Is Rahul Gandhi salvageable as a politician? For the Congress Party this poses an existential question. If the scion of the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty is beyond repair, then India’s oldest party must either find a way to eject him from its helm or face nearly certain extinction.

For India, the stakes are only slightly less high. The collapse of Congress as a national alternative to Narendra Modi’s BJP creates a dangerous vacuum in domestic politics. Bluntly put, if Rahul was less inept India would host a more viable opposition. Instead it faces the prospect of a prime minister with virtually untrammelled power. If you believe that democracy works best with checks and balances, then Congress’s problem is India’s problem too.

Consider, for a moment, the train wreck that the party currently presents. Its cumulative Lok Sabha haul from two successive general elections – 2019 (52 seats) and 2014 (44 seats) – comes to less than one-third of the 303 seats that BJP won this year alone. Rahul even managed to lose from the family bailiwick of Amethi. Some of his most prominent aides, including Jyotiraditya Scindia, Milind Deora, Deepender Hooda and RPN Singh, crashed to defeat as well.

Congress sympathisers point out that BJP, flush with funds after five years in power, outspent all other parties by a massive margin. They fault attack dog TV channels for blowing up every gaffe by a Congress leader out of proportion. (This year the hapless Sam Pitroda filled in for Mani Shankar Aiyar.) They accuse BJP’s dirty tricks department of unfairly turning Rahul into a WhatsApp joke.

All these charges are true. But they don’t change the fact that the Congress campaign was filled with spectacular misfires.

Why did Rahul kick off a spate of TV interviews only after most voting was over? Why was the party unable to lock down alliances in Delhi, Uttar Pradesh or Andhra Pradesh? Why was Priyanka Gandhi Vadra, long touted as the party’s secret weapon, rolled out in desultory fashion in a losing cause in Uttar Pradesh? Why did Rahul’s personal Twitter handle show few signs of life in the midst of a do-or-die election? Students fight with greater verve and vigour than Congress managed.

It’s hard to pick a single low point for such a shambolic campaign, but if there’s one that stood out for me it’s this: In an interview with NDTV’s Sreenivasan Jain, Rahul said he had “dismantled” Narendra Modi’s image with his pet slogan Chowkidar Chor Hai. (The watchman is a thief.) The Congress president also claimed that two-thirds of Indians believed that the government’s Rafale fighter aircraft purchase was a scam.

On the ground, voters i spoke with said exactly the opposite. At a tea stall near Baghpat, in western Uttar Pradesh, a Jat farmer told me Rahul “doesn’t even know how to speak”. The slogan meant to dismantle Modi was instead boomeranging on Congress, and the party president, apparently convinced of his own acuity, appeared blissfully unaware.

I asked a Congress politician of some stature, not long after the 2014 general election, a question about his boss. Could he name a single successful politician anywhere in the world who had not honed basic political skills before the age of 40?

I meant, by this, getting the simple things right: developing a work ethic, learning how to pick talented aides, figuring out whether to present yourself to the world clean-shaven or bearded. The Congress leader responded without missing a beat. “There’s a first time for everything,” he said.

It turns out that such smugness may not be justified. A politician can succeed without charisma (look at Angela Merkel), but this usually needs to be offset by shrewd judgment. At this point, Rahul appears to have developed a knack for alienating rooted politicians like Assam’s Himanta Biswa Sarma. Instead, he has surrounded himself with a strange band of data crunchers, family retainers and washed up leftists.

The Congress president’s attempts to solve his party’s deep organisational problems with technocratic fixes never seem to go anywhere. For the longest time, he laboured without success to introduce some sort of grassroots democracy in Congress. The 2019 campaign’s great innovation, Project Shakti, a bid to link ordinary party workers with the central leadership, also turned out to be a dud.

Part of the problem is positioning. Rahul appears to suffer from a deeply felt need to transcend the privilege of his birth instead of quietly accepting it. He seeks to fashion himself as a messiah of the poor – dragging his party to the left with the foolish NYAY minimum income guarantee scheme – despite the fact that this is at violent odds with his own biography. Is the son, grandson and great grandson of prime ministers really going to compete as a populist with a former tea seller?

Indians are a patient people. Even in defeat, Congress managed to get 19.5% of the national vote; about 117 million people professed faith in the hand symbol, more than the combined population of Italy and South Korea.

Nonetheless, it may be time for Congress to accept that Rahul simply lacks the skills and the appetite to compete in hardscrabble 21st century politics. It’s time for India’s oldest party to find a new leader.