6 min readJun 21, 2026 07:21 AM IST
First published on: Jun 21, 2026 at 06:55 AM IST
On the eve of Rahul Gandhi’s birthday last week, I incurred the rage of his social media fan club. And for the oddest reason. It impressed me that the Leader of the Opposition made the effort to go to Kota and address a huge rally of students about the needless difficulties they have faced with paper leaks and an education system so lousy that coaching centres have replaced colleges. So, when a clip of him standing before a vast cheering crowd popped up, I paid attention and was surprised that his speech was in English.
So on ‘X’, I said that it would have been better if he had spoken in Hindi without expecting that the social media public square would explode. My post was viewed by nearly half a million people, liked by nearly a thousand and retweeted a lot. But, along with this came the fury of his fan club. I was accused of nurturing a special hatred for the Dynasty and of being a ‘bootlicking’ Modi bhakt. Let me get denials and disclaimers out of the way.
I have no ‘hatred’ for the Dynasty, but believe that by putting the interests of her children above the interests of Congress, Sonia Gandhi has ruined the only political party that can take on the BJP juggernaut. As for being a Modi ‘bhakt’, I have not been one for years. For the record, I find Modi and Yogi’s endless promotion of themselves on news channels embarrassing. Not just for them but for India. Their habit of singing their own praise is reminiscent of the North Korea model of governance.
It is my sincere hope that the Congress Party finds ways to strengthen its roots enough to put up a real fight in Uttar Pradesh next year and in the general election in 2029. For this to happen, Rahul Gandhi needs to stop imitating the worst traits of the BJP and copy the best ones. The worst traits include deploying venomous, vicious trolls on social media and creating a cult around the ‘dear Leader.’ Judging from two things I noticed on Rahul’s birthday, it is evident that emulation of BJP worst practices has already happened. Rahul was depicted as Parshuram in a Bollywood style poster on his birthday, and sent a greeting card of nauseating sycophancy by the Karnataka Congress Party.
This greeting card had a picture of him from his more youthful days that said, ‘Happy birthday to Heart of People Shri RAHUL GANDHI JI’. Wait, it gets worse. In a vertical spelling of his name alongside the smiling, youthful face was his name spelt in capital letters under a golden crown. ‘Robust, affectionate, heartful, unparalleled leader’ were the words they spelt vertically with the letters of his name. At the top of this greeting card were pictures of his Mummy and sister, and below were mugshots of Karnataka’s senior leaders.
If the Congress Party has lost election after election after election in the past twelve years, it is because too much time has been spent burnishing the image of the ‘dear leader’ and not enough spent on building the party. There are millions of Indian voters who are tired of the Modi cult and would happily vote for the Congress Party if it revived. Revival must begin at the grassroots, and that is the hard work that has not been done. This is work that the BJP does on a constant basis, and this is why it is such a formidable electoral machine. The BJP also has a leader who works all the time. His dedication to working for ‘my family of 140 crore people’ is total and remarkable.
The Leader of the Opposition, for his part, raises important issues and then buzzes off on holiday and reappears with a new issue to latch onto. NEET should have been raised long before the Cockroach Janata Party turned it into its defining cause. Education is the most important economic reform that Modi has neglected to make, and he seems never to have noticed that one of the things that deters foreigners from investing in India is the horrific state of our cities. These are both issues that the Congress Party can make its own.
Of late, I am forever running into people who say to me sadly that they are sick and tired of religion being dragged into politics and that they would happily vote for the Congress Party if it got its act together. For this to happen, we need to hear less about the man who is the ‘heart of India’ and more about the values that Congress once stood for. Liberal democracy, secularism and tolerance of dissent. I have left ‘socialism’ out because, after the License Raj ended, it gradually became less relevant and has strangely found its way into Modi’s economic ideas.
The most important lesson that Rahul can learn from Modi is his ability to rectify his mistakes and then erase them as if they never happened. This happened with demonetisation and the disastrous early handling of the COVID epidemic. The Congress Party has made many mistakes too, which BJP spokesmen bring up daily on primetime chat shows. Congress spokespersons have learned to fight back on TV and on social media, but what has not happened at all is a serious attempt to rebuild the party’s broken organisational frame brick by brick and with urgency.
