Rahul Gandhi: hope in defeat for India opposition figurehead

The son, grandson and great-grandson of former prime ministers, Rahul Gandhi was seen as India’s next leader in waiting when he made his foray into politics in 2004.

Two decades on, the 53-year-old opposition Congress party leader recorded his greatest success so far: a 140-odd-seat defeat at the hands of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).

In normal political circumstances, it would rank as an electoral humiliation, but compared to the BJP landslides of 2014 and 2019, it is a stunning turnabout.

On Saturday, he was nominated to be India’s official opposition in parliament.

The once-dominant Congress had withered under his stewardship, and expectations were already low even before exit polls predicted another crushing win for the BJP.

Instead, a relaxed Gandhi held up a little red book at his party headquarters on Tuesday and proclaimed that the voters “have taken the first and the biggest step to save the constitution of this country”.

Congress has struggled to present a coherent alternative vision to the BJP’s Hindu-first agenda, while Gandhi has been hamstrung by several criminal cases lodged against him by BJP members, including a defamation conviction that saw him briefly disqualified from parliament last year.

He has struggled to shed his image of an entitled princeling, while his often lacklustre oratory skills are overshadowed by the populist appeal of his politically battle-hardened rival Modi.

But in 2022, Gandhi sought to change his public reputation, presenting what he said was his real self by embarking on a cross-country trek to hear the concerns of ordinary voters.

A bachelor, he argued that India’s media had expended time and money in portraying him in a manner “which is