It's game over for the Gandhis but Congress has a chance to begin anew

The prime minister, a former tea seller from Gujarat, makes a far more credible champion of the poor than a globe-trotting champagne socialist from Delhi with a famous last name

Can India’s Congress Party survive without the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty with which it has become synonymous? For dynasty loyalists, habituated to treating India’s oldest political party as a family fiefdom, the thought is heretical. But they need to acknowledge a harsh truth: 49-year-old Rahul Gandhi has become a liability for the party his family has helmed for much of the past 70 years.

Renewed debate about the Congress Party’s future follows a second consecutive drubbing by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party in the national elections in May. Congress won only 52 of 543 seats in the directly