a Dalit village in Amethi, he had stayed at the house of Shivkumari, a Kori.

As Rahul’s stays at Dalit homes virtually became a trend, other Congress leaders decided to follow suit. On 2 October 2009, leaders of the UP Congress decided to mark Gandhi Jayanti by ‘doing a Rahul’. They set out to spend a night in a Dalit’s home. But, unlike Rahul, some of these party workers landed at Dalit homes with personal cooks, their own plates, pedestal fans, mosquito nets and mattresses. The message they sent out wasn’t quite in sync with what Rahul intended to convey. The sole element of similarity was that these Congressmen also spent the night at non-Jatav houses. In the end, it was no surprise that these night visits by the state leaders, which had been meant to be a once-a-month affair, ended with the first one. But Rahul’s forays into Dalit homes continued, though he has repeatedly asserted that it is the poor he visits and not Dalits. At a meeting of the NSUI at Jawaharlal Nehru University on 30 September 2009, he repeated that assertion. The next month, addressing the media in Thiruvananthapuram, he said: ‘I ask my office to arrange for my visit to a poor man’s home in the poorest village. You see him as a Dalit. I see him as a poor person.’

On 19 January 2010, on a visit to Madhya Pradesh for the IYC membership drive, he told reporters in Bhopal: ‘The media talks only about my visits to the houses of Dalits and chooses to ignore the other places where I go.’ Denials of there being a larger agenda behind these visits are frequent, but the pattern in these visits is too obvious to ignore.

Mayawati’s exasperation clearly grew as the pattern became obvious. In April 2008, she said at a press conference that Rahul Gandhi uses special soap to bathe after visiting Dalit homes. Days later, at another press conference, Rahul laughed as he stood up and asked journalists: ‘Look at me. Do I look like I use special soap?’ The spontaneity of the act from an otherwise-reserved man sent the journalists into raptures. They knew that the Mayawati–Rahul–Dalit soap was just beginning to get exciting.

Rahul Gandhi’s reluctance to enter politics was outweighed only by his eagerness to see the Congress regain its old glory in the Hindi belt. As soon as he contested his first Lok Sabha election, his eyes were set on reviving the Congress’s fortunes in Uttar Pradesh. Rahul’s logic, which he often shared with his team, is simple and irrefutable: The three states of Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and Madhya Pradesh together send nearly 150 MPs to the Lok Sabha, and capturing these three political arenas would ensure that the grand old party could once again come to power, on its own, at the Centre.

‘I live in Delhi but my heart is in UP,’ he told a gathering at a public meeting he was addressing in western UP. That he was a fourth-generation parliamentarian from UP only helped firm up Rahul’s resolve.

In January 2006, when he made that unscheduled speech at the Congress Hyderabad plenary, Rahul made it clear that, once he took charge of things Congress leaders would have to work hard. It was no use, he said, blaming casteist or communal parties for the Congress’s plummeting fortunes in the region: ‘We have failed to live up to people’s expectations, we have stopped fighting for their causes and we have lost the ability to link the Party organization with our workers and people.’ Between 2006 and the Lok Sabha polls in 2009, Rahul’s remarks and his extensive touring of the state often drew cynical responses from various quarters. Sometimes, they originated from within his own party, though in hushed tones. The 2009 Lok Sabha election, however, was a turning point. From being a party that was barely a contender, having won just nine seats in the 2004 Lok Sabha polls, the Congress jumped to a figure of twenty-one seats, making it the second largest seat clincher, just behind Mulayam Singh Yadav’s Samajwadi Party. In fact, the Congress’s gains in the 2009 elections spurred Mayawati to focus on wooing voters from among the Dalits and the Muslims even if it came at the cost of the Brahmins.

Soon after the formation of the 15th Lok Sabha, with great gusto the Congress launched its Mission 2012. The Party’s aspiration was to form a government in UP by winning the 2012 assembly polls or at least to make a comeback in the state’s politics from its current position of little relevance. In the 2007 assembly polls, Mayawati had used a combination of Brahmin and Dalit votes to reach a majority in the state assembly. Rahul Gandhi hoped to re-jig her formula to regain the Congress’s winning combination in the late 1980s: Brahmins, Muslims and Dalits. The Party, just like the BSP, hoped to select candidates for the 2012 polls as early as the start of summer 2011.

After the Congress suffered heavy losses in Bihar, however, the Party cadres which had been working on the grand plan to wrest UP from Mayawati seemed to lose direction. In terms of votes and seats, the Bihar assembly elections in 2010 brought negative returns and loads of embarrassment for the Congress Party and its former allies—Lalu Prasad’s Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) and Ram Vilas Paswan’s Lok Janshakti Party (LJP)—which had fought the election together as an alliance in an attempt to oust the Nitish Kumar government. But, not only did Nitish Kumar’s Janata Dal United (JD-U)–Bharatiya Janata Party combine return to power, it also came back with a clearer mandate. The challengers—Lalu and Paswan, and the Congress—who had contested all 243 seats and were hoping to play kingmaker, fared worse than they had in the previous round.

The negative returns in terms of votes and seats were partially offset by the valuable lessons that the losers picked up from this election. The first lesson was that anti-incumbency could no longer be taken for granted. The voters showed that, if the incumbent government was better than the alternative that the challengers were offering, they would not vote it out just for the sake of a change. Change, for the better, is what the electorate had sought in the previous assembly election when it got rid of the Lalu–Rabri rule. Nitish Kumar had formed his government on the promise of that change and, once in the saddle, he actually did set out to change things.

In the five years of his first regime, the Bihar government gave the state a semblance of governance. At the time of the 2010 assembly polls, when the voters set out to elect a new government, the state did not have enough power or much industry, but it certainly was not Lalu-land anymore. Law and order was restored to a very large extent. Not only were there better roads now, which had become non-existent during the fifteen years of Lalu’s regime, one could actually move freely on them. The road from Patna, the state capital, to Siwan—a small town in western Bihar that had become infamous for crime—is a mere 150 kilometres. While covering the assembly elections in 2010, one of the authors travelled the stretch. It took a little over two hours to drive from Siwan to Patna. It would have taken up to eight hours about ten years earlier, according to Raj Kumar, a taxi driver and resident of Patna. ‘No one would take the road after 3 p.m.,’ he said, to underline the extent of lawlessness that prevailed under the stewardship of Lalu Prasad Yadav and, later, his wife Rabri Devi. The manager of the hotel where we put up for the night narrated an incident of kidnapping that he had witnessed right outside his office about seven years ago. Once famous as the district to which India’s first president Dr Rajendra Prasad belonged, Siwan had become infamous during Lalu’s time due to Mohammed Shahabuddin, a criminal and MP from his party. Shahabuddin, booked in multiple cases of murder and other heinous crimes, has been serving a prison sentence since 2007. The manager spoke of how—though the staff still locked the iron gates after midnight—the hotel now welcomed guests even at night.

Sending children to school was incentivized during Nitish’s rule through free bicycles and uniforms, and enrolments went up. Through most of the five-year period, the state’s economic growth was higher than the national average. Even the Gujarat chief minister and BJP leader Narendra Modi, who had been kept out of the campaign by Nitish, held a press conference in Ahmedabad to congratulate him, dubbing the 2010 victory ‘a win for development and governance’.

When Rahul descended on the scene during the campaign for the Bihar polls in the winter of 2010, he promised a better state of affairs. He said at a rally in Manjhi near Chhapra:

We [the UPA] worked for Backwards and Dalits, and on the issue of poverty, and you brought us back to power in 2009. We have brought in the world’s largest employment programme, which ensures 100 days’ employment. But here, people don’t get more than 30 days. More money [than what is sent to other states] is sent to Bihar for the Indira Awaas Yojana … The poor don’t get that money, the rich do.

The crowd clapped. In Bihar, the poor are pitched against the poorer, and Rahul Gandhi played the role of the messiah of the poorest. In his rallies, Nitish compared his Bihar with that of Lalu. But Rahul Gandhi wanted Biharis to compare their state with Delhi or Mumbai. In any case, his presence in the campaign seemed to have transformed the Congress from being a fence-sitter to something of a player. The Congress jumped into the battle with a promise of development that would out-develop Nitish. The results, however, showed that after fifteen years of Lalu’s rule and promises, the people of Bihar were content to go with Nitish Kumar who had proven he was better than his predecessor.

When the first list of Congress candidates appeared in New Delhi, Rahul’s fingerprints were clearly visible on it. Of the 243 candidates fielded—with the Party contesting all the seats after a long time—118 were below the age of forty (one-third were under thirty-five). Also, forty-seven Congress tickets went to Muslims, who constitute 16.5 per cent of the state population and are said to hold sway in a quarter of the seats. ‘The idea was to give tickets to those who could be recognized as Congress representatives even after the elections, whether they won or lost,’ revealed a source privy to the strategy formulated by Rahul Gandhi’s team. ‘At this stage, winning a large number of seats is not the goal. The real aim is to prove to sceptics that the Congress can go it alone. The BJP will obviously try to run it down as a Congress failure, but the idea here is to convince the average Congressman in Bihar that the Party will not make opportunistic alliances at his cost,’ he added.

The Congress was hopeful of doing better than it had the previous time. Congress leaders on the campaign trail spoke of a Rahul wave in the state. In the more private setting of an airport lounge, a Congress chief minister told one of the authors that the Party hoped to more than double its earlier tally. The Congress closely watched the BJP’s performance and hoped to drive a wedge between the JD-U and the BJP if the electoral arithmetic gave it a chance. ‘If we can cross the thirty-seat mark, who knows, we might end up in government with Nitish Kumar,’ the chief minister said. Only, the Party fell miserably short of its own expectations while the NDA emerged stronger.

The only electoral gain for the Congress was the marginalization of its troublesome former allies Lalu and Paswan. As long as these two remain relevant in Bihar politics, the Party cannot achieve Rahul Gandhi’s dream of an all-powerful Congress at the Centre.

The Congress’s chief opponent at the Centre and one of the principal competitors in the Hindi belt, the BJP, had fared better than it had in the last Bihar election by keeping Hindutva out of the election rhetoric and playing junior partner to the JD-U. This tactic would automatically erode, to some extent, the secular platform from which the Congress had been able to wrest back power from a non-secular BJP-led alliance. The BJP could replace the Congress’s rhetoric of the secular/non-secular axis by employing its Bihar strategy. If the Mandal–mandir phase of electoral politics was coming to an end, then clearly there were opportunities as well as threats for the Congress.

The Bihar election showed that Rahul could draw crowds to his public meetings but the votes would come only if the Congress put up strong candidates. Paradropping the Party’s youth face did not work—not on polling day. Yet, the Party may have made some gains in the election: Lalu could no longer claim that the MY (Muslim–Yadav) combination ‘is my vote bank’. Nor could Paswan claim to command Dalit votes. It is not as if caste had disappeared with that election. Nitish Kumar had managed to create new constituencies for himself through positive discrimination during his tenure. He worked for women, Extremely Backward Castes and Mahadalits (all Dalit castes in Bihar except Paswans), and was able to wean voters away from vote banks that were traditionally supposed to belong to others.

The Congress finished at the bottom of the tally. In its campaign, it had set out to offer a post-Nitish era. It had tried to sell to the people of Bihar the idea that the Party could be an improvement on what Nitish’s rule had to offer, but without anything to show for it on ground. As a result, it put up its worst show ever in the state. It is naive, however, to suggest that the Congress applied the same formula to the Bihar 2010 polls that it planned to use in UP for 2012. Clearly, in Bihar, the Party had invested in the future, giving out nearly half its tickets to candidates below the age of forty. But the Party needs to realize that if it wants a future in the state, it will have to start by tackling its present situation. Rahul cannot be the Party’s face in a state election unless he is running for chief minister. The Congress had no local face in the 2010 Bihar elections. As soon as the results started pouring in, the Congress went on the back foot to defend its leadership. General secretary in charge of the state, Mukul Wasnik, in his first media comments after the results, was more concerned about profusely thanking the Party president and Rahul for addressing rallies in Bihar than admitting that the central leadership could not fill in for a weak or nonexistent state leadership.

When asked if the Bihar debacle meant the failure of Rahul’s strategy, Congress general secretary Digvijaya Singh said:

Please do not connect Rahul Gandhi with what happened in Bihar. We have not done well in the state for ten–fifteen years, and that is because we have been aligning with Lalu Yadav. We have got the disadvantage of being on the wrong side. The fact remains that we got four seats in the 2004 Lok Sabha, and this came down to two seats in 2009. In the assembly, we got nine seats in 2004 and this has come down to four, so we have not really done worse over the past few years, but yes, we have not been able to gain.

Digvijaya Singh, who is in charge of UP for the Party, denied that the Congress had adopted a go-slow policy on Mission 2012, though he did admit to a tactical shift in the plan. The ten rath yatras that Rahul had flagged off on 14 April 2010 (B.R. Ambedkar’s birthday) from Ambedkarnagar were to enter their second phase on 2 October 2010 (Mahatma Gandhi’s birthday), and end on 10 November at Anand Bhavan (Nehru’s house) in Allahabad, four days before Nehru’s birthday. The plan was unceremoniously dropped after the poor show by Congress in Bihar. ‘We have one full year. We will begin the second phase soon. The approach has been changed. We will go in for an agitational approach in every assembly segment,’ Digvijaya Singh said in an interview to one of the authors.

Bihar ensured that the Party shifted its focus from micromanaging UP from the Centre to moving the preparations for the 2012 elections to the state capital. Acting on rumours that Chief Minister Mayawati could advance the election by a few months, the Congress got into the act of finalizing its candidates by mid-2011. The meeting of the Central Screening Committee of the AICC was moved to Lucknow from Delhi, after three decades, to shortlist candidates for UP’s 403 seats. For a party hoping to return to power at the Centre on the basis of its performance in the states, decentralization seemed like a natural move. Except that it didn’t come naturally to the Congress.

When Rahul made his first trip to the backward region of Bundelkhand, he approached Professor Sudha Pai of the Centre for Political Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, and author of
Dalit Assertion and the Unfinished Revolution: The BSP in Uttar Pradesh
, for a meeting to understand UP better. ‘When he met me, he had already read my books. He was here to discuss, not to be spoon-fed,’ Pai recalled. A close Rahul Gandhi observer since then, she accompanied him to a Congress meeting in Chitrakoot, Bundelkhand, along with a group of political scientists. She wrote in the
Indian Express
after Rahul’s grand rally in 2010 at Mayawati’s citadel, Ambedkarnagar: