Rahul Goes To School

Unfortunately, Rahul's first serious foray into UP—his earlier trips were confined to the Amethi-Rae Bareli belt—has come too late to make too much of a difference. A local intelligence official in Bareilly said, "Rahul should have started this many months back, and allowed for time to galvanise the party machinery. People were giving the Congress about 22 seats; today I can say it will be up to at least 35."

Rahul, too, does not have very high expectations for the Congress in this election. "The Congress has not fought a serious election in UP since 1991. And in the 1996 elections (when the Congress gave 300-odd seats to the BSP in alliance) there was a total sell-out; it destroyed the organisation. We lost the ability to create leaders at the ground level. That will change now. You will see a difference in these elections, and a much bigger difference in 2009," he said.

Perhaps the most significant point that Rahul made was that he was in for the long haul. In every speech he said, "I plan to have a long-term relationship with UP; to fight shoulder to shoulder with you. I'll keep coming back, even after this election." Clearly, UP will be his "karmabhoomi", the launching pad for a national revival. Rahul may have been "launched" several times before—at the Hyderabad plenary in January 2006, for instance—but this looked like the "hard launch".

The launch was delayed largely because of security considerations: for, when Rahul travels in the countryside, all security barriers break down. For instance, at every stop in this trip, he got down to shake hands with people, as he did with passengers sitting in a stationary bus, sitting on top of a tractor or standing behind barricades. And he accepted whatever he was given to eat—such as a chuski (those lethal coloured ice lollies) or sugarcane. Politically, it goes down a treat: As a man at Khatauli said, "Dekha kitna tasalli se haath milaya." (How openly he shook hands). Or as our driver—a Yadav from Safai, Mulayam Singh Yadav's village, put it, "Itne bade ghar ka ladka hain magar sab ko milta hain, bus pe log ho ya gaon ke garib." (He is from such a reputed family, and yet meets everyone, people in buses, the rural poor). Feudal perhaps, and distasteful to the educated middle class, but clearly not to rural India. But, for the attendingSPG, these trips are a nightmare.

In this assembly election, the best Rahul can do is to "shake up" the vote and add enough to make a BSP-Congress government possible. But the question is: will the Gandhi-Nehru charisma turn the Congress fortunes and help the party achieve its desire of seeing Rahul as prime minister in 2009, when he turns 39? After all, father Rajiv was PM at 40. But to make that a possibility, Rahul has to be visible—and sustain the momentum begun in western UP.