[On January 28th, 2014; Rahul Gandhi, the heir-apparent to the Congress Party (which presently rules India) gave an interview to a journalist Arnab Goswami. It was Mr. Gandhi’s first formal interview despite 10+ years of political career. Mr. Gandhi, some suggest, is the leading contender to become his Party’s Prime Ministerial candidate. He has refused to engage in such talk, dismissing them as premature and outside the ‘process’. Irrespective, he is the Congress Party’s leader. The principal opposition is the BJP, a Rightist party. It is led by Narendra Modi who, as far as I can tell, has not commented on the interview.]

By the end of Rahul Gandhi’s interview with Arnab Goswami, it was hard not to feel sympathy for the man. It was the look of somebody who had always stared into a mirror and found his own beauty described to him. Only this time, under the glare of a camera and a country that his Party seeks to rule, there was no chorus to accompany. What the disappearance of such props do is hard to imagine. For most us have no such luxury. What we did see today, was Mr. Gandhi’s mind struggling to find its coordinates. It scrambled, it meandered. It lacked the discipline to persevere through an argument. The third-person intuition - how one appears in the minds of others - that all great politicians develop during their career, failed Mr. Gandhi. Words arrived first, ideas followed later. At some point he ended up in that halfway-house between the indignation of having to put up with Mr. Goswami’s efforts to ground the answers in the here-and-now and the need of the hour to appear accountable, reasonable and, perhaps, even Prime Ministerial. To Mr. Gandhi’s handlers, it must have been a terrifying experience. To be unprepared is one thing, to have one’s desperate fumbling telecast to millions is another. The feeling of sympathy that emerges is not solely because he had a less-than-stellar showing; but because what we had always suspected which is that ‘Prince’ has no Clothes was not only true but that we have come face to face with a man who is, well, simply banal.

Mr. Gandhi’s answers to most questions were the unthinking bureaucratese that transnational consultants and image-making experts peddle. Words - empowerment, women’s participation, devolution of power, transparency - that when inserted into conversations are presumed to grant moral superiority to the speaker and a deeper insight into the conditions of all that ails man. In our political system, which has little use for highmindness except as theatrical devices and an visceral disgust for the other side - such words presumably provide a talismanic power to the speaker. Like the 'Knights of Nigh’, he who speaks these buzz words shall appear above the fray. When a leading activists like Dr. Binayak Sen talk of devolution of power or Aruna Roy talks of transparency, there is a life time of commitment, struggle and sacrifice that inform those words. Mr. Gandhi - like the English speaking, upwardly mobile, double-tongued Indian middle class - uses these words merely, in ways buy himself credibility after presiding over a government that is knee deep in opaqueness, corruption and arbitrariness of power. That the very same politicians who work against these words now mouth them - words, with long and complicated histories - as mere pieties, reveals how political calculation operates and soils the efforts of those who spend their lives to achieve the very same.

Mr. Gandhi used these words to create a world view that has allowed him to unthinkingly convince himself that he is fighting a good fight. But what they reveal are the sad fact of a man at the precipice of his middle age who has become enamored of his moral certainties and, in absence of critical reflection, fallen in love with his world view. Ironically, that he had to repeatedly assert he was a “serious politician”, that he was all about “deep thinking”, that he played for the “long term” - reveals him to be somebody who suspects that these very words ring hollow. Perhaps, I am being harsh, but we have little to go by despite a decade or more of public life. He has neither held executive office despite his own government running the country nor has he demonstrated the desire to radically reinvent his own party, in the way new Aam Aadmi Party (the Common People’s Party) has gone about it. The reality is that Mr. Gandhi accrues all the benefits of being at the top of a large, imperial party organization chock-a-block with janissaries, mercenaries and opportunities; but his vanity (or is it the zeitgeist) conceives of himself as a radical who shall fight it out. He tells himself, and us, repeatedly in the interview with Mr. Goswami that “I am a deep thinker”; a tactic that is no different than the self-praise that boxers mutter before a match. Yet, given this schizoid realities in which Mr. Gandhi describes himself as coexisting - political aristocrat and radical - the viewer must face up to the fact that either Mr. Gandhi doesn’t have the courage to break past the faux world he has been living within; or worse, that so comfortable is he in this insider-outsider role that he has cynically (or foolishly) reconciled to a kind of double life. One marked by well-meaning angst on one end and expedient condoning of corruption on the other. In this, certainly, Mr. Gandhi is not alone in the Indian political system. But, he certainly is the most prominent of such cases of self-validation and self-deception.

Since the 4-0 electoral disaster (4 states went to polls) in late 2013, defeat, like a ghoul that has made itself comfortable atop Mr. Gandhi’s weary shoulders, stares on the foreseeable future. The (Narendra) Modi juggernaut meanwhile continues, threatens poll data collectors with off-the-chart readings. In an internal poll data of the Congress Party, leaked to the Associated Press, estimates range from 75-80 seats in the coming elections (out of the total 542). In 30 years since 1984, when the Congress won 409 seats - the decline, like Mr. Gandhi’s confidence during today’s interview, has been steady and, well, secular. The reasons are many and depends on whom you ask. But if Mr. Gandhi in his present avatar was meant to be the one who revives the Congress Party from the soporific and corrupt coalition government, the interview with Mr. Goswami puts a sword to that idea.

Not much about Mr. Gandhi was 'really’ known a priori. He is unmarried, in his 40s, charming by all accounts and rarely linked to a woman in public. (Mind you, the Indian press in Delhi probably knows, but such personal matters are self-censored out of decorum and the unspoken rules of self-preservation.) And that which is known, is carefully stage-managed. Despite this shroud of calibrated exposure, what we do know is that like children of many prominent families elsewhere, he has successfully failed upwards in his life. When asked about evidence presented by Subramaniam Swamy (a Harvard educated Economics PhD, a Hindu nationalist and mercurial persona) with doubts about Mr. Gandhi’s academic credentials, his response was telling. Over and beyond the rightfully expressed sense of frustration, he did what comes naturally to him. He cloaked himself in a sanctimonious self-defense that Mr. Swamy, no wall-flower himself, had been after his family “for 40 years”. And being attacked was, well, just part of the great set of responsibilities he shouldered as young scion of a father-less family. No doubt his family - presumably, his sister (Priyanka Gandhi) and mother (Sonia Gandhi); and may be even his controversial brother-in-law (Robert Vadera) - are not just his source of refuge from the political world, but also from whom he derives his self-lacerating notions of sacrifice and responsibilities. This view of we-against-the-world is a product of years of conditioning and narratives told to him by well wishers, sycophants and even enemies of the Gandhi family. The perils are obvious: a narcissistic faith in his Family as the beachhead that stands between the bearded ‘bhagwa’ (saffron, the color used by Hindu sages) barbarians at the gates and Civilization on the other, defended and paid for by the blood of his grandmother (Indira Gandhi) and father(Rajiv Gandhi), who were both assassinated. It is instructive that in an entire hour long interview, there were two names that never came up, at least in any active sense. Mahatma Gandhi, and more tellingly, his great-grandfather, Jawaharlal Nehru. No doubt, they belong to a past that young Mr. Gandhi genuflects to, but in of itself neither of them matter to his sense of being, his idea of himself. In a way, he merely channels what his mother has consistently told all who care to listen: the domineering influence of Indira Gandhi on her formative days in India and the loving presence of Rajiv Gandhi as her doting companion. Alas, for the country however, neither of the two deceased Gandhis are beacons to shed light on critical matters of the hour: how to rebuild institutions, how to excise the tumors of corruption, how to combat identity politics.

At the heart of the matter is the question of how Mr. Gandhi sees the world. To all problems that India faces, the young Mr. Gandhi’s answers reveal how atrophied his intellectual growth has been and yet, how he has managed to internalize mantras that give him a veneer of sophistication. Perhaps, amidst his well-wishers in the Congress Party, that is enough.

In an effort to pull rank over Mr. Goswami their conversation turned to that final institutional arbiter of Indian elites - their experiences at Oxford and Cambridge. But unlike in the days of Motilal Nehru (his great-great grandfather, a rich lawyer and judge during the British rule), such institutions aren’t merely privy to blue blooded India. Talent, hard work, chutzpah and faith in oneself can open many doors. Mr. Goswami himself embodies that in more ways than one. In fact in Mr. Gandhi’s own government, there are ministers who come from humble backgrounds, who have gone onto do Masters at IIT, PhDs in prestigious American and English Universities, some even attained their PhD at the age of 23. Having failed to assert his own superiority on grounds of education (or should we say, class?) Mr. Gandhi decided to expand on his views on ‘the system’.

He insisted, the problem of India is the “system” that is in place. The perils of getting vocabulary right when assessing problems have rarely been as visible. One who sees in India a ‘system’ believes that it can be fixed by measures that are manageable and manipulable. It is a world view that has faith in a mechanistic cause-and-effect relationship. Yet, the reality of Indian public life is that what we have is not a ‘system’ but nebulous array of self-interests that, like algae atop the many rivers of Indic lives, is afloat. It survives, it sometimes shrinks and it sometime engorges itself on nutrients from the public commons. The Indian “system” is neither static nor comprehendible by some governmental fiat. That is the philosophic perspective that led to decades of 'Five Year Plans’, controlled economies and the infamous 'License-Quota Raj’ that replaced the British. The present set of institutions in place are a living, throbbing, self-arranging phenomena that has only one dharma: survival. Bureaucrats, ministers, underlings have captured the 'commanding heights’ of the system. Mr. Gandhi believes, like his grandmother and father, that he has a handle over such matters. Instead, epiphenomena of interests can be tackled solely by excising the State controls over common lives. It means to reduce our faith in the State as the arbiter of wisdom. It means to recognize that the hubris of ‘system’ builders and engineers is more dangerous and corrosive than what it seeks to cure.

Mr. Gandhi, it is evident, has been spoon fed on a steady diet of standard Left-fare that draws its philosophic roots from world-systems of Marx and Engels on one end and an Hegelian idea of a bureaucratic-State as perfect organizer of human lives. Throw into this mix the soothing assurances of technocrats trained in Walrasian neo-classical economics, who have no epistemic doubt about their models and conclusions. The consequence is a view that has at its root, articles of faith that things can be ‘right’, if only x happened or if process y fell in place. It is a world view of a certain kind of MBAs and NGOs who view the world as a problem to be solved. It is a view that doesn’t have humility at its core, that has no philosophic outlook as far as knowledge or knowability is concerned. It is view that believes it has the means to aggregate, analyze and ascertain facts from the fantastical and magical realist looms that Indian bureaucracy can spin around him to preserve themselves. His faith to correct the deep problems of the ‘system’ leads him to repeatedly conclude that the Indian system is fundamentally opaque, and his efforts to instill ‘openness’ is the cure to all. To this end, he repeats his faith in the RTI (the Right to Information Act) as the panacea for ills. Openness, like many of the words he used with near religious fervor during the interview, means many things to many people; but nothing refutes his claims of ‘openness’ when his party’s upper echelons are stuffed with those who began life with an advantage. As Mr. Goswami bravely pointed out, the Congress is filled with children of ministers - the late Mr. Pilot and Mr. Scindia, Mr. Sangma, Mr. Deora and the late Rajiv Gandhi himself. To counter this, Mr. Gandhi could have pointed at the life story of Meenakshi Natarajan (a woman without any political connection who rose to the top) as an example of what changes he intends. But, either he didn’t have his wits together or so overwhelmed was he by the evidence presented that he thought it best not to counter. To a less than sympathetic observer, all this merely shows is that his strategy of inculcating ‘openness’ within the Congress Party is more of a tactical effort to fill the stalls with his loyalists and slowly phase out the old guard; but in of itself, the only tradeable currency will be loyalty to the Gandhi family. The powers vested in the representatives of the Congress Party will be measured by the degrees of separation from Mr. Gandhi, and in due course perhaps, even Priyanka Gandhi’s children.

It is at such conversational cul de sac-s that Mr. Gandhi sought to differentiate his Party from the other two main opponents. Over and beyond the curved condescension of his lips when talking about the newly formed and popular Aam Aadmi Party, or the categorical insistence, that unlike the BJP, the Congress was inclusive and reluctant to concentrate power. Yet, if one is sees the ease with which a minister, Jayanthi Natarajan, was fired; or in a complete mockery of, what Mr. Gandhi holds as sacrosanct, the ‘process’, the ease with which 9 cylinders of LPG per person were increased to 12 at his mere exhortation tells that Mr. Gandhi is no longer an ingenue politician. He has clearly the ability to pick and choose evidence and has cultivated a healthy lack of self-awareness - both key talents for all successful politicians. Those who suspect he is weak are mistaken. It is just that he is wrong, which makes his claims of strength all the more wrongheaded. None of this, of course, is new in politicians, but so little is really known about Mr. Gandhi’s real thinking that the banality of his fervor catches one by surprise. I suppose, somewhere deep within, one imagines that the Gods perhaps don’t have clay feet. During the course of the interview we realized that Mr. Gandhi is neither a reformer-messiah nor a political God who offers a communal ecstasy. Alas, he is not even a leader who can lead this Party, far less this difficult and challenging country. He is perhaps the perfect representation of our facile, media soaked culture. A carefully stage-managed creation of his mother and party apparatchiks who have poured their own inchoate and incomplete aspirations into this like-able young man, who grew up to believe them and now finds himself inadequately prepared for the task. It is useful to note that a wise and senior reporter like Chitra Subramaniam said in no uncertain terms on Twitter: shame on those who set him up.

This view, in a way, of course, absolves Mr. Gandhi of all personal responsibility, makes him into a ‘passive’ recipient of machinations and Fate - which naturally only casts him in an even poorer light. What is clear is that Mr. Gandhi’s back-room advisors have done him little favor. They sought to adopt an Obama-style model of messaging and communication. Much as ‘hope‘ became Mr. Obama’s cri de coeur, it is evident that Mr. Gandhi wanted ‘empowerment‘ to be his calling card. It is an unpardonable conceptual fumble in an election year. It is a meaningless term when Indians still derive their identities from families, castes and communities. To empower Indians, presumes Mr. Gandhi knows of ways to help individuals circumvent the consequent social pressures and will help them find their own footing. It is a manifestly conceited idea - which yet again reflects the hubris of a Left-leaning perspective that presumes that the vanguard can shower in enlightenment and if not, to wit, throw in a subsidy program at the tax payers expense. The mood of the hour is different. Indians want governments to step out of their daily lives, to make it easier to conduct businesses, transact and exchange goods, to grant freedoms to make choices that are in proportion and contingent with the world-views they emerge out of. India’s processes, systems and linkages between institutions have weakened due to abuse and neglect, and what Indians aspire for is a government that hopefully helps them to make do with less ‘jugaad’ (sly improvisation) in their lives.

This is not to discount the importance of social programs but instead to ask whether such ‘empowerment’ formulae have consequences that go well beyond economic promise. Do they vitiate other macro-phenomena? Does it upset the larger stability of the “system”? When Mr. Goswami mentioned the exorbitant rise of consumer prices, Mr. Gandhi had little of use to say except that he is “working with the government”. Such glib, unthinking response belies lack of engagement with the complexity of the issue at hand. Mr. Obama - with whom many in Congress Party try to forcefully compare Mr. Gandhi - in contrast, takes upon himself to educate his listeners about the complex interlinkages and feed back loops in play. He calls such opportunities to communicate about complex issues a ‘teachable moment’. To do so diligently, conscientiously not only reveals a respect for the intelligence of one’s audience but also tells us that he has thought through the problems at hand. One may disagree and quibble about the solutions, but that is a debate which elevates any politician in the eyes of an informed citizenry. When Mr. Vajpayee (a Rightist politician and Prime Minsiter) insisted on keeping photos of Mr. Nehru on the walls of the External Affairs Ministry - as the historian Ramachandra Guha writes - what it reveals is the respect that Mr. Nehru’s prodigious writings, letters, speeches evoked in his ideological bete-noire. Mr. Vajpayee was proud to have his 'enemy’ stare down from the walls. Mr. Gandhi had such an opportunity to seize the moment. To tell us, to teach us what he has learned up close from the seats of power about what ails India; how does information move along the chain of command; what are the bottlenecks. Mr. Gandhi failed. So, the next time, when Subramaniam Swamy calls him, with barely disguised contempt, ‘buddhu‘ (a dullard) - there isn’t much that those who seek to defend Mr. Gandhi can point out at.

Yet these are matters of intellectual heft and cleverness - neither of which are, in the final calculus, most admired virtues in a politician. But what is relevant and remembered is the courage shown to face up to mistakes of the past. Particularly those of ones close to oneself. Mr. Obama and Jeremiah Wright come to mind. And it is in this line of questioning that Mr. Gandhi failed most unconscionably. The riots in1984, in response to the assassination of Indira Gandhi by two Sikhs extremists, killed nearly 5000 Sikhs. Mr. Gandhi’s father, who ruled then, famously said - when a banyan tree falls, the earth trembles. In 2002 there were another set of riots, in response to the burning of a train-compartment full of Hindu pilgrims (by Muslims; or some say it was a case of an accident and Muslim hawkers were simply there). This happened in the state of Gujarat which was then ruled by Mr. Modi, who had recently taken charge. Around 500-1500 Muslims and smaller number of Hindus were killed. Mr. Modi has been personally cleared by investigative authorities, but some of his colleagues have been convicted. In both cases, a sense of revenge inspired the violence. When interview turned to matters about apology and reconciliation, Mr. Gandhi reveled a mind that was fundamentally timid. He was reluctant to “apologize” for the 1984 riots and vacillated between vagueness and vitriol against Mr. Modi. His answers revealed a mind that when cornered doesn’t have the courage to push back as Mr. Modi does (who argues that he tried his best to stop, and now 'regrets’ the deaths; he too has not “apologized”), or the clarity of morals to see what is being asked of him at the hour as Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru and Sardar Patel had done in the past. They had, in various manners, apologized and atoned for the violent actions of those they lead. Seeking to say, as Mr. Gandhi did, our riots (1984) were not as bad that their riots (2002) is a line of reasoning that only a cynical political mind can take comfort in.

It doesn’t take much to see that the Sikhs have given up on the possibility of justice. Some of the perpetrators have died. (Many of the perpetrators of the 2002 riots, meanwhile, have been convicted and imprisoned.) Cases of the 1984 riots have been prolonged in court thanks to active political intervention by the Congress Party. Those riots are a wound that the Sikhs have reconciled to living with. It will remain open and festering till that generation of Sikhs pass away. What the Sikhs want now, clearly, is a respect for the memory of their loved ones. At the least, Mr. Gandhi ought to have come prepared. Perhaps, given interminable number of yojanas (social welfare programs) called Indira this and Rajiv that, he could have offered to build a monument for those who died in that planned and organized butchery. Many of whose names, we will never know. Mr. Gandhi spent many a sentences extolling the death and sacrifices of his grandmother, but barely a sentence to express contrition or emotion for those men pulled out of buses, their hair forcibly shorn of then stabbed, for those women who were raped, for those children who were hacked away in the bazaars, for those old who were burnt in public as they came out of the gurudwaras (Sikh temples). To equivocate is unacceptable. And to suggest that the government of the day in 1984, made efforts to prevent the murders reveals how masterfully Mr. Gandhi has learned the art of dissembling in face of uncomfortable facts.

The only moment of emotion that Mr. Gandhi revealed was when matters turned to how he takes defeat and the support from his steady-as-a-rock sister. By then, even Mr. Goswami - like a fast bowler who toys with a tail-ender - had begun to sound a note of reconciliation or two. And precisely then, Mr. Gandhi tried to go on an offensive and accuse the media of not taking up issues of interest to him. How to grow India, how the industrial corridors purportedly is where India’s manufacturing future lies, how RTI (oh, the RTI) is the weapon against corruption - and so on. Predictably, not a mention of land deals orchestrated by his brother-in-law or the gargantuan scams during sale of spectrum-air waves and other unmentionables made to the fore. This evident frustration suggests that Mr. Gandhi was led into an ambush. He had come prepared to pontificate on ‘big‘ ideas, but somehow the upper echelons of the Times of India group decided to go for the jugular. They decided to defeat him with a thousand cuts.

The consequence is that in a keenly contested election year, when a note of stridency would have not been out of place, so worn was Mr. Gandhi by the end, that he was reluctant to name Mr. Modi in person, far less lash out. And it at this moment, one is astounded Mr. Gandhi’s relative lack of political ruthlessness. In a conversation about Gujarat riots, Mr. Gandhi did not even try to go for a name-and-shame strategy against Mr. Modi’s government. He could have cited Maya Kodnani (minister, who served in Mr. Modi’s administration and now serves a jail sentence for orchestrating riots) or the lumpen thug Babu Bajrangi who arranged for murders, or made clear accusations by the police commissioner R. B. Sreekumar against Mr. Modi, or the direct testimony of Harsh Mandher (an ex-bureaucrat who resigned in protest) over riots or the findings of the editor Siddharth Varadarajan et al or the political scores against those who protested including a Jesuit priest Cedric Prakash or the activist-dancer Mallika Sarabhai. All of this reveals that Mr. Gandhi neither knows the details of the Gujarat riots, except in terms of parlor room generalities, or that he has satisfied himself by the supposed culpability of Mr. Modi, which of course is self-evident to him, his coterie and thus presumably to the rest of us. This despite the fact that Mr. Modi has been found uninvolved in these riots. He presumes that India would just fall in line and see Mr. Modi’s complicity in the riots.

Either Mr. Gandhi is extraordinarily polite or he just has never gotten into a school yard fight - where unless you punch yourself somebody in public, you get no respect. If there is anybody who deserves a rhetorical punch or two from Mr. Gandhi, it is Mr. Modi who has been crass, personal and insulting. It is in this context when Mr. Gandhi says he has “no fire in his belly for power”, we can only but believe him. Power, and all its accoutrement, have come all too easily to him. And he is content with a calorie-controlled diet of power, where no body can publicly accuse him of being gluttonous, or as selfish. It may come as a news to him that there is nothing more disingenuous, and if true even more dispiriting, than a politician who says he has no interest in grabbing power. In a way, his statement reminded me of what Sylvester Stallone said: “I could play Hamlet if I wanted to. I just don’t want to.”

In the end, well, it was all too tame and pitiable. It is an uneven match. Mr. Modi, who has come up the hard way in life, reveals himself as a strapping, brutish, effective satrap who has consolidated power, cultivated loyalties, threatened opponents and now seeks to become the ruler of India. He wants power, he wants to effect change. His contempts and passions come from a deep and maybe dark place within, which after years in the wilderness as a second rung party functionary, who had neither the base nor family connections, – a formidable set of complexes define him. Resentment is a terrific spur. In Hamish MacDonald’s “The Polyester Prince”, there is a wonderful story of how, when the industrial tycoon Dhirubhai Ambani was disallowed from entering into drinking clubs officiated by the patrician Nusli Wadia, on account of his 'class’, Mr. Ambani vowed to destroy Mr. Wadia’s premier textile business called Bombay Dyeing. And so, he did. No one remember Bombay Dyeing, and Nusli Wadia. The late Mr. Ambani is the lodestar of Indian capitalism. At this hour, before the electoral battles are to begin in April-May 2014, Mr. Gandhi comes across as Paris to Mr. Modi’s Agamemnon and Achilles combined. Mr. Gandhi has no Hector on his side.

The reason Mr. Modi connects with the young, not withstanding the riots of Gujarat and the accompanying bigotry, is that he represents the primeval struggles that many a young Indian goes through today. In Goa when he challenged the audience and asked aloud if they want to suffer as their parents did, there is an authenticity in that interrogative question which is hard to shake away. A messianic conviction in his own world view. One can never see Mr. Gandhi speak to the people from that inner core, which as we discovered during the interview is neither too deep nor too dark. It is shallow and bland. Mr. Gandhi did himself no favor by being ill prepared. We learnt that behind the cotton-white Congress kurta (tunic) is a young man who has erected psychological defenses and justifications that guard mythic memories of his father and grandmother, dutifully and lovingly tended to by his mother and sister. His is a victim’s mindset. It is how he sees India. It is why he finds the idea of empowering Indians so attractive.

Alas, India is overwhelmingly young today and with little memory for the sacrifices of his family. Today’s India is a scrappy, aggressive and an impudent nation. It may need empowerment - education, health, manufacturing, gender equality - but it cannot be brought by the vocabularies of noblesse oblige that Mr. Gandhi and many in the Congress speak today. That was a language that the more genteel generation of my own parents had reconciled with. They took inequity, insults and insecurities in their stride and tried to make a good life for their children. Today’s India, however, speaks the language of naked ambition, of angered frustration and thick-lipped carnality. It sees those who have social infrastructure build on it, while those who don’t languish in the purgatories of Indian social life. If Mr. Modi increasingly seems to be able to cut across caste barrier and consolidate in places like western Uttar Pradesh, it is because he has the first mover advantage in tapping the well-spring of resentment. With an increasingly loyal base, he has begun to pivot and march to the center, admittedly a Hindu center, or rather a non-Islamic center of India. From this new vantage point, he speaks of growth, of transparency, of equality - the same words and ideas that Mr. Gandhi tries to articulate. In all of this, Mr. Modi reveals himself to be a master of political maneuvering, a great student of mass communication and most importantly, one who has an identifiable core - even if one may disagree with it. But, alas, if opinion polls are to be trusted, Mr. Gandhi is seen as an anodyne pretender. When he speaks, he is mocked out of pity. When Mr. Modi speaks, he is mocked for they fear he may do what he says. The media may call Rahul Gandhi, 'the prince’ of the Gandhi dynasty. But by Machiavellian standards, it is Mr. Modi who is The Prince. When the young of India ask themselves, can I make something of myself despite lacking family connections, wealth and opportunities. They look around and ask - who has done that before me?

Not too surprisingly, as of now, Mr. Gandhi’s name never comes to mind. []