India’s late Mughals make for some of the saddest history imaginable. From the doltish Bahadur Shah I, Aurangzeb’s son and successor in 1707, unable even to enforce his writ in a Lahore mosque, to the wretched Bahadur Shah II, famous for starring in the last act 150 years later, in 1857.

It is difficult for the Indian reading Sir Jadunath Sarkar’s four-volume work on Mughal decline to not feel shame and horror at how helpless, craven and incompetent the performance of Delhi’s great dynasty was. There are no heroes to redeem a story that is, against all Aristotelian dramatic principle, relentlessly downward in trajectory.

It is 2015 in Delhi and another dynasty is in an advanced state of decay. However, the idea that something bigger than family reputation is at stake doesn’t seem to have registered on the Gandhis, either mother or son. As state after state is being taken away from their control, it is all normal and business as usual at 10, Janpath.

If there is alarm, shame or indeed worry, at the fact that an inheritance that belongs to all Indians is being squandered by Sonia and Rahul Gandhi, there is no sign of it. They are Jawaharlal Nehru’s heirs only on behalf of millions of others, including non-Congress voters, who see in him, flawed as he was, a man representing pluralism and tolerance of the Hindu type. This is being washed away by the mainstreaming of a nasty and angry ideology that is replacing the receding Congress. It is represented in Parliament by assorted sadhus and sadhvis whose venom is explained away by the Prime Minister as their rustic innocence. In the face of this, the only animation and real emotion one sees these days from the Gandhis, and that only expressed through their retainers, is when there is offence to the sainted Robert Vadra. Meanwhile, the BJP is allowed to continue unobstructed on its path, in election after election, to absolute national dominance.

Is there a strategy and a method to effectively engaging Narendra Modi? Yes, and it is obvious. A report in Business Standard on January 9 said Rahul was challenged by other Congressmen over what the party’s approach should be. He was backing a man, the Youth Congress chief, for his “agitation-style politics”. However, the report added, “a section of Congress senior leaders disapprove of such ‘protests and agitation’” and that “if the Congress’ front organization adopts such tactics, there will be no difference between the brands of politics of BJP and the Congress.”

This is a dispute over form, not substance. The primary question is: what is the Congress to protest and agitate about? In Parliament, the party has been chasing after non-issues like forcible conversion, which actually redound to the benefit of the RSS (whose predictable response has been, ‘Fine, let’s restrict conversions’).

The fact is that the very issues on which the Congress lost the election are still alive. They are the fanciful notion that one man has arrived and saved a nation of 1.2 billion. That honesty and integrity are in the possession of only a single politician. That India has successfully used force to impose its will on Pakistan at the border. That our problems of corruption and black money now stand resolved in the person of a messianic figure. There is space to go after Modi on his economic policy. There is the scope and the opening for the introduction of complexity and nuance in India’s political debate. There is the opportunity to use humour and ridicule, which are so appropriate in the atmosphere of worshipful submission that the PM has ordered around him.

There is no danger of Rahul, perhaps the dullest speaker in Indian politics, suddenly becoming a Demosthenes or a Cicero, but he could pick up a tip or two from reading the Roman tutor of oratory, Quintilian. He could learn to compress issues, coin slogans and use the media to amplify ideas, something that Modi himself does with such effortless mastery.

That may be to hope for too much, given his performance since the Lok Sabha defeat. It is difficult, looking at their conduct as the party collapses around them, to escape the conclusion that the Gandhis think it will turn around automatically for them in time. That all they need to do is wait for the government to trip up and they can stroll up and collect the prizes at the next election. That is not going to happen with a moribund party which is lacking in energy and a coherent message.

The decay that has set in the Congress does not have the stench of putrefaction — yet. But the Mughals would recognize in this casual approach to defeat and conquest, and in the Congress’s pusillanimity, their own conduct as their world collapsed around them.