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Politics of immaturity

Rahul Gandhi's first serious foray into electoral politics would appear to have yielded mixed results. Till Mr. Gandhi plunged into battleground Uttar Pradesh, little was known of his political views. In evidence had been his pride in his illustrious lineage. His January 2006 maiden speech in the Lok Sabha was on education. Avoiding contentious issues, the Congress family heir spoke of fulfilling the dreams of young India. No quarrels with that; if anything he emerged from that effort as sincere of thought and action, much like Rajiv Gandhi in his formative political years. If Mr. Gandhi's subsequent interventions in the lower House were few and far between, his political outings were always to pocket boroughs, Amethi and Rae Bareli. Thanks to his U.P. roadshows, Mr. Gandhi is finally up close and real — and evidently willing to be judged by the world at large. That he is a huge crowd-puller is obvious enough. More importantly, he has energised the moribund State Congress, much to the delight of leaders and cadre alike. The difficulty is with his political vision, rather the lack of it. Through his road journeys Mr. Gandhi has made a string of immature statements, almost all of them arising from his fierce defence of the Nehru-Gandhi clan. Yet he surpassed himself when he counted the "division" of Pakistan among his family's achievements. Unsurprisingly, Pakistan's foreign office seized on the diplomatic faux pas, reading in it an abiding Indian design to "destabilise" its western neighbour and "interfere" in its internal affairs.

Just days earlier, Mr. Gandhi had declared his family capable of defending the Babri Masjid to the last. The mosque would have survived had a member of the family been active at that time, he said, inviting a sharp rebuke from critics who promptly reminded the young Congress leader of his father's role in fuelling that crisis: The locks of the Ayodhya temple had been opened, and a shilanyas ceremony performed, when his father was Prime Minister. That Mr. Gandhi's remarks were seen as a criticism of P.V. Narasimha Rao was a further complication. Mr. Gandhi's problems are twofold. The inability to think beyond the first family and the lack of a cohesive vision. Whatever the merits of his Babri remarks, they at least cast him in the mould of a secular leader. Not so his claim regarding Pakistan. Mr. Gandhi was at liberty to extol the liberation of Bangladesh without bringing the division of Pakistan into the picture. Political attention was what Mr. Gandhi desperately sought to win with these remarks over the past fortnight. He won the spotlight of course but did he bargain for the embarrassment his party finds itself in?

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