Rahul Gandhi Reveals His Grand Strategy For 2024-Will It Work?

On 1 September, Congress leader Rahul Gandhi revealed his strategy for success in next year’s general elections to leaders of the I.N.D.I.A. coalition in Mumbai. According to press reports, his plan is to unravel three illusions about Prime Minister Narendra Modi:

The first illusion: that Modi and his government are not corrupt. On the contrary, Gandhi referred to market reports which allude to collusion between Modi and the Adani group.

The second illusion: that Modi has improved India’s standing in the world. Gandhi does not agree; instead, he believes the Modi government has failed to adequately tackle our issues with China because it is mired in ‘administrative paralysis’.

The third illusion: that Modi is a champion of the Other Backward Classes (OBCs). No, says Gandhi, Modi has only paid lip service to the OBC community.

What does this strategy mean, and can it work?

It is a Modi-centric approach which confirms an observation made in Swarajya's pages last year: that, the opposition can hope to defeat the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in its strongholds only if they can make Modi unpopular.

In tactical terms, that means more Modi-bashing. But this is not a novel approach since the Congress party has sought to do little else but malign Modi, both directly, and by the use of a pliant mainstream media, ever since the man became Chief Minister of Gujarat over two decades ago.

They have called him names, questioned his character, insulted him, questioned his intent, and called him a failure. And every time they have done so, in three successive elections to the Gujarat assembly plus two general elections, this strategy has only boomeranged repeatedly, and devastatingly, on the Congress.

They have scoured and exhausted the phyla of taxonomical classes searching for vile appellations. They devised vituperative metaphors which no self-respecting politician should ever employ in public discourse. Their revilement has been uncivilized; their slander, scurrilous. Yet, in spite of it all, Modi has only gone from strength to strength, ironically at the cost of the Congress.

However, if Rahul Gandhi now wishes to disregard the political history of his own party in this century, and once more use a strategy which has only resulted in persistent, counter-productive failures, then we have no option but to assess its viability.

Regarding the first illusion of incorruptibility, Gandhi needs to understand that making mere allegations is not going to cut any ice with the electorate. He has to demonstrate a clear, irrefutable, cognizable, quid-pro-quo link between Adani and Modi if he wants to show that Modi is corrupt. Bandying vague reports of round-tripping or manipulation of the markets, prepared by shadowy foreign entities, will not help either.

One reason is that these reports pertain only to Adani; they show no Modi hand. 

Two, the motives of such reports are themselves suspect; many believe they were prepared with the intention of making money from a resultant fall in Adani’s share prices. 

Third, the narrative sought to be set by these reports triggers a louder, more forceful, counter-narrative of Gandhi being a cat’s-paw in a larger, Soros-ian, anti-India ploy. 

And fourth, the white noise generated by the two conflicting narratives bores voters, takes the focus off Modi, and permits Adani to successfully generate its own victimhood narrative.

In the process, it is Gandhi who ends up looking like a neo-Marxian Luddite killjoy who keeps the wrong company on his frequent foreign trips, and just can’t digest the rise of a genuine Indian global conglomerate; and Modi’s image of incorruptibility remains firmly in place.

For the second illusion which Gandhi wishes to dispel, he has chosen to use India’s frayed ties with China to show that Modi has not improved India’s standing in the world. He has a set speech which he repeats, about Modi’s pusillanimity in tackling Chinese belligerence, and Modi’s inability to aggressively recover lost lands.

This is senseless folly, because it is amply clear to everyone except the Congress that six decades of a meaningless ‘Hindi-Chini-Bhai-Bhai’ policy expired upon the Doklam Plateau in 2017 during the first Sino-Indian standoff. Even the Chinese know it, which is why they have redoubled their efforts in Aksai Chin since 2020, where a grimmer standoff now prevails.

Rather than showing Modi up in a poor light, it instead highlights the resoluteness this government has demonstrated in contesting the Sino-Pakistani nuclear nexus, the rapid pace at which border infrastructure is being built (to compensate for a preceding decade of Congress dithering), and the military capacity-building this government has tenaciously undertaken since 2014.

Further, it allows the growth of a counter-narrative which contrasts the sacrifices of our brave Jawans at the Galwan clash with Rahul Gandhi’s praise for China at Cambridge earlier this year (specifically, and gallingly to Indians, China’s Belt-and-Road Initiative, part of which passes through Pakistan-occupied Kashmir). And Modi’s strongman image remains intact.

The third illusion sought to be dispelled is caste-specific, and purely political. Gandhi’s emphasis on the OBC community is possibly a signal that he and his dotted coalition realize the limits and risks of depending too much on the minority vote. They also see the tremendous draw Modi has within the community, being an OBC himself.

But there are problems with this plan and conflicts of interest too. 

First, the OBC vote is not monolithic; loyalties vary within constituencies. 

Second, attacking Modi for not allegedly having done enough for OBCs is not going to increase the index of opposition unity; only more alliances will. 

Third, too much focus on the OBCs could alienate the Muslim vote, leading to lowered turnouts or, just as fatally for this coalition, a splitting of the identity vote. Asaduddin Owaisi, for example, will surely be delighted to hear of this plan, since it validates his bemoaning of a dwindling Muslim voice.

Fourth, traditional loyalties could be affected in the ceding of space and seat-sharing among the dotted coalition. If that happens, vote transferability will be hit, and the BJP could become the main beneficiary. 

And fifth is the biggest problem of all: for those constituents of this coalition who are wholly dependent on the identity vote (most are), attacking Modi means attacking Hindus, Hinduism and Hindutva. This would be largely unacceptable to OBCs, who are devout Hindus.

For example, minister Udayanidhi Stalin of the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) in Tamil Nadu recently declared in public that Sanathana Dharma had to be eradicated like dengue or malaria. Stalin may have made this remark to shore up his party’s own position in the state, but the impact in this digital age is pan-national. The net result is that the more the DMK and other parties like them insult Hinduism, the more their ally, the Congress, gets hurt in the rest of the country. 

If Rahul Gandhi is after the OBC vote, then this is not the way. He cannot sit idly by while an ally shaves against the grain, and naively expect OBCs to not feel insulted. 

Consequently, in conclusion, we see that Rahul Gandhi’s grand strategy of maligning Modi through a three-pronged approach of corruption tautologies, border bellicosity, and OBC-wooing, are more likely to be counterproductive to Congress interests, and put more political pressure on the workability of a creaky coalition, than impact Modi or the BJP. 

If this is the strategy he has openly adopted, then he will also have to openly accept responsibility for its failure next year.