Should Rahul Gandhi be a reconciler or a hellraiser?

In his maiden speech as a newly minted Leader of the Opposition (LoP), Rahul Gandhi spoke a lot. On July 1 in Parliament, during the motion of thanks to the President’s address, he spoke for over 100 minutes. One wondered if that was an unmistakable verbal excess or an absolute necessity.There will be cheerleaders on either side of the aisle who will take extreme positions on Rahul’s speech. Politics has anyway come to function on narrow binaries across the globe for some years now. The Trump-Biden binary played out last week. The Marine Le Pen-Macron binary has taken a new dimension in France. The rest of Europe has not been left out of the experience. It was more than evident in recent weeks when the European parliament elected new members.However, if one were to take a step back and ask, could Rahul have played it differently on July 1, then, an alternative reasoning would emerge. The 2024 general election results were the most sobering after a decade. It offered respite from the heat of bigoted ideologies. The people of India created a fine balance with the results. Therefore, the question is, should Rahul have built on this new balance? Should he have been a reconciler? Instead, did he choose to, deliberately or otherwise, be a hellraiser, a muckraker and a kind of anarchist spirit?The frontal attack he made in his long, unstructured speech on the prime minister, the Speaker, Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), other individuals and aspects of the establishment was like saying: ‘The system worked against me for 10 years and now is my opportunity to blow it up’; ‘I have the pulpit of the LoP and I will use it to settle scores’; ‘I will create doubt about every little element that the system is made of’. There was bitterness and anger that he brought in, in good measure to Parliament, even while he tried to be an apostle of peace and non-violence. medium111429379On the contrary, a reconciler looking back into history, and far into the future, taking into consideration the demographics of the young and the diversity of our cultures and geography, would have perhaps told himself something like this: ‘The system punished me’; ‘I suffered enormously, but I will set new terms of engagement’; ‘I will gently and permanently reform the system’; ‘There will be new politics, a new society, and new hope’. The symbolic act of embracing his tormentors would have greater resonance now. The timing was just right to defeat and diminish them.Even if one thought that Rahul was entitled to his ideas of a shock treatment to the Modi and BJP system, he could have used words more carefully. Language offers a range of figures of speech, which he seems oblivious to. He could have perhaps said, all that he said for over 100 minutes, with a certain panache, relish, mixed with doses of irony, sarcasm and humour. This perhaps would have expanded his follower base.Language heals and makes fresh memories. Language can also be provocative. Last week also was the 49th anniversary of the Emergency. The Congress was upset about it being mentioned in Parliament. But in the run-up to the Emergency, language played a crucial role. Rahul’s grandmother Indira Gandhi’s biggest defence about the Emergency proclamation was that Jayaprakash Narayan’s language was provocative. Indira accused him of trying to provoke the army and the police to rebel. The context in which JP spoke was forgotten but the words became a grand excuse for a dark time in post-Independent India.History sometimes offers strange lessons, and as it is proverbially said, those who don’t heed them are condemned to repeat it. Coincidentally, June 5, the day when the 2024 results were just about seeping in, was the day when JP had given a call for “total revolution” in 1974. medium nocaptionhttps://youtu.be/SDmQHFg6qF4?si=XhGbyjOhXmwVF__rRahul is not just the LoP but the leader of a grand old party with a pan-India presence. His words will have consequences. The reconciliatory method would have helped put confidence in people who had deserted his party. To foreground maturity and patience was central to make a path to seek a majority on his own.Fiery speeches are best left to regional party stars and former socialists, given that the communists have anyway lost ground. They are smaller parties and occupy smaller corners of India. What they say or do may have a limited consequence. Rahul will be judged with a different yardstick. He will be weighed on a different scale. Hence the reconciler role would have worked better for him.It appears that Rahul is playing to the social media gallery. He has realised that there is a constituency that expects him to speak about Narendra Modi, the BJP and their Hindutva ecosystem in a certain way. He perhaps knows that they expect him to be aggressive, irreverent and unconventional in a house full of conventions. He is probably told often that conventions are not there just for him to follow. The BJP anyway violates them all the time with impunity. That they did not make the slightest concession when they dominated Parliament for a decade or even after their numbers were reduced in the 2024 polls (recall the debate on the election of the Speaker). medium nocaptionhttps://youtu.be/Holx8UX_f0s?si=e3GbIZ2nSsZCaAD7With this nature of counsel and context, perhaps Rahul thought it was better to play to the constituency he has newly acquired, and to those who have stayed loyal to him (the Congress saw a less than 2% jump in vote share from 19.4% in 2019 to 21.19% in 2024). He perhaps thought it was time to give it back to Modi for all the humiliation that he and his party have heaped on him in the past decade. Did it become about himself and his family?Perhaps Rahul thought being reconciler was not the game of a winner but that of a loser — a tag that he has often been saddled with. But a more basic question has to do with the interpretation of his win. In the first place, is it accurate? He has undoubtedly made a dent but is it correct for him to assume that there is a “tectonic shift” in Indian politics and that he has “blown up” the Modi and Hindutva ecosystem? Will the interpretation of the results this way be quietly judged as arrogance? Or has he assumed that to loudly claim victory is important to drown the contours of defeat that are just forming. Is it a ploy to remain unscrutinised for the relative and limited achievements of his party?The fact is that the Congress has not expanded its social base in any state, and if it has done well in Uttar Pradesh with just 2% votes and two seats in the assembly, it is the innovation of the Samajwadi Party that helped them.Interestingly, all Congress analysis of the 2024 election is currently centered around only Uttar Pradesh. They have forgotten their performance outside of Uttar Pradesh as an independent party, and not as an ally. medium111429548So, is Rahul dancing with borrowed plumes? Will his aggression scare his new and old allies? If the Congress has to grow as a party, after all, it has to grow at the expense of these regional allies. Will his speed hurt him?Finally, Rahul, who a few days ago kept waving the pocket edition of the Constitution at everybody he came across, suddenly in Parliament, on July 1, started showing religious figures and religious symbols. It was an immaculate contradiction. He had become a schoolteacher with flash cards, trying to prove he knew enough about religion. He also tried to acquire a moralistic perch through this exercise. Whatever his reason for doing so may be, religion is a landmine that a politician should avoid stepping on. He should have remained inside the frame of the Constitution he had nicely created as his niche. Sadly, he had disrupted the harmony of his own efforts.It also appears Rahul has confused the cultural for the religious. He and his party cannot be deracinated but to find the right cultural idiom to express is very different from invoking the arguments of religion. Lalu Prasad Yadav, the Congress’ ally, in his parliamentary speeches was never religious but deeply cultural. Perhaps Rahul can ask him about it when he meets him the next time to make another mutton dish.Read more from the author here.