Gandhi rallies the Congress faithful

It wasn’t quite a coronation, but the elevation of Rahul Gandhi to vice president of the All India Congress Committee is, without doubt, putting him on the road to lead the governing Congress Party coalition into the next Indian general election in 2014.

Senior party members, who know they must choose a Prime Ministerial candidate to replace the ailing 80-year-old Manmohan Singh, have been calling for, even demanding, that Gandhi play a greater role in Congress politics. Their reasons were obvious. After a decade in power, the party is embroiled in a slough of corruption scandals.

India’s once spectacular economic growth has slowed and there are mounting complaints from the military that it does not have the manpower and equipment to defend the country properly – a highly sensitive subject given border tensions with China in the east and Pakistan in the west.

The Congress grandees’ reasoning is that only the Gandhi name (Rahul is the great grandson, grandson and son of former Prime Ministers) can give the party a fighting chance of a further five years in office, but the 42-year-old backbench MP has, up to now, been reluctant to put himself forward and last year declined a Ministerial appointment in Singh’s Government.

Instead, he has been content to work behind the scenes within the party structure and these most recent moves have brought him to second place in that hierarchy behind his mother, Sonia.

This somewhat roundabout way of rising through the ranks mattered little to the 1200 delegates gathered in Jaipur who were ready to treat what in all other cases would have been a routine vice-presidential acceptance speech as a much needed morale-booster for the Congress faithful. In fact, they got more than they bargained for.

After beginning in traditional fashion, saying the people of India were his life and pledging to fight for their betterment, Gandhi then launched into an attack on the Government system that would have done credit to any opposition speaker.

“A handful of people control the entire political space…it doesn’t matter how much wisdom you have, if you don’t have a position, you have nothing – it is the tragedy of India,” he said.   

All the public systems – administration, justice, education and politics – were designed to keep people with knowledge out. Mediocrity was rewarded.

He pledged himself to work to transform stagnant, out-dated systems and promised to bring younger people, with new ideas, into the political process.

Such words from a representative of the greatest establishment family in Indian politics are surprising to say the least, but it may be that Gandhi has been playing an artful game by keeping out of the turmoil into which the Singh Government has descended in recent times.

By staying on the sidelines in the Lok Sabha, while building up a power base within the party structure, he can use the pulling power of the Gandhi name, while portraying himself as an outsider ready to tackle the problems that his own party created.

However, much will depend on him being able to lift what has been up to now a very moderate campaigning style, especially, as seems likely, he will be up against the charismatic Chief Minister of Gujarat, Narendra Modi, of the Opposition Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in 2014.

In recent times Gandhi has supported Congress in state elections in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar with a singular lack of success, while his intervention in the Gujarat poll late last year was a disaster as Modi swept into a third consecutive term on a landslide.