Now he appears to be - again - sounding reluctant about becoming the prime minister. Many believe Mr Gandhi's remarks on Tuesday may have been timed to counter a recent attack on Congress's dynastic politics by Narendra Modi who, many believe, is being positioned as the prime ministerial candidate by the main opposition Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party BJP. On the face of it, Mr Gandhi may be caught between a rock and a hard place.
On the one hand, it appears that he genuinely believes in democratising his party - political power and patronage in the Congress has traditionally flowed from the top, thus thwarting the organic growth of strong local leaders and weakening the party in key states like Uttar Pradesh. Mr Gandhi has said he believes in a more democratic politics and that merit should score over dynastic privilege. On the other, his message may not be finding too many takers within his own party, where generations of leaders and workers have believed that there is no life beyond the Delhi dynasty.
The raison d'etre of the Congress, they believe, is loyalty to the Gandhi family. It is what keeps the flock of leaders and workers together. Most of the leaders at the top and bottom have no bases of their own. All power flows from the high command.
Local leaders are measured by what they can do for the high command and keep it in good humour," says Aarthi Ramachandran, author of Decoding Rahul Gandhi , a well-researched study of the man and his politics. The arguments from analysts go broadly like this: India no longer has a place for dynastic politics, especially in contrast to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who rose from humble roots.
Gandhi is unable to revamp the Congress party; he has not revitalised it through intra-party elections. This failure forces the high command to rely on handpicked figures in states who lack credibility on the ground to win elections. India desperately needs a strong opposition, critics reiterate.
By staying on at the helm in the party, Gandhi is neither leading as he should nor moving out of the way. Some want the Congress to collapse as an entity — so that an alternate formation can emerge organically from the disaffection with the BJP. Rahul Gandhi is evidently stopping India from a form of political development that would inexorably happen without him, well-meaning liberals argue.
There is a lot to speak for this argument. Dynasty per se may not be the problem for Indian voters; the BJP, after all, has its own share of hereditary politicians. However, Gandhi does suffer from a certain form of cultural illegitimacy in contemporary India: he is a Westernised politician with an Italian, Christian mother, one who is more comfortable in English in contrast to his improving Hindi. He stands in opposition to a vernacular political elite determined to transform the iconography and symbols of the Indian Union along determinedly religious and Hindi-oriented lines.
Andrew Breitbart famously said that politics is downstream from culture. The broad traditionalisation of Indian society over the decades through religious programming on TV, saas bahu soaps, Bollywood movies and tropes of a nationalism that socialise Indians to despise foreigners furtively delegitimises a figure like Gandhi.
The Congress is in bad shape nationally. It lost undivided Andhra Pradesh through serious judgment errors on handling Jaganmohan Reddy and by creating the state of Telangana. Repeated failures in elections put his relevance in doubt. Gandhi is, however, not about to go anywhere.
He cannot go off into exile like leaders in other countries, such as Ayatollah Khomeini, Nawaz Sharif and Benazir Bhutto, and return at an opportune time. Given that he is here to stay, what is the future of his politics? Take the matter of internal democracy in the party for example. Gandhi has not proceeded on that agenda; this is not the time to pursue it even if he wants to as the party is struggling to hold on its members in the face of temptations from the BJP.
He said India was being referred to as a territory, but the country was about its people, relationships and that of ties among religions.
My problem with the PM is that he's breaking these relationships. Gandhi is on a two-day visit to Kerala to reportedly quell growing dissent in the party's state unit.
His trip to the southern state came amid a fresh turmoil that has gripped the party in Punjab following the resignation of Navjot Singh Sidhu as Congress president. I can't build a bridge without understanding different traditions, ideas, different religions, different cultures in this country: Rahul Gandhi pic. He said every time the PM resorted to hatred to break a bridge, his job and commitment was towards rebuilding the same.
The Congress leader said hurting relationships among Indians was akin to attacking the idea of India. Of course, he remains an Indian.
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