An eighth-class student from Gandhi Nagar, Charvi Solanki, woke up at 3 am in the morning to attend the Congress Working Committee meet held in Ahmedabad on April 8. She and her mother reached the venue at 5.30 am, but since they had no VIP pass, Charvi had to wait till 5pm so she could meet Rahul Gandhi, whom she obviously idolised. This young girl finds his speeches on a `united and secular’ India inspiring. It turns out that Rahul Gandhi has a huge fan following in Gujarat, and thousands of young people flock to attend his rallies.

Gandhi (and his party colleagues) needs to ask why he has not been able to transform this popularity into winning votes. There is little point in holding one meeting after another, even if it be in the BJP stronghold of Gujarat, if the Congress has, in the last eleven years, not been able to build a strong alternative power structure to take on the BJP juggernaut.

The central leadership of the Congress, led by none other than Rahul Gandhi, continues to issue pompous-sounding statements of organisational rehaul and of the induction of younger people at the district level, but they have failed to initiate basic operational tenets that are a must for any political party. To cite an example, the NDA’s landslide victory in the Maharashtra assembly elections saw the Mahavikas Aghadi, led by the Congress, accusing the ruling party of rigging, especially since there were major discrepancies between polled and counted votes in EVMs. This same accusation was made after the Haryana and UP state elections. What stopped the Congress from taking to the streets and starting a sustained movement against electoral fraud? It is simply not enough to be knocking at the doors of the Supreme Court on every issue. The Congress needs to take to social media and highlight these issues instead of........

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