The year is 1980 and Rahul Gandhi and his sister, Priyanka, are in a parked Ambassador car at New Delhi’s Palam Airport, not yet named Indira Gandhi International Airport. There is an argument, a little pushing. In the door frame, unnoticed, appears a handsome man in the uniform of an Indian Airlines captain, smiling as he peeks in at the scrapping pair. A word from him and the duo are separated, their dispute forgotten. The car drives off noisily, children now focusing on Rajiv Gandhi, India’s future prime minister.
Some weeks later, as New Delhi’s Raghubir Singh Junior Modern School on central New Delhi’s Humayun Road celebrates Sports Day, Rajiv and his wife, Sonia, turn up in T-shirts and jeans to mingle unobtrusively with children and fellow parents, whose children share Priyanka’s class. Gamely, Rajiv joins a potato-sack race organised for parents. As the contest starts, he tumbles over and so do a few other parents. In a trice, portly sports minister Buta Singh, chief guest at the event, leaps to his side, obsequiously dusting off the younger man’s clothes as other parents fend for themselves. What a fool the politician, attempting to ingratiate himself so plainly! Indira’s older son waves him away, and he and Sonia exchange winks and nudges.
Dad and Mum, dinner over at the joint family home they share with prime minister Indira Gandhi, drive the short distance to the India Gate monument to the war dead, for the popsicles and ice cream sold by a fat Sikh man whose trolley rolls up every evening and stays until just after 11pm. Which kid would not like Mum’s pasta, especially when the recipe is straight from Italy and she is only too happy to enter the kitchen? For the pre-teen Rahul and Priyanka, life would have seemed complete.
Forward to 1988, and Rajiv is prime minister of India, having been elected with a record parliamentary majority that beat the best results delivered for his Congress party by even his famous grandfather, Jawaharlal Nehru, thanks to the flood of national sympathy over the assassination of Indira Gandhi. It is the 100th anniversary celebration of a key government department, and Rajiv, as chief guest, has brought his family along for the dinner. The dessert is a sweetmeat common in northern India called revdi, a hard, sugared candy made in flat rounds encrusted with sesame. Food aficionados credit the revdi made in Meerut, a busy cantonment town 70 km to New Delhi’s northeast, to be the finest in India. Spotting the sweet in the buffet line, Sonia turns to mutter to Rahul in rapid-fire Italian, the boy vigorously nodding in agreement. Her husband, who follows Italian, explains to a curious onlooker: “She is telling Rahul: ‘Remember, before Dad became prime minister, we used to drive down to Meerut over the weekend to eat their revdi. Don’t you miss those days?’”
These and other similar moments must surely play through the minds of the Gandhi widow and her two children a thousand times as they dutifully trudge the dusty hinterland of India, even as the tide of public opinion has swung so sharply against the Congress party they inherited, and lead. The assassinations of father and grandmother aren’t the children’s only painful memories. Uncle Sanjay, their father’s politically active younger brother, was killed when the stunt plane he was flying crashed in June 1980. That was when Grandma, bereft of Sanjay’s muscular support, turned to Dad, forcing him to leave his Indian Airlines job to “help Mummy”. Sonia wept that day, knowing her calm and carefully ordered life was soon to turn upside down.
And of course it does, starting within the household. Indira Gandhi’s turning to Rajiv upsets Maneka, Sanjay’s young widow, who had stood by Indira Gandhi during her bad times and now assumes the political legacy will come to her. There are tensions in the joint family, shouting, and then the spunky aunt is bounced out of the house by Grandma. With her goes Priyanka’s toddler cousin, Varun Feroze, the boy who carries the name of Indira’s husband, and is loved by one and all.
Outside the home, Indira Gandhi is facing Sikh separatism in Punjab, partly fanned by her own home affairs minister, who is in a political battle with the Akali Dal group that governs Punjab. Forced to send in troops to oust the rebels from the Golden Temple, the holiest Sikh shrine, Indira draws outrage from the Sikh community, even those who have no sympathy for militancy. One day, the car carrying Rahul and Priyanka to school is bumped by another vehicle. Indira, fearful it is an attack on her grandchildren, or at the very least a warning, gathers the kids and takes them on a short holiday to Kashmir, seeking peace amid the maples, evergreens and pines of the Valley. Short weeks later, on October 31, 1984, she is cut down by bullets fired by her own Sikh bodyguards, and it is Mum, Sonia, who rushes the mortally wounded prime minister to hospital. In less than seven years, their own father, who succeeds Indira as prime minister, would be killed too, blown up while campaigning in Tamil Nadu by a woman suicide bomber dispatched by the Sri Lankan Tamil Tiger supremo Velupillai Prabhakaran. So massive is the blast that Rajiv is recognised only by his running shoes. The body is accompanied to New Delhi by his school chum, Suman Dubey, who has since remained a father figure to the Gandhi kids and Sonia’s most trusted counsellor.
Whatever you may say about the Gandhi clan, their vanity, lack of intellectual depth or propensity to fall for flattery – the obsequious Buta Singh rose to be home affairs minister in Rajiv’s Cabinet – it is indisputable that a streak  of public service runs in their veins. So, too, a concern for the dispossessed and the people who lead marginal existences. Rahul’s selfimage, for instance, is clearly of one selflessly and unceasingly defending the interests of the poor and the underprivileged, in the tradition of his grandmother, Indira, and great-grandfather Nehru. It is a role he takes seriously. Ashutosh Varshney, head of the political science department at Brown University in the US, recalls sharing a Virgin Atlantic flight from New Delhi to London. Rahul had dozed off for a while and when he awoke, Varshney, seated near him in Business Class, suggested a chat at the bar. For the next three hours, Rahul stood there sipping orange juice and discussing poverty and other developmental issues with the Ivy League don.
His critics, and there are millions of them now, refer to Rahul as Pappu – a Hindi word for dupe. Jokes about his intellect abound within India’s swelling middle classes. A Doon School contemporary remembers him as not a particularly bright spark in an institution that emphasised a wellrounded personality and sound instincts over academic excellence. Rahul was removed from school early and abruptly because of fears for his safety – Rajiv, reportedly driving himself and with a security car following at a discreet distance, showed up early one morning and took the lad back into the security of the prime ministerial home. From then on, for the cocooned lad, some of his best pals were his father’s security officers, all older than him, and alongside whom he sometimes practised at the Special Protection Group’s firing range in Mehrauli, emerging as a crack shot.
Those who know the man better have a different take on his intellect. Like Varshney, senior people in Singapore who know Rahul speak of an earnest person with a keen interest to debate, and learn about, development issues. One Singapore minister who hosted Rahul in his house spoke of spending the entire evening in serious discussion. In New Delhi, former external affairs minister K Natwar Singh, no friend of the Gandhi clan these days, once noticed that a book I was carrying had several passages underlined with a pencil. Rahul, he said, was also a voracious reader and, like me, tended to highlight key passages or thoughts in his books. Despite their falling out, Natwar Singh seemed to have no animus towards Rahul. And he was firmly of the opinion that Congress would not survive if the Gandhis were not around. Both Sonia and Rahul, he pointed out, were unquestioned dynasts – but they were also elected dynasts, repeatedly endorsed by people in parliamentary elections. Sonia too, it appears, is a book lover.
Nevertheless, the image of Rahul stuck in people’s minds is that of a genial dunce, or Pappu. A series of gaffes has contributed to the reputation. In April 2013, a year before he led the Congress party into the national election that got it all but wiped out, Rahul spoke to the country’s top businessmen at an event organised by the Confederation of Indian Industry. There he warned about investing too much hope in Modi, saying “We go into this model where you have one guy who will come and fix everything. He is going to come on a horse, the sun is in the background. There are a billion people waiting. He is coming and everything is going to be fine. No, it’s not going to work like that.”
Rahul was right of course, but the intelligence of his words was obscured by his clumsy articulation on these and other issues that headline writers seized upon. One of them was to liken India to a beehive. “People call us an elephant… We are not an elephant… we are a beehive. It’s funny but think about it. Which is more powerful? An elephant or a beehive?” Rahul was speaking about inane comparisons of China as a massive dragon with its insatiable appetite for infrastructure and India as a slow-moving elephant. He meant to speak about Indian society’s resilience, like a beehive that survives strong winds by swaying with it. But while the idea makes sense, the words came out all wrong. People in the audience looked at each other, not sure of what they were hearing. Six months later, he told a conference of India’s Scheduled Castes – former Hindu outcastes now called Dalits – that India’s Dalits needed the escape velocity of Jupiter to escape their plight. To escape Earth’s gravitational pull, he explained, you need to travel into space at a speed of 11.2 km per second. In Jupiter, that was 60 kmps. Since Rahul was illustrating the social plight of India’s most underprivileged social classes, he was perfectly within reason to use the analogy, but India’s media, particularly television and the English print press, is mostly composed of urban, English-educated classes who unconsciously sneer at the lower classes. A fresh round of jokes began to circulate about Rahul. The subtext was that his audience couldn’t be trusted to handle a concept like escape velocity. It was as though there was little he could do without attracting ridicule.
At other times, he simply bombed as a politician. In January 2014, Rahul gave his first television interview, with the Times NOW channel landing the coup. Arnab Goswami, the channel’s combative anchor, mentioned Modi more than two dozen times during the 80-minute interview. Rahul, trying to focus on issues, avoided saying Modi’s name for the most part, and instead talked of issues such as development, women’s rights and corruption. At times he rambled, frequently referring to himself in the third person. The New York Times later wrote, “Mr Gandhi fumbled, stared with a blank expression and a tilted head and looked wounded at times.” There was no question about it. The interview was a failure: it made the self-assured Modi, in contrast, look not only like the more formidable contender but also overwhelmingly more competent as a leader.
Meanwhile, as the polls approached, Congress was a house divided. The old boy herd, whose power was built around a lifetime of influence peddling, gathered around Sonia while Rahul was trying to push his own ideas, including promoting a younger crop of idealistic candidates. The vital southern state of Andhra Pradesh was particularly riven with Congress feuding and some key moneybags refused to open their kitty to the party, even if  funds had been gathered in its name. Television channels, sensing the mood was massively for Modi, often offered split-screen live coverage of Modi and Rahul speeches, but while Modi could be heard, Rahul was muted out most of the time.
Nor was it any better after the election, which delivered the Congress party its worst drubbing. With Congress strength in the powerful lower house of parliament cut to 44 seats, a historic low, Sonia and Rahul came out to accept defeat before the national media. After congratulating the new government and wishing it the best, Rahul acknowledged that his party had done very badly.
“As vice president of the Congress, I hold myself responsible,” he said. Then, standing to his mother’s left as she took the microphone, Rahul seemed a picture of relief and joy, smiling throughout the brief session. India’s media, sections of which suggested he had been smirking, quickly speculated on the reasons for Rahul’s behaviour. Many surmised it signalled relief that he would not be called upon to pursue an occupation he didn’t quite relish, but had been pushed into by a sense of duty, or his mother’s ambitions, just as Meryl Streep pushes her son’s political career in The Manchurian Candidate.
Watching his performance on television, I, too, got the same sense. Rahul was radiating unparalleled relief. Later, checks with people close to the Congress leadership offered up a totally different picture. On that day, when Sonia and Rahul announced at short notice they would face the cameras, beat reporters were mostly out of the office, contacting people in the new government. In many newsrooms, the youngest staffers – many of them women barely into their twenties – were told to hurry down to Congress party headquarters. These young women, eager to take photographs of the handsome Rahul or shoot selfies with him in the background, frequently squealed out to him to smile and look their way. With no sense of the moment, Rahul had obliged. Television cameras, stationed in the back of the press scrum, had caught only Rahul’s expression, not the entreaties to which he was responding.
Later, when Sonia, as chair of the United Progressive Alliance, hosted dinner for the departing Manmohan Singh and his Cabinet, Rahul was nowhere to be seen. He was overseas on holiday, after a gruelling election.
It is hard to tell why someone so steeped in his family’s political tradition, and with the best recognised family name in Indian politics, should prove so lacklustre as a leader. Rahul’s parliamentary interventions are remarked upon only because they are so rare. He has one of the worst attendance records. In early 2015, he missed the entire budget session of parliament, having disappeared from India for nearly two months with no explanation about his whereabouts. And he is invariably remembered for the wrong reasons. In August 2015, a journalist with a telephoto lens captured him walking into parliament with a cheat sheet in hand, the key points of his speech, to be made in Hindi, written out in Roman script. Twitter and other social media lit up with #Pappu talk for days.
Vayalar Ravi, a longtime Congressman and minister, says Sonia once asked him for advice on how Rahul should go about building his political career. “Madam, in youth politics you have to be a little aggressive, burn a few buses and things,” Ravi offered. Sonia vigorously shook her head in disagreement and changed the subject.
One explanation offered to me by someone who has known the family since the 1960s is that after four generations in power, the biting urge and burning hunger to hold high office à la Modi are simply not there in Rahul. Instead, there is a sense of fatigue. Another could be fear of one more great tragedy being inflicted upon the family, should it accept power directly. It has now come to light that the reason Sonia declined to be prime minister,  when the post was available to her in 2004, was not because of any advice from president APJ Abdul Kalam or her own self-confessed “inner voice”. in his book, Natwar Singh described a scene between Sonia and Rahul witnessed by him, Manmohan Singh and Suman Dubey. Sonia apparently was willing to be prime minister but Rahul stepped in and vetoed the idea. As a son, he would not allow her to come in harm’s way after his father and grandmother had fallen to assassins, he insisted. Sonia, of course, famously told the world later that an “inner voice” had stopped her from taking the job.
According to Natwar Singh, the Gandhi clan tried its best to stop the story from surfacing. Indeed, he told me, pointing to the chair on which I sat, Sonia had sat in his drawing room with Priyanka, after years of ignoring him,  pleading that he not go public with the event. Natwar could not oblige them – the book, he told them, was already with the printers.
The pity is that young Rahul had shown much promise initially. In March 2006, when he made his first major speech in parliament, he had focused on education. In fact, reading that speech, I discovered that he’d spoken of ancient Nalanda University even before the idea of its revival was mooted by president Kalam. His travels around India, he said, had convinced him that education was not about schools and universities but fulfilling aspirations. “A successful education system must do two things: it must allow all young Indians to dream, and it must teach them the skills to turn those dreams into reality,” he said, to resounding cheers from every section of the House.
The candour and sincerity in his address touched a chord. Word then was that Rahul might be planning to step into the shoes of human resource development minister Arjun Singh, who was ailing. It made sense: more than a third of Indians were below the age of 15 and many would soon be eligible to vote. A new minister tuned to the latest thinking was probably just what the country needed. After all, his father, Rajiv, was credited with laying the foundations of India’s rise as a power in computing and software.
Rahul’s reluctance to enter government was a point of frustration for many young MPs in Congress, who felt their own progress was hampered on this account. While many of the younger guard – Sachin Pilot, Jyotiraditya Scindia, Milind Deora and some others – did get junior ministerial berths, some, like Pilot, clearly had potential to go higher. Scindia, too, while no bright spark in school, had flowered in adulthood and won the respect of the bureaucrats who dealt with him. They spoke of his keen grasp of matters and the preparations he made for meetings. But because of his lineage – he is the current head of the Scindia clan that ruled the erstwhile Gwalior state – Jyoti Scindia and others like him had to be particularly careful to not grab too much limelight, lest it touch off some of the famous insecurities endemic to the Gandhi household.      -Outlook