A Role For Rahul Gandhi-Its time for him to show what his vision for the country is- Minhaz Merchant

On June 19, 2010, Rahul Gandhi turns 40. That was the age his father Rajiv became prime minister. So what are Rahuls views on foreign policy, On nuclear weapons security, On Pakistani state terrorism, On Maoism, On economic policy, On dynasty. Apart from a few thoughtful issues raised in his private correspondence with PM Manmohan Singh who at his press conference on Monday endorsed him as a future cabinet minister we know little of the AICC general secretarys worldview. While he rebuilds Congress electability in UP, Bihar, West Bengal and Kerala all governed by non-UPA parties and up for assembly polls in 2010-12 with his charismatic grassroots approach, Rahul must engage a broader national constituency with his thinking on Indias key strategic challenges. At 40, PM Rajiv Gandhi had a clear-eyed view of the world. He sought global nuclear disarmament. He implemented Panchayati Raj. He engaged with then Pakistani PM Benazir Bhutto. He spearheaded IT revolution.
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The Gandhi scion has shown considerable skill in grassroots work

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Dynasty was farthest from his mind. His children Rahul and Priyanka were 14 and 12 when he became PM on October 31,1984. His wife Sonia was viscerally against politics. Nephew Varun was barely five and sisterin-law Maneka permanently estranged. Rajiv thus conducted his politics without a thought to Nehru-Gandhi dynastic succession unlike mother Indira who openly declared Sanjay her heir in the mid-1970s. Which model will Rahul follow His fathers or his grandmothers. Interestingly, great-grandfather Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru was no admirer of dynastic politics either even though he allowed himself to be convinced to appoint daughter Indira Congress president in 1959 when she was 41. It was an act out of character with Nehrus principled belief in meritocracy. It was only after Pandit Nehrus sudden death in May 1964, and on new Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastris polite but well-meaning insistence, that Indira joined the cabinet as minister for information & broadcasting. The rest is dynastic history.

Can Rahul reverse that history Does he want to. The principal argument in favour of the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty is that it is legitimised by democracy : the Gandhis are voted to their Lok Sabha constituencies by huge margins. The 74 MPs in the current Lok Sabha who have serious criminal charges against them would be delighted by this argument. They too stand legitimised by our democracy: each won his/her Lok Sabha seats by a comfortable margin,just like the Gandhis, Scindias, Pilots, Deoras and Hoodas.
In an imperfect electoral democracy where feudal instincts traduce merit, history-sheeters with money and dynasts with bloodlines will often win elections. Neither should overestimate the legitimacy of such electoral endorsement. Rahul understands these arguments in all their delicate nuances. An intelligent and sensitive man whose common touch makes him a formidable political opponent, he concedes, he owes his position to his birth. He is not proud of a system that allows such feudal anomalies and wants to bring internal democracy to the Youth Congress with transparent elections so that young men and women of merit can enter politics without the shoehorn of a surname.

Rahul is silent about applying the same high standard to the top echelons of the party, including the post of president which his mother Sonia has held for 12 consecutive years a record in the Congresss 125-year history. (Even Jawaharlal Nehru was party president for a total of only eight years, four of them consecutively,from 1951 to 1954.) If Rahul has his fathers sense of noblesse oblige and he probably does this is a situation that should make him feel uncomfortable. Does he have the political will to do something about it At the moment, perhaps not. But the gentle decline of the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty has already been underwritten, partly by Rahul himself. He is unmarried so his own progeny are unlikely to ever be Indias PM. Varuns political extremism rules him out. Priyanka and her 10-year-old son Raihan Rajiv Vadra could keep the dynasty relevant for two decades but by the time Raihan is 35, in 2035, and ready for office, India will have a more enlightened electorate. It will reject feudocracy and endorse meritocracy. That does not automatically rule dynasts out.But it does not automatically rule them in.

What about the mini-dynasts who, like amoebae, have proliferated in the states since the 1980s, first tentatively, then increasingly assertively in the dynastic footsteps legitimised by the Nehru-Gandhis. They too will eventually wither in the face of an electorate that over the next generation will acquire education and empowerment. Neither surnames nor money will win votes from enlightened voters.
For the present though, Rahul will, despite his well-mannered reluctance, be PM within the next few years. How long he remains prime minister will depend on the policies he and his cabinet deploy to combat terrorism, Maoism, poverty, corruption and the divisiveness of caste, region and religion as India becomes part of a putative G-3 along with China and the US over the next decade.

At 40, PM Rajiv Gandhi was implementing policy. At 40, Rahul needs to spend as much time publicly articulating his own policy vision as he does refurbishing his 125-year-old party across India.(The writer is the author of a biography of Rajiv Gandhi and chairman of a media group).
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