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, I chanced upon a political scientist at Vienna’s iconic Café Central. Over coffee, he remarked that the true tragedy of modern Indian liberalism is its penchant for perfectionism in an age of existential crisis.
He was referring to the comfortable habit of Delhi’s intelligentsia of judging the Congress leadership by the standards of a peacetime democracy, rather than the asymmetric warfare of a computational autocracy.
We are told, with varying degrees of sociological certainty, that the Congress remains a “family firm” and that Rahul Gandhi lacks the “gravitas” and “curriculum vitae” required to unseat a formidable electoral machine.
This assessment, while satisfying to the purist, is not merely harsh: it is analytically flawed. 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.
The critique relies on an intellectual silo that deliberately ignores the terrifying asymmetry. 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 – 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.
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. 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.
Today, the entire state architecture – from the judiciary to a capitulated media – has synchronised its vocabulary with the government’s rhetoric. To mock Gandhi’s direct public outreach as “gimmickry” under such total institutional capture is laziness. 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.
The air of indestructibility that envelops the current regime may well unravel in the years ahead, driven by economic distress, joblessness and institutional decay. 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.
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, but what defines incompetence itself.
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 is a distraction from the political narrative of the moment.
Narratives of criticism can’t be dictated by the logic of singularity. 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. Politics is about time, who can have control over time, and who can shake off that control and reclaim it.
Guha writes that the Congress has “belatedly realised Rahul is not the new Nehru”. Whether that is true or not, Rahul Gandhi’s qualities are more reminiscent of Nehru than Indira’s anti-democratic strains and Rajiv Gandhi’s buckling under communal politics on more than one occasion.
During Partition, many Congressmen became openly communal. Nehru stood his secular ground and took enormous risks to address volatile crowds in Bihar in 1946 for the sake of Hindu-Muslim fraternity.
Rahul Gandhi has shown a similar commitment to a secular society by his politics of love (“mohabbat ki dukaan”). 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.
Politics is a matter of conviction and a refusal to lose one’s ground. Guha is a pragmatist. Pragmatism has a retrospective limit in politics. It is justified by past assessment. Pragmatism does not offer hope. It has no tools to offer for the future. Political futures are run by the ability to take risks.
Rahul Gandhi has been taking risks like Nehru did in 1946-’47. Failure is a matter of time in politics. Those who dismiss Rahul must qualify if their idea of incompetence is pragmatic, or political.
The pyramidal structure and political history of the Congress Party favours the Nehru-Gandhi family. Guha needs to ask questions of the party and not the family. He is focussing on the wrong issue in his desperation to see the Congress (a party Gandhi wanted disbanded in 1948) back in power.
Why single out the Congress when criticising dynasty?
By Kay Benedict
ADVERTISEMENT
Ramachandra Guha is mistaken if he thinks all the ills in the Congress will end if the Gandhi family relinquishes the leadership.
Other than finding fault with Rahul Gandhi, Guha does not offer an alternative road map. Pray, other than the Gandhis, which Congress leader is acceptable pan-India? Last, over 12 years, the Bharatiya Janata Party has spent crores to project Rahul Gandhi as “Pappu” and to make India Congress-mukt.
Aren't the leaders of regional parties also responsible for the BJP's growth? 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.
In the past, strong regional parties such as the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam and the Trinamool Congress also helped prop up BJP governments at the Centre. Even parties like the Aam Aadmi Party, Biju Janata Dal, YSR Congress and All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeenindirectly helped the BJP to contain the Congress, the Rashtriya Janata Dal being the sole exception. Even the Congress has many leaders peddling soft Hindutva, whom Rahul Gandhi has, of late, managed to isolate.
That leaves only the Congress, Rashtriya Janata Dal and the Left parties as the principal challengers of the BJP on uncompromising ideological terms.
Why single out the Congress when criticising dynasty? Dynasty, per se, is not harmful. The BJP and most regional parties also have dynastic families. Not just Rahul Gandhi, no Opposition leader can electorally challenge the BJP, plush with money and muscle power, supported by the fawning mainstream media, the Enforcement Directorate, Central Bureau of Investigation and a section of the judiciary.
Intensity of BJP attack on Rahul Gandhi shows that he is not irrelevant
By Hasnain Naqvi
Ramachandra Guha’s article reduces Rahul Gandhi’s political journey to a caricature that no longer corresponds with political reality.
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.
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.
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.
Guha’s critique also underestimates why the ruling establishment devotes extraordinary political energy to attacking Rahul Gandhi. The intensity of that response itself suggests that he is no longer viewed as politically irrelevant.
Guha is looking at the wrong end of the pyramid
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.
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.
Guha misreads how India’s political system works. We are not dealing with a uniform European nation but a sprawling, hyper-complex puzzle of regional prides, linguistic identities, caste hierarchies, and intense local rivalries. A pan-Indian opposition cannot be run on managerial efficiency alone.
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.
Besides, the obsession with political lineages being uniquely toxic is an elite myth. 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 or the Khama family in Botswana.
Mass movements such as the Bharat Jodo Yatra 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.
Guha fixates entirely on the top of the pyramid while ignoring the absolute bottom. 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.
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.
For More News Updates Follow Us On www.tconews.in
