He came, he saw, he failed to conquer. Rahul Gandhi, the great hope for the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty, has spent two years in Uttar Pradesh rallying support for the Congress party. But the voters of India’s largest state were not exactly bowled over by all the attention. Congress won a paltry 28 seats in the 403-seat legislative assembly. Mr Gandhi has been humbled.
What are the people of Uttar Pradesh trying to say? Since there are 200m of them, as many as live in Brazil, it seems only polite to listen. In the past, UP – as it is known in acronym-loving India – has been the stage upon which national politics is fought. In recent elections something new has happened. People have started voting for themselves.
Indian politics is a complex mosaic of regionalism, religion, caste, class and party. It is hard to draw firm conclusions from a single event. Still, the result in UP fits into a broad pattern from which we can draw at least four conclusions. First, the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty, and by extension the Congress party, is in trouble. There are few political parties whose success is so bound up with one dynasty. Indira Gandhi, the daughter of Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister, neutralised Congress’s institutional legitimacy during her three consecutive terms from 1966. That made the party almost entirely reliant on her charisma. Today, without the allure of the dynasty, Congress would be an empty shell. With Sonia Gandhi ill and Rahul weakened, the party is feeble.