Responses to Ramachandra Guha’s column “How the Gandhi family has helped Modi consolidate power.”

Why liberal critiques of Rahul Gandhi ignore institutional capture

Soon after the 2024 general elections, I chanced upon a political scientist at Vienna’s iconic Café Central. Over coffee, he remarked that the true tragedy of modern Indian liberalism is its penchant for perfectionism in an age of existential crisis.

He was referring to the comfortable habit of Delhi’s intelligentsia of judging the Congress leadership by the standards of a peacetime democracy, rather than the asymmetric warfare of a computational autocracy.

We are told, with varying degrees of sociological certainty, that the Congress remains a “family firm” and that Rahul Gandhi lacks the “gravitas” and “curriculum vitae” required to unseat a formidable electoral machine.

This assessment, while satisfying to the purist, is not merely harsh: it is analytically flawed. It reduces the existential struggle for the soul of the Republic to a critique of the personal failings of a single individual, unwittingly validating the very playbook designed by Narendra Modi and Amit Shah.

The critique relies on an intellectual silo that deliberately ignores the terrifying asymmetry. To judge the opposition without addressing the ruling party’s unprecedented concentration of capital – manifest in the Bharatiya Janata Party’s Rs 10,000-crore war chest – is an analytical farce. The modern BJP is a corporate-bureaucratic behemoth boasting state-of-the-art infrastructure in every taluka, sustained by the deep, century-old societal penetration of the Sangh Parivar.

Finally, the critics over-index on individual personality traits while under-indexing on the profound socio-political mutation that has occurred within the Indian electorate. The rise of the BJP is not the result of Rahul Gandhi’s alleged lack of discipline; it is the consequence of a decades-long, meticulously crafted cultural and ideological project that has successfully shifted the centrist gravity of Indian politics towards a muscular majoritarianism.

Today, the entire state architecture – from the judiciary to a capitulated media – has synchronised its vocabulary with the government’s rhetoric. To mock Gandhi’s direct public outreach as “gimmickry” under such total institutional capture is laziness. Labelling the chief targets of this ruthless state apparatus as its accomplices shifts the moral burden away from the institutions and corporations that actually broke our democracy.

The air of indestructibility that envelops the current regime may well unravel in the years ahead, driven by economic distress, joblessness and institutional decay. When that moment comes, the alternative will not emerge from the immaculate conception of a textbook liberal leader. It will have to be forged from the messy,........

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