editorials

Updated: Oct 05, 2018 19:49 IST

At the Hindustan Times Leadership Summit on Friday, Congress President Rahul Gandhi positioned his party as everything the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is not. He sought to present the Congress as a liberal, progressive, inclusive and tolerant party that did not believe it knew all the answers but was at least prepared to listen to all the questions. The BJP, Mr Gandhi was at pains to explain, didn’t believe in listening. It was also a government that eroded the authority of institutions, he claimed, referring to, but not directly mentioning the judiciary and the media (although he did refer to the two in other contexts). Like one would expect an opposition leader to, Mr Gandhi rattled off the various issues he has with the government’s performance in managing the economy, creating jobs, addressing the agrarian crisis and other such. And he also sought to distinguish the previous Congress-led United Progressive Alliance’s idea of Aadhaar and the Goods and Services Tax from this government’s.

In recent months, Mr Gandhi seems to has grown into the role of the principal Opposition leader — there are many claimants to the throne — even as he has reinvented his persona and sought to do the same to his party’s. He has become approachable and accessible and doesn’t shy away from taking tough questions any longer, although one on whether there was someone special in his life stumped him. This may be smart politics. Prime Minister Narendra Modi, still immensely popular across the country, has the tendency to convert electoral contests into mano-e-mano ones and Mr Gandhi’s aim seems to be to get people to compare them on his terms, and on parameters of his choosing. Ask me anything, Mr Gandhi said, and then pointed out that he didn’t think the Prime Minister would do the same.

The missing element in Mr Gandhi’s conversation was the specifics. While he told the audience what the Congress party didn’t stand for, he didn’t spend as much time telling them what it stood for. Nor did he have specific ideas to tackle issues related to growth, bad loans, a falling rupee, unemployment, and the problems in agriculture. He accused the BJP of blaming and attributing everything on the Congress but he can be accused of the same thing too — he blamed everything on the BJP, although the party’s ideological parent, the RSS too came in for some flak. It’s possible that Mr Gandhi has specific solutions to many problems but to truly present the Congress as an alternative to the BJP he will need to articulate them soon.