With his formal elevation as Congress president, Rahul Gandhi now faces several challenges to lift his party from the doldrums.
FROM a bespectacled teenager who hugged his father and sobbed when his grandmother’s (Indira Gandhi) pyre was lit, to the shy young man who stood hesitantly in a line of Congress M.P.s in the Central Hall of Parliament in order to greet his mother Sonia Gandhi after she was elected leader of the Congress Parliamentary Party in 2004, clutching a single rose behind his back, Rahul Gandhi has traversed a long road but still remains an enigma. And this is what makes his elevation as Congress president interesting, notwithstanding the fact that his lacklustre leadership and failure to win any major election since he assumed an active role in the party have been dissected threadbare by his political opponents.
Rahul Gandhi took over as Congress president at the party headquarters in New Delhi on December 16 amid fanfare and celebrations by Congress workers, after Mullappally Ramachandran, president of the party’s central election authority, completed the formality of handing over the election certificate to him.
In speeches filled with nostalgia and emotion, Rahul Gandhi and Sonia Gandhi spoke on how they had faced the “politics of hate” without getting bogged down by it and promised to continue to fight for the “secular and democratic fabric of India”.
“The Congress will defend the voice of every single Indian and fight politics that crushes people,” Rahul Gandhi said, and accused Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) of “setting the nation on fire”.
“The Congress took India to the 21st century, but the PM today is taking us back to the medieval times. We are now being compelled to imagine that businesses can be built without harmony; that only one man himself is the voice of reason; and that expertise, experience and knowledge can be cast aside for personal glory,” he said.
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