Rahul@40:Why the prince is reluctant to be king

Rahul@40:Why the prince is reluctant to be king Revamping the Youth Congress and building the party at the grassroots level are positives in Rahul Gandhi's  political graph. But on more serious issues facing the country and on foreign policy, his views and leanings are almost unknown.Rahul needs more perspective and experience before he moves on to bigger things.

Sanjay Kapoor Delhi

Just a few days after Congress General Secretary Rahul Gandhi spent a night in a socially and economically depressed Dalit village of Uttar Pradesh, a group of local Congress party leaders accompanied by some mediapersons trooped down to this hamlet to ascertain for themselves the impact of their leader's visit.

They were in for a rude surprise.

A journalist asked the head of a Dalit family about the identity of the person who had spent time with them. "I don't know his name, but he was a sahib who came from the city. He seemed to be a good man." The response of the villagers threw off the Congress leaders who wanted to learn first hand how Rahul's politics was being received on the ground.

Enveloped in a haze of calibrated spin doctoring about the great impact Rahul was making amongst the Dalits, the constituency of UP Chief Minister Mayawati  and her Bahujan Samaj Party, these local leaders did not really know how to convey their feedback to the central leadership about the manifest dichotomy between hype and reality, and also the limits to Rahul's politics in a depressingly poor and caste-ridden state where Congress has been out of power for 20 years.

True to their wont, the Congressmen kept to their volition. In the process, valuable feedback about how Congress was squaring with the BSP and other political parties was lost in this display of sycophancy. An impression that the Congress juggernaut had begun to roll and it was a matter of time when the party squelched all opposition was allowed to prosper unhindered.

Such an attitude gained impetus after party's remarkable success in 2009 parliamentary elections when it managed to win 21 Lok Sabha seats in May 2009.

Due to this reason, facile and perfunctory assessments about the prospects of the party are routinely palmed off as authentic feedback from the ground leading to some serious setbacks in by-elections to the UP assembly.

Repeatedly, it was stated that the collapse of the Bharatiya Janata Party  and Mulayam Singh Yadav's  Samajwadi Party would make it easy for the Congress to earn easy success in the state. These projections have been proved wrong time and again.

For instance, in the recent by-election for the Domariaganj assembly seat in eastern UP, the Congress came a poor fifth. This, despite the fact that the party did not leave a stone unturned to make its candidate win. Actress Nagma, actor and MP Raj Babbar, Congress General Secretary Digvijay Singh  all showed up. Rahul's posters were stuck all over the place. A colossal amount of money was spent, but it did not really save the party from such an unedifying performance.

More than anyone else, Rahul knows how uphill the task is of reviving the fortunes of the party in UP and other states where it is not in power.

The manner in which he makes light of the noisy chatter in the party and outside to takeover from Prime Minister Manmohan Singh  stems from an important realisation that first he is not ready, and secondly, he would not like to head a coalition government that has to lean on allies for survival or lead a party, which is still animated by the old guard.