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Tale of two sons: What Rahul Gandhi can learn from Akhilesh Yadav

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Angshukanta Chakraborty
Angshukanta ChakrabortyJan 18, 2017 | 15:37

Tale of two sons: What Rahul Gandhi can learn from Akhilesh Yadav

We are used to living under the immense weight of myths and mythological epics. We quietly accept sons being crushed under the despicable whims of the father, or the family – a parable for individuals trampled by tradition – and call it culture. In fact, we glorify the sacrificial son in almost every religion. The heartless, tough but “just” father always wins to restore “order”. The only exception has been Bollywood, the realm of dreams and fantasy.

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Until real life gives us a tight slap on our collective faces, and makes us see things anew. What happened within the Samajwadi Party over the past few months, and especially the well-managed coup led by Uttar Pradesh chief minister, the 42-year-old Akhilesh Yadav, as 2016 gave in to 2017, is nothing short of a brand new epic fit for our times.

From the “intern CM” who was installed by his father on the throne (isn’t it amazing how the language of fables and the language of technology-aided modernity mingle when we speak about the prodigal sons of our politics?), Akhilesh Yadav has now truly taken over the reins of Samajwadi Party. Even the Election Commission had no choice but to recognise the new math within SP and grant Akhilesh the “cycle” symbol.

(Though, one report said that Akhilesh was also keen on the “motorcycle” in case the cycle went to his father, the usurped SP patriarch, Mulayam Singh Yadav. Motorcycle would have indicated the real time development and a progress from the cycle, speed and fast-tracking of growth that UP embraced under his five-year stint as its chief minister.)

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Akhilesh Yadav has now truly taken over the reins of Samajwadi Party.

So what did Akhilesh Yadav do?

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Firstly, with immense dignity, fortitude and determination, he focused on the economic development on his state, even as politics kept slipping out of his control. The Muzaffarnagar riots in 2013 and the 2014 Lok Sabha elections loss were spectacular and grim reminders that unless Akhilesh could fuse his “Jagat bhaiyya” image with someone who has an iron grip on truly secularising the politics of his state, and not merely fraternising along established Muslim-Yadav voter base lines, UP was a lost cause.

Secondly, as he built roads and expressways with a breakneck speed, he understood that without communicating what he was doing and without winning over the youth, his considerable work was as good as non-existent. Since August 2016, under the tutelage of Harvard professor Steve Harding and his team, Akhilesh excelled at WhatsApping his expanding grip on a brand new but smarter, quicker and more economically aspirational cadre base.   

Finally, when push came to shove, Akhilesh did not relent. He went against his father and retinue of uncles – practically the entire Yadav old guard – to embrace Uttar Pradesh as a whole, all the while singing paeans to family and family values.

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Akhilesh owned up to the possibility of the humiliating defeat and failure, of SP MLAs not siding with him, all the while ensuring with smart backchannel negotiations, proper communication and appeal to the dream of creating a post-caste Uttar Pradesh made the legislators pick him over his blinded father and conniving uncle Shivpal, and that peculiar specimen of political pimping – Amar Singh.

A bloodless and most graceful coup was just duly engineered, and Mulayam Singh Yadav was outfoxed by his very obedient, very polite and very publicly emotional son. Akhilesh proved that a scion becomes a king not by inheriting the gene but by forging a brand new politics of his own.

In Akhilesh’s case, it was the calculated risk of moving beyond identity politics in a communally uber-sensitive UP, at a time when his own father and uncles were falling back on the tired old trope of clutching on to Yadav strongmen and Muslim fear of being overrun by the BJP, and while the Modi-Shah-led BJP was putting forward technofascism of the Hindutva-driven Centre as the only viable option for India’s most populous state.    

What a study in contrast is Akhilesh Yadav with Rahul Gandhi, the scion of scions, the crown prince of the Indian National Congress, the Gandhi to take forward the Gandhi legacy.

True, there is perhaps no other leader in the current political horizon of India who has been more steadfastly secular, more committed to ensuring that welfare legislations such the UPA-era schemes were passed in Parliament, and more burdened by a surname that is written in blood.

Yet, Rahul Gandhi has neither imprinted the Congress with his own signature brand of doing politics, nor has he earned wider, bipartisan respect beyond his own party to emerge as the true face of the anti-Modi coalition, despite his clear attempts to do exactly that a number of times.

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What is Rahul Gandhi’s idea of India? We don’t know, beyond his warnings against the tear in the secular fabric of India.

Despite saying the right things, despite being well-meaning and despite giving ample speeches which have shown a steady rise in quality and content, Rahul Gandhi is still waiting in the wings as an ailing Sonia Gandhi, the Congress matriarch who took her party to great electoral success not once but twice, in 2004 and 2009, remains the party president. The divisions within Congress, much like the divisions within the SP, are fractured along generational lines, exactly as the vote-catching expertise of a Mulayam Singh Yadav prevented the SP old guard to accept Akhilesh as the new leader.

It’s not Rahul’s holidaying abroad, or his ATM photo-ops to protest demonetisation, or his “khaat sabha” with farmers in UP that are individually problematic. Quite the contrary. In fact, individually they are/were brilliant advices and strategic moves that backfired, or earned public ridicule only because Rahul has been unable to weave these dispersed and scattered actions and speeches into a cohesive narrative of his own. He doesn’t have a story, a new story, a new dream to offer India, that is splintering and reeling under the divisive superstorm that is Narendra Modi.

Rahul Gandhi’s currency is also Rahul Gandhi’s cage. Yes, he has been compared to Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau, and may be one election victory against a Stephen Harper-like Narendra Modi could indeed re-script the Rahul Gandhi story. Unfortunately, until the engine is reignited on its own, electoral victory against Modi at the Centre is a distant dream.

Rahul’s story is “don’t read the Modi story, it’s a lie”. But he doesn’t have the content to fill in the ideological and political vacuum that the accuracy of falsifying Modi duly creates. Political reality of a lumbering democracy like ours has been changed drastically by Modi’s dual core processor of technocratic utopia blended with a Hindu-majoritarian civilisational idea of India. No appeals to freedom movement and the secular foundations of the Congress party (now interpreted, erroneously, as just minority appeasement) could reverse the changed fabric of our nation, which wants more of the future, and the past only as an imagined golden age, a gilded mould to pour the future into. 

India wants to believe the lie, quite knowing it’s a lie. As Adam Kirsch has recently written in the context of America, “The problem with our ‘post-truth’ politics is that a large share of the population has moved beyond true and false. They thrill precisely to the falsehood of a statement, because it shows that the speaker has the power to reshape reality in line with their own fantasies of self-righteous beleaguerment.”

Yet, what Akhilesh Yadav has managed to do is to reshape the reality of UP in his own image. There are tangible proofs of economic development, such as the 393-km-long Agra-Lucknow Expressway constructed in just 22 months, or the Lucknow Metro, the scintillating examples of mobility and aspiration for a state saddled with encumbrances and stifling movements along caste and religious lines.

The Gunga-Jamuni culture of a secular, mixed-breed UP is becoming a relic of the past, as clansmen rob votes in lieu of offering a semblance of protection from one’s own neighbours. Akhilesh risked his political fortunes entirely by asking UP to believe in the future and the possibility of truly coming together without fear or pressure.

What is Rahul Gandhi’s idea of India? We don’t know, beyond his warnings against the tear in the secular fabric of India. How is his secularism different from the old ways of keeping communal brackets safe but intact? Yes, UPA-era schemes are still the backbone of India’s fast slowing economy post demonetisation, but how does Rahul plan to weld real welfarism with an India obsessed with fanciful ideas of growth, which imagines itself to be post-caste when Dalits are lynched and driven to suicide, when Muslims are killed because the meat stored in their refrigerators is rumoured to be beef. What is Rahul Gandhi’s modus operandi beyond sounding like a considerably less erudite version of, say, an eloquent argumentator in Shashi Tharoor or a factually-armed P Chidambaram, at a time when India prefers the shortcut of fantasy over the harder and longer and broader route of a democracy enshrined in constitutional values.

In other words, what is the story that Rahul Gandhi is writing, and that has moved beyond the story he was born with?   

Rahul Gandhi is perilously close to becoming the sacrificial son in the myths we revere only to distance ourselves from them. On the other hand, even as the legends of Ajatashatru and Aurangzeb make bad apples of sons who toppled their fathers, adding Akhilesh to the pantheon makes that crucial difference to the one-sidedness of the stories that are India’s family heirloom. It brings them up to date.

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Last updated: January 18, 2017 | 15:37
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