NEW DELHI: Five months spent traversing his nation on foot helped the scion of India’s most well-known dynasty shed his playboy picture — however the street to reviving his dismal political fortunes will likely be a more durable journey.
Rahul Gandhi has for years struggled to problem the electoral juggernaut of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, whose Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) holds a near-monopoly on energy by means of nationalist appeals to the nation’s Hindu majority.
Modi has revelled in casting his chief opponent, dubbed an “empty suit” in leaked US embassy cables from 2005, as an out-of-touch princeling extra keen on luxurious and self-indulgence than preventing to helm the world’s largest democracy.
His Congress celebration, a once-mighty power with a proud position in ending British colonial rule 75 years in the past, is now a shadow of its former self, tormented by infighting and defections.
But a choice to invoke certainly one of India’s best-known protest traditions, flanked by bizarre folks, has given him an air of authority that had thus far eluded him in public life.
“Rightly or wrongly, the BJP’s campaign of him being an incompetent person was the dominant perception — he has managed to change that,” impartial political analyst Parsa Venkateshwar Rao Junior instructed AFP.
Since his lengthy trek started on India’s southernmost tip final September, Gandhi has struck a chord with fiery speeches and affectionate interactions with the hundreds of bystanders which have lined streets to observe his procession.
The marketing campaign harkens again to the well-known 1930 trek by Rahul’s unrelated namesake Mahatma Gandhi, whose march to protest a salt tax imposed by British rulers was a seminal second in India’s independence battle.
It has bypassed the nation’s conventional media in an effort to achieve the general public instantly, with an in-house social media equipment and interviews with on-line influencers.
Footage of Gandhi on the street exhibits him with a brand new commanding posture, sporting an unkempt salt-and-pepper beard grown through the march and trailed by smiling kids.
His 3,500-kilometre (2,175-mile) journey — not all by foot — concludes on Monday within the frosty Himalayan foothills of Kashmir, after months spent finessing each his widespread contact and a voter pitch capitalising on widespread financial insecurity.
“The job of the nation is to make sure that you feel protected,” he mentioned this month whereas sharing kebabs and playfully joking about his candy tooth in a YouTube interview with a well-liked meals blogger.
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‘Unite India’
The “Bharat Jodo Yatra” (“Unite India March”) has common Gandhi right into a extra credible inheritor to the legacy of his father, grandmother and great-grandfather, every one a former prime minister, starting with independence chief Jawaharlal Nehru.
But Gandhi has already steered Congress to 2 landslide election defeats in opposition to the seemingly unconquerable BJP, whose victory in subsequent yr’s nationwide polls is nearly universally thought-about a foregone conclusion by consultants.
“He has managed to redefine his public image,” Rao mentioned. “Whether it will translate into votes, I am not very sure.”
Congress was dominant through the first half-century after Indian independence however now governs in simply three of India’s 28 states.
The celebration weathered a messy and public inner brawl final yr over who would take workplace as its president after the resignation of Sonia Gandhi — Rahul’s mom, widowed when her husband Rajiv was assassinated in a suicide assault in 1991.
Several leaders of different opposition events traditionally aligned with Congress spurned Rahul’s entreaties to affix his countrywide trek, an uncharitable estimation of his prospects subsequent yr.
His exhortations of non secular tolerance and India’s secular traditions have up to now didn’t dent the BJP’s muscular advocacy for the Hindu majority at a time of rising intolerance in opposition to Muslims.
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‘He had no selection’
But his determination to undertake the march additionally displays his largest hurdle: the enduring energy of Prime Minister Modi, whose talent in cultivating a populist public picture properly outclasses his personal.
“Rahul Gandhi himself has said that he had no choice but to go for the (march) in order to connect with people and report it through social media,” Zoya Hasan, an educational and political scientist primarily based in New Delhi, instructed AFP.
Modi is the beneficiary of a media surroundings largely in thrall to the BJP’s agenda, with Indian press freedoms declining considerably since he took workplace in 2014, in keeping with worldwide watchdogs.
While the prime minister’s every day actions are reported on frantically by cable information broadcasters, Gandhi’s exploits have largely didn’t function except they forged him in a unfavorable gentle.
“Anything that undermines the opposition is prime news,” Hasan added.
“Anything that is positive which actually brings people together, as the Bharat Jodo Yatra is seeking to do, is not.”
