The blank page

A new book on Rahul Gandhi struggles to present his worldview

On the cover of Decoding Rahul Gandhi the book’s subject is shown holding up a piece of paper while speaking into twin microphones. The sheet of paper has nothing written on it. Your eyes shift from Rahul Gandhi’s name to the blank piece of paper pictured next to it, and you get the point.

Aarthi Ramachandran then goes on to prove it many times over. We don’t know enough about Gandhi’s opinions and vision. He has been guarded about his personal life and past. This has led many into conspiracy theories — even those who should know better, like Swapan Dasgupta who last week said when Gandhi repeated the claim that 70 per cent of young Punjabis were on drugs that “I seriously wonder if RG is himself afflicted by what he sees as the great youth disorder in Punjab”.

 

Ramachandran has no time for such silliness, but does fall prey to the lesser crimes of overinterpretation and mind-reading. Much effort is spent explaining what is known about Gandhi’s education, for example; but efforts to link it to his politics sound patently ridiculous — such as when the author tries to describe development economics, and then says that it “led him to back his mother’s and her kitchen cabinet, the National Advisory Council’s, proposals for the NREGA and other large social sector measures”. That many development-oriented economists aren’t fans of the NREGA is quite irrelevant, apparently.

One’s got to wonder why this mind-reading is necessary in some cases. Does it really matter whether Gandhi was “reluctant” to enter politics? This is not a question that seems to be asked about anyone else. Even if he was, what difference does it make now, almost 10 years on? And, if it’s an irrelevant question, why try and torture the known facts till they give you something that passes for an answer?

So scanty is the information that Ramachandran has access to on which to base her conclusions that sometimes you’re forced to laugh out loud. One such story is introduced, for example, as showing Gandhi’s “independent streak” with reference to his mother’s ideas. We rub our hands expectantly, and then are told that a Congress leader once overheard a phone call between the two just before Gandhi set off for a protest in Aligarh. His mother asked if he had packed properly. He replied that he would take care of himself. Ramachandran concludes, with her unnamed informant, that “unlike Sanjay Gandhi [and Indira Gandhi], Rahul did not fight with Sonia”. I really don’t know what to say about this sort of inference.

There is, occasionally, a bit of startling insight that follows, and is eminently justified by, all these little bits of information. For example, the point that his “political reclusiveness and caution in public life run contrary to his personality trait of being curious, questioning and willing to speak his mind”. Perhaps, rather than making a series of small, focused inferences, Ramachandran should have limited herself to retelling the stories, and sharing the occasional larger, more solid conclusion.

She is particularly good when she repeatedly notes how often Gandhi lets down or confounds the expectations of the press or his party. The press wants theatrics and vignettes at chai shops, she says at one point; Gandhi comes in and out of towns quietly and isn’t noticeable till he addresses the rally he’s been invited to. His big speech at the Congress’s 2006 conclave in Hyderabad was “a business strategy consultant’s roadmap for organisation building” when he was expected to be “the party’s charismatic face”. As the pressure grows on Gandhi from the press to show his abilities, or lack thereof, in government, his habit of disappointing expectations seems very relevant.

The completeness of Ramachandran’s research blows a few holes, incidentally, in the persistent claim that the Indian media hasn’t bothered to investigate Gandhi’s antecedents and personal history. It draws heavily on newspaper stories about his education (many of them mistaken, and subsequently corrected), his personal life (almost all of them subject to similar corrections) and finally his work as a consultant and then owner of an engineering outsourcing company (wild claims about which were made in the press in 2004 that were, again, subsequently found to be false, in part by this newspaper). I wonder how widely believed 2004’s accusation by Mid-Day that Gandhi’s small firm had bagged giant government contracts, including for Mumbai airport, would have been in today’s credulous environment.

A large part of the book is taken up describing Gandhi’s efforts to reform the NSUI and Youth Congress, and make them more democratic. Many people, including me, count these efforts as being largely failures; Ramachandran lays out our arguments, including that most internal elections seem to throw up relatives of senior leaders or people with criminal backgrounds — both outcomes that the reforms were supposed to minimise. Ramachandran correctly points out that, in the absence of the devolution of power from the “high command”, these elections are rendered meaningless, and thus won’t throw up true talent. These chapters are probably the best in the book, partly because they are so clear an example of how Gandhi’s assumptions can come crashing into the unforgiving wall of political reality.

Her claim that Gandhi’s intervention in other issues is “shoot-and-scoot” and opportunistic is somewhat harder to pull off. She says, for example, he scuttled mining in Niyamgiri, but didn’t engage with Posco; sure, but he seems to have spent a long time talking about land issues elsewhere, too. Unfortunately, Ramachandran sees each one of them as opportunistic individually, and doesn’t seem to see that they could link up into a thematic whole. Ramachandran’s error, perhaps, but Gandhi’s fault: he hasn’t helped observers see the connection between these episodes, if any, because of an unwillingness to claim a larger political vision beyond reducing deprivation.

Towards the end, Ramachandran tells the story of how she met Gandhi. Upset that the Delhi government might move beggars out of the city before the Commonwealth Games, she shot off a letter to him, without telling him she was a journalist. To her surprise, she received an invitation to discuss the issue with him. When she turned up at his house during one of his “jan sabhas”, he asked her what he should do — should he focus on every manifestation of poverty? Or try to tackle the root causes? He needed to focus, he said, since he had “limited energy”. It was, Ramachandran says, as if “he didn’t understand how to route his ideas and plans through political action and initiatives. Even the things he did right, like meeting an unknown middle-class woman to talk about urban poverty, did not get reflected in his politics.”

Ramachandran is right: Rahul Gandhi has a communication problem. Even worse, it’s one of his own making. He may think the right things, but we’d never know. In some ways, he emerges from this book, for better and worse, as the anti-Arvind Kejriwal; comfortable thinking only in general, not personal terms; incapable of taking over the media narrative; unable to create a political movement. Of course, Arvind Kejriwal would be a disaster in government, as a minister. Gandhi’s only hope is to show that here, too, he is the opposite of Kejriwal.

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Decoding Rahul Gandhi
Author: Aarthi Ramachandran
Publisher: Tranquebar
Pages: 270
Price: Rs 350