Does Priyanka have it in her to fight against the odds? Can she replicate the efforts made by her grandmother or her mother? The jury is still out on that.

by Saroj Nagi

Priyanka Gandhi's no-holds barred attack on the BJP’s prime ministerial nominee Narendra Modi is possibly the only good news that despondent Congress cadres have got since the start of the election campaign for the 16th Lok Sabha which, opinion surveys aver, may be dominated by the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance.

But Priyanka’s aggression against the party’s prime opponent has come a little too late in the day, as the Congress has all but surrendered in the ongoing Lok Sabha elections and is reconciled to sitting in the opposition benches unless the electronic voting machines throw up a badly fractured mandate in which Sonia Gandhi’s party can play a decisive role.

In a frontal attack on Modi, Priyanka has shown up Modi not as a strong and decisive leader that he has been projecting himself to be but as 'childish and immature' who, instead of focusing on issues, has resorted to name calling, specially when it came to her brother and Congress vice president Rahul Gandhi and her husband Robert Vadra.

The BJP’s prime ministerial nominee has in the course of campaigning, called Rahul a namuna’ (specimen) and a shehzada’ (prince), released a CD on Vadra’s land deals and painted "RSVP’’ (Rahul Sonia, Vadra, Priyanka) black.

She, in turn, hasn’t pulled back her punches: She has said that the BJP are acting like 'panicky rats', declared that the country needed a leader with a large heart, not a 56 inch chest and said that she was only her father’s daughter and not 'like a daughter' to anyone. She was giving it as good as her brother and husband had got, grabbing the headlines in the process.

Not surprisingly, disheartened Congress workers have gone ga-ga over her, invoking comparisons with Indira Gandhi as she strode through the by lanes of Rae Bareli and Amethi, her aquiline nose reviving memories of the former prime minister who demolished her opposition with the war cry of garibi hatao (remove poverty) and the invincible logic of 'main kehti hun garibi hatao, voh kehte hain Indira hatao ( I say remove poverty, they say remove Indira).

The future which has so far looked bleak to despairing Congress workers, suddenly seems to hold promise. Indeed, Modi’s ad campaign of 'acche din aane wale hain’ (good days are ahead) appeared to apply more to these Congressmen who were not inspired by Rahul and were yearning for a more charismatic leader who could extricate them from the morass they were in, much like Indira Gandhi had done in 1980 or Sonia did in 2004 and 2009 by leading the party to victory in the general elections.

But Priyanka is no Indira---or for that matter, no Sonia either--- to resurrect the party’s fortunes. At least not yet. She has a long way to go and is still to prove herself despite claims by senior Congress leaders that her father Rajiv Gandhi had spotted her potential as a leader and perhaps also saw her as his political heir.

Sonia, for instance, had taken charge of the party at a time when it was pushed down into the dumps by allegations of corruption, a badly dented image, an uninspiring leadership and a rapidly eroding social and political appeal that saw its traditional Brahmin-Muslim-Scheduled Caste support switching its loyalty to the Bharatiya Janata Party and regional outfits like the Samajwadi Party, the Rashtriya Janata Dal, the Lok Janshakti Party or the Bahujan Samaj Party among others.

After becoming the party president in 1998, Sonia fought against all personal and political odds to turn the tide running against her party. She battled opposition over her foreign origins, ignored the ridicule of being a 'reader rather than a leader', reinvented the Congress by giving it a pro-poor tilt and jettisoned its go-it-alone policy to strike up alliances including with the Nationalist Congress Party which had broken away over her foreign origin.

She surprised everyone by bringing the Congress to power in 2004 as the head of its first coalition government at the Centre and topped it by renouncing the PM’s post that raised her stature and baffled her opponents.

In all this, Sonia displayed elements of Indira’s traits: resolve in battling adversity, determination in achieving her objective and flexibility in working towards that goal.

Her moves were reminiscent of the way Indira had worsted the powerful syndicate, split the party, confronted the opposition with her garibi hatao slogan, created a solid base among the poor and established herself as a tall leader in the country and the region by liberating Bangladesh and standing up against the United States so much so that her critics who derided her as a gungi gudiya (dumb doll) acknowledged her supremacy, with Atal Behari Vajpayee even hailing her as 'Durga'.

Indira did have her ups and downs. The imposition of Emergency, for instance, boomeranged on her but she stormed back to power in 1980 when the unstable Janata party regime collapsed under the weight of its own contradictions.

Does Priyanka have it in her to fight against such odds? Can she replicate the efforts made by her grandmother or her mother? The jury is still out on that.

Her charming ways and her easy and conversational style help Priyanka establish a comfort level and a rapport with her audience both in her personal interactions with voters as well as in speeches at rallies. She bears a striking resemblance with her grandmother in physical appearance and is not afraid of taking her adversaries head on.

But there are two major lacunae in her approach to politics right now. One, she has confined herself not only to a limited geographic area ---the home turfs of Sonia and Rahul in Rae Bareli and Amethi ---but also to a limited role, namely of ensuring an impressive victory in each of these seats where victory has generally been taken for granted.

Even this time, Rae Bareli is not under any threat, with the Samajwadi Party not putting up any candidate there as part of a deal.

But Amethi has become a triangular battle between Rahul, BJP’s Smriti Irani and Aam Aadmi Party’s Kumar Vishwas who threaten to bring down the Congress vice president’s margin of victory and are making the family sweat it out this time. Rahul had won the seat by over three lakh votes in 2009. Priyanka’s challenge would be to maintain this margin amid rising aspirations of the constituents and the country-wide anti-incumbency factor against the Congress.

Can she do it? That would be one of the touchstones of her own performance as campaign in charge in her brother’s constituency.

The second lacunae is that Priyanka’s own efforts in this region have been a mixed bag. In the Lok Sabha elections, it hasn’t been a tough challenge so far. But she has failed to get the assembly seats in these two prime constituencies for the party. Few can forget TV grabs of Priyanka tweaking her mother’s cheeks and promising to deliver all the 10 assembly seats in Amethi and Rae Bareli to her mother. The outcome was vastly different: the party lost all five assembly seats in Rae Bareli and won only two in neighbouring Amethi.

Priyanka’s performance as a communicator has also been questionable. While campaigning in the assembly segments of Amethi and Rae Bareli, she was seen 'talking down' to voters, choosing to quiz them about politics instead of repackaging the Congress which had virtually been wiped out from these areas in the 2010 panchayat elections.

Not surprisingly, when at Terhut in Amethi she asked the crowd whether their MLA had served them well, one disgruntled listener shot back saying that neither the MLA nor the MP had done anything for them. That was a warning signal that the voter cannot be taken for granted.

The crisis that stared the organization in the face in the panchayat and assembly elections in UP is now gripping the party at the national level as it battles the negativities of 10 years of incumbency, price rise, inflation, allegations of corruption and paralysis in policy making in UPA-II.

At a time when the party needed to pull out all stops to reverse the trend, it has decided to save Priyanka for the unseen future. The present has been ascribed to Rahul who has failed to take off and despite a decade in active politics remains a learner and not a leader who can take the party out of the doldrums.

His experiments of broadbasing and democraticising the Youth Congress remain a controversial and incomplete exercise.

The project of holding primaries in certain constituencies has already faltered, with the party replacing the selected candidate with general secretary Madhusudan Mistry to fight Modi in Vadodara. All this, and Modi’s rampaging campaign has intensified the yearning among Congress workers for a larger role for Priyanka.

There were intermittent reports initially that she would campaign beyond Amethi and Rae Bareli and perhaps even contest against Modi in Varanasi. But the party decided not to squander but to save, what it feels, could be its trump card, its brahmaastra for a more opportune moment.

Critics however attribute other reasons for it: she would have eclipsed her brother and presented an opportunity to the Opposition to raise Vadra’s questionable land deals--a point borne out already with the BJP releasing a CD on it. In a move that perhaps does not reflect well on her political maturity, it was Priyanka who first raised the issue by bemoaning the attack on her husband without offering any substantive argument in his defence.

Though Priyanka’s voter connect was limited to the Gandhi pocket buroughs, in view of the dire straits the party was in, she began taking a more pro-active role in working out its election and campaign strategy since early this year.

With Priyanka working behind the scenes, the party’s election war room which functioned out of 15 Gurudwara Rakabganj Road became redundant. Indeed, she virtually became the war-room. A trimurti of Sonia, Rahul and Priyanka discussed, deliberated and reached a decision which was then communicated and implemented by the others.

Besides steering the party’s strategy and campaign, Priyanka also functioned as a bridgehead between Rahul, who wanted to give a greater role to youngsters, and the old guard that was part of Sonia’s team and were not quite comfortable with the party vice president’s ideas. She sought to strike a balance between the two groups, say insiders.

There is little doubt that given a choice between Rahul and his sister, the Congress workers would have wanted her to lead from the front.

Over the years, Congressmen had petitioned Sonia several times to bring Priyanka upfront. Even ahead of the 2004 general elections, they had lined up outside Sonia’s 10 Janpath residence to urge her to bring Priyanka into active politics. They returned with the distinct impression that the Congress president wanted to field Rahul from Amethi.

The demand for Priyanka continues to be raised intermittently. It is expected to gather steam once again after the elections are over and the party would have to reinvent itself to deal with the challenges that the election results would bring. It might lead to a formalized arrangement of the triumvirate of Sonia-Rahul-Priyanka. And if Priyanka takes on any formal responsibility, that would be time to assess whether she has it in her the traits of a leader who can resurrect the party’s fortunes.

But that is a story for another day.