Rahul Gandhi's stunning debut debacle

It was always going to be a tough fight for Gandhi, but after his first interview things have possibly gotten much harder

There were questions and there were answers, but there was barely a connection between the two. Rahul Gandhi's debut sit-down interview to Times Now was a debacle to put it kindly. If the anchor started by asking for a pledge to be specific, Gandhi ensured he was anything but. 'Women empowerment', 'democracy', 'RTI' and 'systemic change' were catchphrases that played almost in a loop, finding their way abundantly in Gandhi's answers. But he ducked more serious questions on corruption (Adarsh, Virbhadra Singh, getting political parties under the RTI ambit), refused to apologise for 1984, stuttered sloppily on 2002 and feebly expressed confidence that the Congress was battle ready for 2014.

 
Gandhi played the sympathy card too, evoking the deaths of his father and grandmother when asked whether he was avoiding a direct face-off with Narendra Modi because he was afraid of losing. And he chose mythology to elaborate on a point about his focus on bringing about systemic change.
 
"(Arjuna) only sees one thing, he does not see anything else. You asked me about Mr Modi, you ask me about anything and the thing that I see is that the system in this country needs to change, I don't see anything else and I am blind to everything else. I am blind because I saw people I love, destroyed by the system," Gandhi proclaimed somewhat unintelligibly.

 

Arjuna aimed for the bird's eye. Gandhi did not specify what precisely it is that he was aiming at, and perhaps forgot that he and his party make up the system, and have been the system for a better part of the last 60-odd years.  
 
The snap verdict on social media: He was anxious, evasive, sometimes shrewd, relied too much on clichés and went ill-prepared, but also came across as being endearingly vulnerable and sincere. While that may not provide much solace to a party in election mode, one couldn't help but contrast the calm, polite demeanor of Rahul Gandhi as a breath of fresh air to the more antagonistic, unwilling-to-be-grilled posture of Narendra Modi, who has in the past walked out of interviews when the going got tough.

 
Whether Modi is ready to face tough questions ahead of the polls remains to be seen, but what became obvious as Gandhi's interview went from being dull to comic to sad and into the realm of the bizarre by the time it ended, was that he evidently doesn't belong to politics. The long pauses, the ruminating, often disjointed answers, the nervous twitching of the eye and the perceptible helplessness in answering rough questions pertaining to his party's dismal track record made him appear more like a Shakespearean tragic hero resigned to his looming downfall, than a budding young politician waiting to win a battle.

 
As if to reinforce his image of the reluctant politician, someone who is in the business of politics because of the family he hails from, Gandhi gave a winding explanation of how he didn't have in him, the quest for power. "I am an anomaly in the environment that I'm in... I don't get driven by the desire for power... For me power is an instrument that can be used for certain things... it's not interesting to own it, to capture it or to hold it," he said.
 
While the irony of this statement, coming from the heir of the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty was hard to miss, somewhere it also betrayed Rahul's insufficient hunger for the role he is being prodded to play.

 
That's undesirable, and doubly so at a time when passions have been flared, the nation is witnessing an Aam Aadmi revolution and Gandhi has to face off with not one but two staggeringly popular opponents.
 
It was always going to be a tough fight, but after this interview things have possibly gotten much harder for Gandhi.
 
PS: The anchor must be applauded for skipping the deferential tone reserved for interviews of this kind, but pray was the Robert Vadra question not sufficiently pertinent to be asked?