Rahul Gandhi is the scion of India’s greatest political dynasty but can’t compete with Hindu nationalism.
India’s main opposition party is trying to stop Narendra Modi winning a third term as prime minister.
So what? It’s failing.
The Congress Party – the party of Mahatma Gandhi and Indian independence – is a shadow of its former self. Without its once-dominant presence at the centre of Indian politics
- Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (the BJP) is poised to sweep back to power in a six-week election that started last week and gives a vote to 970 million people;
- the BJP is likely to intensify the Hindu Nationalism of its first two terms; and
- the quality of Indian democracy – already in decline – is set to weaken further.
This matters because democracy is under threat from Beijing to Budapest and nearly one in four people eligible to vote in 2024 is Indian. Modi is uncomfortably friendly with Putin and not above electoral tactics that sometimes recall the Kremlin’s.
Rahul Gandhi, the Congress Party’s leader, enjoyed a brief poll bounce when the party won local elections in Karnataka last year, but that has fizzled. Modi’s government has since
- had Gandhi suspended from parliament for four months for mocking Modi’s name;
- curbed his access to media;
- accused him of money-laundering; and
- frozen some of his party’s bank accounts.
If that were the extent of Gandhi’s challenges he might be able to craft a narrative of the Congress Party as a muzzled voice of the people, more than half of whom don’t support the BJP. But it isn’t.
Dynasty. As the son, grandson and great-grandson of Indian prime ministers, Gandhi has name recognition – but also the burden of association with dynastic politics and privilege when Modi can boast of being the son of a tea-seller. Gandhi is half-Italian and studied at Harvard.
Decay. The Congress Party ruled India for 55 years but lost 60 per cent of its vote share between 1984 and 2019 and suffered two heavy defeats on Gandhi’s watch.
Recovery? Bidding for a comeback, the party is leading an alliance of smaller parties known as INDIA (for Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance). Gandhi is campaigning to reduce poverty and youth unemployment but no alliance member has offered voters a compelling alternative to Modi’s nationalism.
“The entire opposition is lacking in political imagination,” says Praveen Donthi of the Crisis Group. “They end up offering diluted versions of Hinduism… [but] Congress and the others can never beat the BJP in its own game.”
History of now
1885 – Congress Party founded
1947 – India wins independence – at which point, according to the author Kapil Komireddi, the party ceased to be truly democratic and became “the chattel of one family”.
2014 – the BJP beats Congress and starts a campaign for a “Congress-Mukt Bharat” (Congress-Free India) styled like the liberation struggle Congress pursued against the British Empire. It resonates in a country brimming with anti-incumbency.
2019 – a landslide win gives the BJP 303 seats to Congress’s 52. At least 25 senior Congress figures have since defected.
What’s more… There are signs Modi might seize on a third win to ditch the secularism on which modern India was founded and declare it an explicitly Hindu state. His support in Bollywood and among India’s leading industrial families is solid.
The Congress Party’s Professor Saifuddin Soz, a former minister, says Modi has “criminalised the opposition and… is working to establish a dictatorship in India”. If so, Saifuddin’s party is unequal to the moment.
