Depends on the situation. If he's dumb as a brick, i will hold it against him. The problem with generational things is, you expect quality to be as good or better than the previous generations and not worse. Rahul should have been much better in politics (compared to Modi or others) coming from a family that has been in politics from 60+ years and who have given a lot to India. Look at his performance or his mom's or sisters performance. They're bad at it. They should learn from other people in Congress. Either Congress does not know how to do politics or somewhere down the line, the nature of politics has changed such that the Congress is feeling like a fish out of water. Maybe the amount of MP's with cases against them coming into politics and winning successfully is a compass towards where the political situation in the country is heading towards.
Back in 2016 i'd have believed that but in the next two years i watched RaGa's popularity rise, reaching 30% according to polls and at the same time Modi's popularity dropping from a high of 65% around mid 2016 towards 40%. That's not a very big gap. But Congress never projected him as a competitor.
We will have to watch this space as there is uncertainty as to what RaGa status will be. His sister was unlucky, she was going to start her push but then Pulwama happened. So she had to wrap up her campaign and got sidelined. Whenever i see her i think of her grandmother and i'm sure i'm not the only one. This i've thought ten years back too. So she's an open question. I think she is their best bet but untested. Whether she has it in her.
The way i see Congress predicament is they have to go back to basics. Get in touch with the people. They have become disconnected. Compare their statements to what Modi says, he's with it they seem out of it. You can see this in the way people react to them in social media. They need to get better at this on social media having never really been that much into it as if their voters are not on there.
They have to champion regional leaders from their party. Give them space to grow. When the BJP was in the wilderness for ten years they did not prevent Modi from becoming viable. There is a lesson there. They've done this before after Rajiv lost, with Narasimha and Manmohan. Some where a leader will emerge but if the family treats it like a threat to their leadership then no competitor to Modi will come about.
It's funny, back in 2014 i thought it would be good for national politics if BJP won as then we would have a viable alternative to Congress and not continue to remain a one party only state. This time i'm thinking the same about Congress.
I don't quite understand this line. These parties were always fighting against the Congress from the time they were made. They might have won once or twice but lost a lot because they were even more scam making governments than the congress. Maybe the people were just fed up of the subsequent govts not doing anything and just gulping money and thought of giving the BJP a try. The North is mostly Hindutva based voters now. Congress and other parties lost because they didn't play that Hindutva card.
I mean in states that don't have prominent regional parties its a two way fight. See the three elections at the end of last year. MP & Rajasthan, why did BJP lose there. Even if you say the win was a fluke still you cannot deny Congress was quite close. Where was the hindutva ? the word means different things to different sections of RSS affiliates. Walter Anderson has done a good job documenting this. If one was to score the BJP and what they have done in hindutva space the score isn't going to be high. The approach was soft and not hard. Very cautious as this can blow up predictably and become difficult to manage and then they are wasting time doing damage control & putting out fires.
Gujarat earlier was a warning shot to Modi. Imagine if Congress won in Gujarat, what would that have done to Modi. To lose his state when he was PM, he would have lost his momentum. The mandate would have become fractured and we'd be having a different conversation now.
So people vote differently depending on whether its national or state. How good or not the local representative is matters a great deal more at the state assembly level than on the national level. Congress is still a force to reckon with at the state level given recent results.
The two people who take Congress seriously are Modi & Shah. They are not complacent at all even if the media & electorate want to think otherwise.
The issue is with the fact that Raga has no clue what he talking about for the most part. If the congress set their agenda on the basis of unemployment, farmers distress and infra building, rather than on going on and on about Rafale, they would probably have got more seats. Ask Raga about Rafale and he says he does not have data....then why the hell did he spend his whole campaign talking about things which he has no idea about? He went on and on about Dokalam,.,someone asked him a question and he said he has no data....basically if you are going to go for an interview with no idea of the company, their operations, what they do etc etc and then expect to get the job its not going to happen.
And we got to see all those ideas parroted here...
What about his behaviour post Balakote ? his party did its best to show the govt was incompetent when exactly the opposite was the case and worse the people realised it. Compare this with the US. The media there starts the drums when ever any attack is likely. You never get the kind of rhetoric there like we see here with the opposition.
Rahul Gandhi must decide if Congress is a European NGO or a party in nationalist India
It’s quite one thing to criticise your government, it’s another to end up echoing the official propaganda of your adversary, that too in a fiercely nationalist country, in wartime, on election eve.
