David Turns Goliath

Snubbing tricky allies and collecting 87,000 campaign kms, Rahul Gandhi touches new heights

Using the examples of a basketball coach, David in the battle against Goliath, and TE Lawrence taking on the mighty Ottoman Turks with his rag-tag bunch of bedouins, bestselling analyst of turning point trends, Malcolm Gladwell says surprise victories are results of two things: When the underdog chooses not to play by Goliath’s rules, and when they work harder than anyone else.
By insisting that the Congress go it alone in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, Rahul Gandhi changed the rules of the game. And by traversing 87,000 kilometers addressing 110 rallies in punishing heat, he worked harder than most.The results have been remarkable. In Uttar Pradesh the Congress upped its tally from nine to 21, the same as Mayawati; nationwide the party got 203, the second highest after 1991 when it won 221 seats following Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination.Rahul, who will be 39 next month, entered active politics only in 2004 and for the longest time his low-key approach was the despair of Congressmen. They couldn’t understand why a young man who could fast-track his way to prime ministership wanted to work at the grassroots level. Why, they secretly questioned, couldn’t it have been the other Gandhi, Priyanka, who was leagues ahead in the charisma stakes, in the fray.
But Rahul, not to be hurried, was determined to be the humble party worker. In his case he lived the cliche. He travelled to Amethi, his constituency, every two months, and in the last two years, he’s made over two dozen trips to travel across the state that he was determined to wrest back for the Congress. “He has just been going to schools, colleges, youth seminars punctuated with visits to dalit villages and homes of distressed farmers,” says Congress spokesperson in UP Akhilesh Pratap Singh.
Like his father, he is familiar with most voters in Amethi and when he interacts with them in a village, he just “solves their little problems like getting a water tap installed in someone’s house. He also doesn’t make false promises. Once a man asked him in one of his campaigns in Amethi that the last time he had visited he had promised him a job. Rahul immediately said, ‘I don’t promise jobs. Study well and may be you will get one’,” recalls journalist Vijay Simha who reports on the Congress Party and who has been keenly following Rahul’s progress.
The similarity with his father doesn’t end there. Rahul’s style of functioning is people-oriented. Like Rajiv Gandhi he often jumps into crowds, hugs people, kisses their children, makes it a point to eat in a dalit’s house and seems perfectly comfortable talking to people by the side of an open sewage.
So while the opposition was ridiculing his Discovery of India yatra and his photo-op with UK minister David Miliband at the house of a dalit farmer, Rahul was going beyond mere symbolism and building a real bond with the down-trodden. “What he has achieved in UP has given great thrust to the Congress and the real results would be seen in the assembly elections in the state three years later,” says senior Lucknow journalist Suman Gupta. “The results are a complete rejection of caste and communal politics and voters turning out for development. This has a lot to do with Rahul wooing emergent India’s young voters, who have no space for caste and regional politics. They want jobs, amenities, money, and that’s what Rahul has been talking about.”
Maharashtra Pradesh Congress Committee general secretary Sanjay Dutt recalls, “While supervising the preparations for rallies in Maharashtra, Rajasthan and Haryana, I saw him travelling tirelessly in 45 to 48 degree celsius, asking partymen whether the people there were provided enough tents, drinking water, first aid in the event of sun strokes. On his way to the public meetings I have seen him interacting with people on the roads, bystanders from the crowd. To my experience in the rallies, what helped the party to score was his way of explaining the nuclear deal and its impact on the future of the nation. He said we will not hesitate to put the government at stake while sticking on with the deal. That helped greatly to clear doubts among the younger generation.”
While most parties have been using the totem of youth, Rahul Gandhi made wooing that demographic his one-point agenda. His complete rehauling of Youth Congress, traditionally a den of thuggish leaders, is a pointer. As also his insistence on greater allocation of tickets to the under-40.In the Congress finally there is acknowledgement of Rahul’s role in the historic win and the clamour has begun to appoint him to the Cabinet. Typically, Rahul responded by saying he’d join only if he was forced to “by the prime minister or his boss.”
Unexpected wins, points out Gladwell, are anomalous. It’s not as if Davids win all the time. He then quotes political scientist Ivan Arreguín-Toft who recently looked at every war fought in the past two hundred years between strong and weak combatants, and found that in 71.5 per cent of the cases the Goliaths won. Rahul Gandhi has just turned into a Goliath himself; he now needs to learn to fight the conventional battle well.