Scroll.in has published the following
Responses to Ramachandra Guha’s column “How the Gandhi family has helped Modi consolidate power.”
Why liberal critiques of Rahul Gandhi ignore institutional capture
By Pius Fozan
Soon after the 2024 general elections,
in which Congress doubled its score & BJP lost its majority
I chanced upon a political scientist at Vienna’s iconic Café Central.
The guy might know about Austrian politics. India is far away from Vienna.
Over coffee, he remarked that the true tragedy of modern Indian liberalism is
that not all Indian Liberals can become Professors in Vienna?
its penchant for perfectionism in an age of existential crisis.
One might say that Gandhians wanted moral perfectionism but Liberals were always aware that India is very poor. It can afford Liberal policies and institutions. It must cut its coat according to its cloth.
He was referring to the comfortable habit of Delhi’s intelligentsia of judging the Congress leadership by the standards of a peacetime democracy,
India is at peace though some border areas may witness insurgency from time to time
rather than the asymmetric warfare of a computational autocracy.
i.e. Hindus are the majority. They prefer voting for Hindu leaders even if they are OBC- like Modi- rather than Brahmin- like RaGa.
We are told, with varying degrees of sociological certainty, that the Congress remains a “family firm”
Rahul really is the son of Rajiv who really was the son of Indira who really was the daughter of Nehru.
and that Rahul Gandhi lacks the “gravitas” and “curriculum vitae” required to unseat a formidable electoral machine.
Suppose you are the head of a regional party. You do a deal with Congress whereby you dominate your own State. But you also want some juicy portfolios at the Centre so as to siphon off funds. The question is would your bagman be happy to serve under Rahul? Is he competent? Suppose he gets some stupid idea into his head. Can he be persuaded to give it up?
Rahul may not want to be PM. He might nominate someone else. The problem is that he might tear up the ordinances issued by his nominee. That's what he did to Manmohan. If the PM lacks power, the administration turns to shit. The opposition will win by a landslide- as BJP did in 2014.
This assessment, while satisfying to the purist, is not merely harsh: it is analytically flawed.
India's problem is that it has a Hindu majority. Also, most of its people are nationalistic. They don't want foreigners to conquer it.
It reduces the existential struggle for the soul of the Republic to a critique of the personal failings of a single individual, unwittingly validating the very playbook designed by Narendra Modi and Amit Shah.
Rahul says he could have become PM in 1995. He could definitely have become PM in 2004, 2009 and 2013. I think he would have won a full majority if he entered the 2014 election as the sitting PM.
The critique relies on an intellectual silo that deliberately ignores the terrifying asymmetry.
i.e. the fact that Hindus are about 80 percent of the population.
To judge the opposition without addressing the ruling party’s unprecedented concentration of capital – manifest in the Bharatiya Janata Party’s Rs 10,000-crore war chest –
if Rahul hadn't been crap, Congress would remain the richest party
is an analytical farce. The modern BJP is a corporate-bureaucratic behemoth boasting state-of-the-art infrastructure in every taluka, sustained by the deep, century-old societal penetration of the Sangh Parivar.
Congress achieved that in the Twenties & Thirties. The Dynasty ruled the country for 38 out of its first 40 years. Sadly, assassination tempered autocracy.
Finally, the critics over-index on individual personality traits while under-indexing on the profound socio-political mutation that has occurred within the Indian electorate.
It occurred because Rahul didn't want to become PM just in case he was shot like his granny or blown up like his daddy. The problem was his dog in the manger attitude. He wouldn't do the job and he wouldn't let anybody else do it on his behalf.
The rise of the BJP is not the result of Rahul Gandhi’s alleged lack of discipline; it is the consequence of a decades-long, meticulously crafted cultural and ideological project that has successfully shifted the centrist gravity of Indian politics towards a muscular majoritarianism.
Congress, as Gandhi said in 1939, was the Hindu party. This was borne out by the 1946 election results. It remained the party for all Hindus till the mid-Sixties when regional & caste based parties began to rise.
Today, the entire state architecture – from the judiciary to a capitulated media – has synchronised its vocabulary with the government’s rhetoric.
If so, why did the BJP lose its majority in 2024? It would be fair to say that the BJP has become the default national party. Still, if the opposition gets its act together on seat sharing, then the BJP can only form a Government as part of a coalition.
To mock Gandhi’s direct public outreach as “gimmickry” under such total institutional capture is laziness.
It is foolish. The fact is Congress spent a lot of money sending the message that Rahul is in charge. That's a good thing. Voters want to know that there is an effective chain of command within the party they vote for. Congress has won in Kerala & seen a change of Chief Minister in Karnataka. In both cases, it was made clear that the High Command had chosen the CM.
Labelling the chief targets of this ruthless state apparatus as its accomplices shifts the moral burden away from the institutions and corporations that actually broke our democracy.
This crazy fool is saying 'Modi is Hitler. Did you know Hitler came from Austria and used to live in Vienna? I went to Vienna & talked to a 'political scientist' there. This enables me to understand that all those RSS dudes are actually blonde, blue-eyed Nazis wearing jack-boots.'
The air of indestructibility that envelops the current regime may well unravel in the years ahead,
In other words, it may lose the next General Election. The question is whether whatever Coalition is cobbled together in 2029 is stable.
driven by economic distress, joblessness and institutional decay.
not to mention the worsening global economy. What if the State goes off a fiscal cliff? Populist schemes may have to be scrapped. There is bound to be a big backlash.
When that moment comes, the alternative will not emerge from the immaculate conception of a textbook liberal leader. It will have to be forged from the messy, flawed, and resilient people we actually have.
in Vienna? No! Oslo!
The question of political incompetence
By Manash Firaq Bhattacharjee
Who always says the stupidest thing possible.
From the views that have appeared on X about Ramachandra Guha’s column, it appears that the core issue is not whether Rahul Gandhi is incompetent as a political leader,
He is the Leader of the Opposition. He may not be as competent as Modi but he is clearly better than Mamta or even Stalin.
but what defines incompetence itself.
Everyone knows that 'incompetence' means 'not being able to do the job assigned to you'. Has Rahul asserted control over Congress? Yes. Has he helped win any States? Yes (Kerala). Is he a good Leader of the Opposition? Good enough. He is always on the attack. That show's fighting spirit.
A friend teaching political science said in private that Guha’s article is badly timed as the paper leaks and the CBSE marking debacle is currently the most serious national issue.
Guha's article was stupid. He said Priyanka should not have been given the Wayanad seat. But doing so helped Congress win in Kerala.
Guha’s article is a distraction from the political narrative of the moment.
The current narrative is about the 'Cockroach Janata Party' set up by a student in America. He is due to return to India. Will he lead a 'youth quake' of the sort we have seen in Nepal, Bangladesh & Sri Lanka?
Narratives of criticism can’t be dictated by the logic of singularity.
Sure they can. Hegel explained why. Narratives of criticism based on it had a huge influence on the politics of many countries- including India.
Guha has the right to make his point. I nevertheless granted my friend’s point. Public intellectuals must prioritise issues that have an urgent material ground and have impacted people’s lives.
No. They are welcome to focus on arcane matters of interest only to policy makers at the highest level.
Politics is about time, who can have control over time, and who can shake off that control and reclaim it.
No. Politics is about solving collective action problems or deciding who gets to pass the buck.
Guha writes that the Congress has “belatedly realised Rahul is not the new Nehru”.
Congress realised that without Rahul- or some other dynastic head- the party would dissolve into squabbling factions.
Whether that is true or not, Rahul Gandhi’s qualities are more reminiscent of Nehru
who presided over the ethnic cleansing of Muslims in Delhi itself.
than Indira’s anti-democratic strains
she made the party dynastic. But, it must be said, 'the Syndicate' was utterly useless. Morarji was the worst PM ever.
and Rajiv Gandhi’s buckling under communal politics on more than one occasion.
Why has he not married a nice Muslim man? Is it because he is 'communal'?
During Partition, many Congressmen became openly communal.
Maulana Azad said Nehru was communal. He chose only Hindus as Chief Ministers in 1937
Nehru stood his secular ground and took enormous risks to address volatile crowds in Bihar in 1946 for the sake of Hindu-Muslim fraternity.
Yet, in Delhi, the Muslim percentage of the population fell from one third to five percent when he became PM. In 1948, he passed a law forbidding the return of refugees who had crossed the border in panic. It is a different matter that, as a Socialist, he was against religion as 'the opium of the masses'. But this was also true of Ataturk and Nasser & Ba'athist leaders.
Rahul Gandhi has shown a similar commitment to a secular society by his politics of love (“mohabbat ki dukaan”).
He lurves Modi. He also wants Varun to join Congress- thinks nobody at all.
His emphasis on the politics of listening has been a clear departure from top-down, elitist, muscular forms of Indian politics. Rahul Gandhi appears humane and accessible. We do not know the true measure of what he achieved during Bharat Jodo Yatra because the mainstream media bent its knees and ignored the historic event under political diktat.
Did Congress double its numbers in the Lok Sabha? Yes. We have to accept that the Yatra was a success.
Politics is a matter of conviction and a refusal to lose one’s ground.
There are some 'conviction politicians' and some pragmatists and some populists and so forth. Refusing to 'lose one's ground' is silly. Mamta refused to resign. People laughed at her. Now it looks as though her candidate for Leader of Opposition has lost to an upstart who, till a decade ago, was with the Communist party.
Guha is a pragmatist.
No. He is a cretin. He thinks Priyanka shouldn't have taken Wayanad. But she has proved to be an excellent Parliamentarian.
Pragmatism has a retrospective limit in politics.
No. It is a virtue because Politics is about solving collective action problems by making compromises of various types.
It is justified by past assessment.
No. It is justified by present assessments.
Pragmatism does not offer hope.
Yes it does. You see a smart pragmatist take power and you become hopeful about the future. Look at Suvendu Adhikari in West Bengal.
It has no tools to offer for the future.
If finds such tools.
Political futures are run by the ability to take risks.
Anyone can take risks. It is gaining power which is tricky.
Rahul Gandhi has been taking risks like Nehru did in 1946-’47.
No. He was cautious. What would have been risky was trusting the Muslim League. Nehru hated the whole lot of them and pulled the trigger on Partition. Overnight, the League disappeared from North India. Muslims who remained would become a vote bank for Congress. Why? The alternative was ethnic cleansing.
Failure is a matter of time in politics.
No. It is about losing power.
Those who dismiss Rahul must qualify if their idea of incompetence is pragmatic, or political.
It is pragmatic. Incompetence means being shit at your job. If your job is political, you are incompetent if you are shit at politics.
The pyramidal structure and political history of the Congress Party favours the Nehru-Gandhi family.
No. What favoured it was Nehru being less shit than Gandhi & Indira being less shit than Morarji & even Rajiv turned out to be less shit than VP Singh & Arun Nehru. Sonia, once Rahul returned to India, was less shit than Pawar. Whether we like it or not, Rahul has asserted control rights over his party. Who now remembers the Group of 23?
Guha needs to ask questions of the party and not the family.
Why bother? Everyone knows what happened to the Group of 23. Of them only Tharoor holds elected office but he isn't going to stand again. It is obvious that there will be no Congress without the Dynasty. Its great virtue is that sibling does not challenge sibling. Primogeniture has prevailed.
He is focussing on the wrong issue in his desperation to see the Congress (a party Gandhi wanted disbanded in 1948) back in power.
Guha hates the BJP. Is he happy with Congress rule in Karnataka- where he lives? I suppose so. It must be said that the transition to a younger CM has been very deftly managed.
Why single out the Congress when criticising dynasty?
Fair point. Dynasticism doesn't seem to have worked for Mamta or even Stalin.
By Kay Benedict
Who is a perfectly sensible journalist.
Ramachandra Guha is mistaken if he thinks all the ills in the Congress will end if the Gandhi family relinquishes the leadership.
Guha is always mistaken about everything. He is the Huccha Venkat of Indian Historiography.
Other than finding fault with Rahul Gandhi, Guha does not offer an alternative road map.
Because he has shit for brains.
Pray, other than the Gandhis, which Congress leader is acceptable pan-India?
Rahul could nominate a technocrat. It worked for Sonia.
Last, over 12 years, the Bharatiya Janata Party has spent crores to project Rahul Gandhi as “Pappu” and to make India Congress-mukt.
He did it to himself. I don't blame him. He doesn't want to get shot or blown up. If you come across as a moon-calf, nobody will bother to assassinate you.
Aren't the leaders of regional parties also responsible for the BJP's growth?
Mamta gave West Bengal to Modi as an early birthday present.
Many of these once-secular parties, such as the Janata Dal (United), Janata Dal (Secular), Lok Janshakti Party, Telugu Desam Party and the Nationalist Congress Party factions are now with the BJP.
They started off as anti-Congress. We must admit that the BJP is the most successful heir to the Janata Morcha of 1977.
In the past, strong regional parties such as the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam
which Rahul has ditched so as to suck up to Vijay.
and the Trinamool Congress also helped prop up BJP governments at the Centre.
Mamta would enter and exit Vajpayee's Cabinet with her usual histrionics.
Even parties like the Aam Aadmi Party, Biju Janata Dal, YSR Congress and All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen indirectly helped the BJP to contain the Congress, the Rashtriya Janata Dal being the sole exception.
RJD has such an evil reputation that it enabled Modi & Nitish to sweep the Bihar polls.
Even the Congress has many leaders peddling soft Hindutva, whom Rahul Gandhi has, of late, managed to isolate.
I think they are 'ageing out' of politics. Rahul's brand looks quite strong from the youth point of view. But 'affiliation' isn't enough. You need energization so as to do booth management on the ground.
That leaves only the Congress, Rashtriya Janata Dal
which now has only 4 Lok Sabha MPs and 25 MLAs
and the Left parties
CPM has 4 Lok Sabha seats and about 43 MLAs spread across the country
as the principal challengers of the BJP on uncompromising ideological terms.
Which nobody gives a shit about.
Why single out the Congress when criticising dynasty?
Because Rahul could have been PM but refused to step up to the plate. He is a Roi Faineant.
Dynasty, per se, is not harmful.
If the current scion is competent- sure.
The BJP and most regional parties also have dynastic families. Not just Rahul Gandhi, no Opposition leader can electorally challenge the BJP, plush
flush not plush
with money and muscle power, supported by the fawning mainstream media,
If BJP is popular, you lose readers if you keep attacking it.
the Enforcement Directorate, Central Bureau of Investigation and a section of the judiciary.
If the BJP keeps getting re-elected then it is seen as having legitimacy and auctoritas. I think the BJP would have put up Advani in 2014 if Rahul had become PM & led his party into the General Election.
Intensity of BJP attack on Rahul Gandhi shows that he is not irrelevant
He is the Leader of the Opposition- i.e. the person likely to become PM if the Opposition win the 2029 election.
By Hasnain Naqvi
Will Muslims start voting for Owaisi's party? What happens after delimitation- i.e. an increase in the percentage of Hindi speaking MPs? 50 million Indians have Urdu as their first language (this is probably undercounting) and at least 100 million Muslims have Hindustani as their mother tongue. They are bound to want their own party (or at least a caucus) so as to address issues of direct concern to them. 'Secular' parties keep saying 'Modi is Hitler. He will kill or deport you. Vote for us if you want to live!' But Modi has been in power for many years. If Muslims haven't run away from Gujarat, what do they really have to fear elsewhere?
Ramachandra Guha’s article reduces Rahul Gandhi’s political journey to a caricature that no longer corresponds with political reality.
That could be said about anything Guha writes.
To argue that Rahul Gandhi displayed “focused hard work” only during the Bharat Jodo Yatra ignores the broader transformation of opposition politics in India over the last four years. The yatras themselves were not symbolic spectacles but sustained political exercises that reconnected the Congress leader with ordinary Indians across regions, classes and communities. Their political impact became visible in the Congress revival in the 2024 Lok Sabha elections and the emergence of a more coherent opposition bloc.
This is perfectly fair. However, we have to ask, did Congress's allies gain or lose since then? Currently, it looks like they lost. One might say, 'Mamta self-destructed. Stalin faced Vijay who showed exceptional political nous (unless the thing was a fluke).' Still, it has to be said, it is bad for regional pride if you are seen as playing second fiddle to a cretinous dynast.
More importantly, Gandhi’s politics today extends far beyond social media interventions. His persistent advocacy for a caste census, electoral transparency, institutional accountability, unemployment, guarantees of a minimum support price for crops, Manipur and crony capitalism reflects a structured political narrative centred on constitutional democracy and social justice.
Very true. Constitutional democracy & Social Justice require son of the former PM to become PM.
Whether one agrees with all his positions is secondary. What deserves acknowledgment is that he has emerged as one of the few national leaders consistently foregrounding concerns about democratic erosion, inequality and institutional opacity.
No democratic erosion occurs if the son of the PM becomes PM. It is only if some lowly 'chai-wallah' becomes PM that the Constitution is put in peril.
Guha’s critique also underestimates why the ruling establishment devotes extraordinary political energy to attacking Rahul Gandhi.
The Government attacks the Leader of the Opposition because the latter's job is to attack the former.
The intensity of that response itself suggests that he is no longer viewed as politically irrelevant.
Because he is the Leader of the Opposition.
Guha is looking at the wrong end of the pyramid
There is no pyramid. Guha is merely exhibiting his imbecility. He thinks Priyanka should not have stood in Wayanad. But doing so helped Congress win Kerala.
By Nikhil Sanjay-Rekha Adsule
Blaming Rahul Gandhi and the Gandhi family for the Bharatiya Janata Party’s political dominance has become a reflex for India’s liberal intelligentsia. Ramachandra Guha recently leaned into this narrative, framing the Indian National Congress as a stubborn "family firm" that hands Narendra Modi his best electoral weapon on a silver platter.
Rahul refused to enter the Cabinet or takeover from Manmohan even after he tore up this ordinance. This meant that the BJP put up Modi rather than Advani. Modi's campaign was thoroughly professional. He gained a full majority. In 2019, there was some hope that Rahul would do well because he now seemed keen on becoming PM. But he imploded soon enough. Modi won because he deserved to win. That remains the case though, it may be, a deteriorating global economy, will cause fiscal collapse & the drying up of 'last mile delivery' of essential public services and transfers. God alone knows what will happen next.
By treating a massive political shift like a corporate human resources problem, it pushes the idea that a vibrant opposition will magically appear the moment the Gandhi family steps aside.
Congress would implode.
Guha misreads how India’s political system works. We are not dealing with a uniform European nation
There is no such European nation- even Iceland.
but a sprawling, hyper-complex puzzle of regional prides, linguistic identities, caste hierarchies, and intense local rivalries.
But Hindus are the majority. Hindutva- ecumenical Hinduism- means there can be a national party
A pan-Indian opposition cannot be run on managerial efficiency alone.
Sure it can. The BJP was in opposition but had managerial efficiency. However, it was complacent in 2024.
The Gandhis today serve as vital central gravity. Rahul Gandhi’s authority is rooted in history rather than backroom political deals. It acts as a neutral internal referee. An ambitious leader from the South is never going to accept a rival from the Hindi heartland as their national boss. Take away that central anchor and the Congress will not undergo metamorphosis into a meritocracy – it will simply shatter into a dozen squabbling regional factions.
It might disappear altogether. Perhaps that will be the fate of the TMC.
Besides, the obsession with political lineages being uniquely toxic is an elite myth.
The problem with primogeniture is that the heir might be a cretin.
Look at established global democracies. They routinely rely on legacy names to anchor public trust during highly polarised eras, whether it is the Kennedys in the US
two brothers got shot. The third had a skeleton in his cupboard and thus didn't have a shot at becoming POTUS. Since then, there have been no Kennedys in politics- unless you count Bobby's crazy son.
or the Khama family in Botswana.
The traditional kings of the people of that country. Sir Sereste married an English woman and thus was barred from the throne. Thus he became the elected President of the country when it gained independence. His son succeeded him but the current President belongs to a different party and lineage.
Mass movements such as the Bharat Jodo Yatra
not a mass movement. It was a 'mass contact' strategy which was meticulously planned & which cost a lot of money.
also show that leadership isn't just sitting in an ivory tower – walking thousands of kilometers through heat and rain is a gruelling, physical commitment that bypasses a hostile media to connect directly with citizens.
All Indian politicians do this- if they want to get elected.
Guha fixates entirely on the top of the pyramid while ignoring the absolute bottom.
Does Congress have good cadres for booth management? Yes, in some states or areas. But its Seva Dal is pretty shitty compared to the RSS.
The BJP does not win elections because of who leads the Congress; it wins because of an unmatched, year-round grassroots machinery driven by disciplined booth-level agents and panna pramukhs.
Congress had mastered this long ago.
Demanding a change at the high command is just a distraction from the real battlefield. The Congress must stop debating its leadership and start building a tech-savvy, ideologically trained local cadre that can actually protect polling booths and convert public sympathy into actual votes. Changing the face at the top without fixing the foundation is a fundamental misunderstanding of modern political warfare.
You can't change the face- save by substituting Priyanka for Rahul. Can local Congress activists create an army of volunteers for booth management? Yes. Look at Kerala or Karnataka. The problem is the Hindi belt which is going to gain more seats. The Dynasty is from UP. Rahul has regained his seat there. Congress hopes to overthrow Yogi in 2027. It is said that they are reaching out to Mayawati. There are plenty of very smart, public spirited, young people in UP & Bihar. The future belongs to the Party which can help them rise up in politics so as to improve the lives of their brethren.
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