Soon after the general elections of 2024, I met a young Congress legislator. He asked me for five pieces of advice for his leader, Rahul Gandhi. I said I had only one; that Priyanka Gandhi should not run for the Lok Sabha from Wayanad. I added that I was certain the advice would be disregarded.

There is little doubt that Rahul Gandhi’s Bharat Jodo Yatra helped in enhancing his credibility, in portraying him as being a man of the people. Yet the Yatra’s gains were frittered away by the reassertion, after the elections, of the Congress as a family firm.

Priyanka Gandhi won the Wayanad seat (as safe for her as Gandhinagar is for Amit Shah), and spoke grandiosely about how she and her brother were uniting the country, her representing the South and he the North. Then, for a parliamentary debate on the Constitution’s 75th anniversary, the Congress chose Priyanka as the lead speaker, even though it was her own grandmother who sabotaged the Constitution by imposing the Emergency.

Meanwhile, the Congress winning 99 seats in the general elections encouraged the coterie of sycophants around Rahul Gandhi to proclaim that he was now a prime minister-in-waiting. These claims were amplified by intellectuals and journalists in Delhi, whose sterling anti-Hindutva credentials were clouded by their lack of judgment, and perhaps by the seductions of being rajgurus.

Two years later, we can see that this sense of elation was premature. The odd state unit of the Congress (such as Kerala) remains well-organised, and capable of winning the odd assembly election. In most other parts of India, the party has steadily lost ground. The Bharatiya Janata Party is now the natural party of governance in Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh, Haryana, and several other states where the Congress was once dominant. Rahul Gandhi has been incapable of arresting this slide. According to a recent report in The Print, since Rahul assumed a formal leadership role in the Congress around 2008, the number of Congress MLAs nationwide has dropped by almost half, from 1,204 to 676.

I have met and corresponded with Rahul Gandhi, and know him to be a decent human being. Even without this slight acquaintance, I would have much sympathy for him because of the personal tragedies he has........

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