Opinion: Rahul Gandhi’s Guerrilla Tactics Are Proving To Be Counterproductive

Rahul Gandhi needs to get his act together. Unless he scores in the upcoming Assembly elections, he cannot hope to lead the INDIA alliance

At 55, Rahul Gandhi can be pardoned for getting restless. The prime minister’s chair which he covets is getting increasingly beyond his clasp. He could have had it if only he was in 2004 or 2009 as dogged as he is now.

The Congress thought it would be better off with Manmohan Singh as the prime minister given his tendency not to rock the boat. The communists whose support counted would have heckled Rahul at every step of the way. And being a non-serious and part-time politician, he deferred to his mother Sonia Gandhi who kept an eagle eye on Manmohan Singh and got her programmes passed in the cabinet.

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Ever since the 2024 Lok Sabha verdict in which the Congress fared much better than the expectations and the BJP punched below its weight, Rahul has been itching to dethrone Prime Minister Narendra Modi given the fact in his third innings, as it were, Modi is dependent on JDU and TDP for survival. The truth, however, is the INDIA alliance is almost moribund and its constituents resent the self-anointed leadership role of Rahul.

Egged by the youth brigade in Congress, therefore, he resorts to guerrilla tactics to both stay relevant and gain attention both in the Parliament and outside, especially on television and social media. His holding forth against the Modi regime before the foreign audience, especially in the UK and the USA where the Indian diaspora is in large numbers, hasn’t earned him rich dividends, as NRIs, while being interested in Indian developments, do not have stakes in the electoral battles, as NRIs with Indian passports have to descend on their constituencies where they are registered as voters to cast their votes.

Of course, they can influence their parents and other relatives back home, but in this day and age, people are fiercely independent. Just as youngsters do not pay much heed to the advice and sermons of their elders, the elders too do not succumb to their wards’ views, especially on India and its politics.

Having realised the futility of thundering from foreign pulpits, Rahul has been trying to be the cynosure of Indian voters from the ground zero, India, itself. His Lok Sabha speeches are unfortunately long on rhetoric and short on facts.

Despite the immunity against defamation conferred by article 105 for utterances made in the Parliament, Rahul chooses the outside space for his taunts. His first salvo was against Narendra Modi couched in seeming generality—why all crooks turn out to be Modis was his first major taunt. He thought he would get away with it as the alleged scamsters bearing the Modi surname was Lalit Modi of IPL infamy and Nirav Modi, the diamantaire, who together with his uncle Mehul Choksi is alleged to have siphoned off funds from Punjab National Bank and is now a fugitive in London. He was sentenced to serve prison term and lost his Lok Sabha membership which was later restored by the Apex Court.

Last month he tried to quote from retired General Naravane’s unpublished memoirs Moment of Truth in the course of his speech on the President’s address to embarrass his bête noire PM Modi.

When that was disallowed on the ground that the rules didn’t permit invocation of an unpublished work, the women MPs of Congress were sought to be let loose on Modi when he was to give his thanksgiving speech but the putative operation Shikandi, consisting in gheraoing of the PM, was foiled by the timely intervention of the Speaker Om Birla.

He tried to play to the TV audience by calling his former colleague in Congress and now a BJP Minister in the Modi government as a ‘traitor’. Then he tugged at the sleeves of Minister Prahlad Joshi outside the Parliament building.

The latest in the series of guerrilla tactics was shirtless protest inside Bharat Mandapam where India was hosting the annual AI summit. The stripteasers after sneaking into the venue removed their shirts to reveal their vests, badmouthing the PM with the jibe he was compromised while dealing with POTUS Trump on the bilateral tariff matter.

When the media cried foul, the Congress apologists rationalised the partial striptease on the ground it was kosher in the Western world, little realising that while nudism doesn’t raise eyebrows in Sweden, in India even semi-nudism is considered indecent and thus violative of one of the exceptions to freedom of expression.

All his guerrilla tactics are proving to be counterproductive as evident from the successive routs in the assembly elections post-2024 Lok Sabha results. Rahul Gandhi needs to get his act together. Unless he scores in the upcoming Assembly elections, he cannot hope to lead the INDIA alliance where regional satraps are loath to yield to him whose only claim to fame is his ancestry.

Some of his antics haven’t gone down well with the Congress old guard. His alliance partners, notably SP and TMC, have made it clear that while the protest itself was justified, but the venue, the AI summit where the global who’s who had gathered, was wrong. They were obviously worried about the rub-off effect inevitable in a pre-poll alliance.

The writer is a senior columnist. He tweets @smurlidharan. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect News18’s views.

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