multi-storied #32: The details of an election
Words are funny things. You’re told you have 5,000 of them, and you think: Gosh, what a volume that is! How difficult it will be to come up with all of them, one after the other! Would two weeks of research even suffice? Shouldn’t it take two months, properly speaking, to even know what to say in those 5,000 words?
So, like me, you spend those two weeks—in this case, following Rahul Gandhi and his Congress Party cavalcade through the state of Uttar Pradesh—wondering if you’ll ever have enough material. You scramble to get it all. You take notes about the guy dressed in a karate uniform, and the other guy who looks like Rahul Gandhi but isn’t, and the precise tenor of Gandhi’s voice, and the characteristics of the people in his orbit. You read five books, carefully plucking anecdotes out of each of them.
But then you write the piece and, by the time you’re 2,000 words in, you realize you won’t have room for 99 percent of the material you’ve collected. (That piece, in the New York Times Magazine, is here: Time is running out for Rahul Gandhi’s vision for India.) I’ve mentioned here before the difficulty of narrating one country’s politics to another country’s readers. But even beyond that territorial gulf, it’s just the sad, unshakeable truth about this kind of writing that a multi-sensory experience has to be converted to linear prose. Everything always falls short.
The piece is above, but some of the outtakes, I think, are worth recording here:
The flag-carrier
Somewhere in advance of Raebareli, I sat in a Congress car and talked to whoever hopped in to escape the heat. One of these people was Devendra Sharma, a longtime party worker who carried the flag at the head of Rahul Gandhi’s Bharat Jodo Yatra in 2022-23. Frequently, he said, the yatra found an emotional connection with the Congress that was once commonplace but has since gone missing.
In Karnataka, a woman gifted two cucumbers to Gandhi, saying his grandmother had made it possible for her to own farmland. Sharma told me about an old woman who walked alongside him in Telangana. “Why are you tiring yourself out, amma?” Sharma asked her. “It’s a long walk.” She replied that the flag reminded her of the original Gandhi—the Mahatma—that it was his tricolor, and she was walking for him. This moved him so much he handed it to her to carry for the next kilometre. This kind of thing happened often, he said: “I’d start crying, sometimes.”
(The caveat here is that of course people in the Congress will say wonderful things about the yatra. Most of the time, it’s possible to suss out when they’re propagandizing. With Sharma, I never got that feeling.)
The songs
Sharma sang songs while carrying the flag, he said. I asked him to give me a couple:
The dynasty
Rahul Gandhi has been in a strange situation his whole political life, of having come to his privileged position because of his family but also of having wanted to come to his position through dint of his own effort. In one sense, it is a wasted effort; his family and his history are inescapable. At times, he has been guilty of taking that privilege for granted, but at other times, he has been acutely conscious of it. One Congress worker recalled a rally from around 2019, in the Uttar Pradesh town of Jhansi, where a backdrop consisted of photos of Gandhi and six other children of party heavyweights. Gandhi cancelled the event. “What message would we be sending?” the worker recalls him saying.
In conversation
Speaking to Rahul Gandhi, according to people who have spoken to him, can be either heartwarming or frustrating. He’s often distracted and will jump from topic to topic. “He will ask you for random data and information, which are hard to come by,” one former party strategist told me. He often talks like a self-indulgent intellectual: high-minded, first principles. Once, when a group of professors grumbled to him about their state-run university, he heard them out and asked: “What is a university for?” But he can also be empathetic and winning. One former Congress MP told me about a meeting not very long ago in which a group of Muslim intellectuals, highly critical of the party and of him, went in to meet him. They came out beaming. “He’s much better in conversations, in a Socratic mode,” one of his aides told me. “Speeches from platforms aren’t his cup of tea.”
The yatra
The idea of the Bharat Jodo Yatra in 2022 was born during the pandemic. In lockdown, up and down the central Delhi lane where he lives, Gandhi clocked 40,000 steps a day as practise. On the yatra, he had to be talked down from his goal of walking 15 miles daily; the point, after all, was to talk to people along the way. By the end of the yatra, his right knee started giving him trouble. Part of the reason his second yatra, this past spring, was a motorcade rather than a pedestrian affair (you know what I mean) was that his knee was still tender.
Religion
Rahul Gandhi’s immersion into Buddhism is perhaps well known. (One of his teachers, according to a former party source, was the Dalai Lama’s private secretary.) His taste for Buddhist practice syncs perfectly with his aversion for the rancid Hindutva politics of the BJP. One person described it to me as a “purity test”—an insistence judging people based on their stance on Hindutva. In 2014, a consultant made his first presentation to a few of the Congress elite, Gandhi among them. The threat of the BJP was clear and present, so among the images in the PowerPoint was one in which Gandhi wore a strong, ruddy tilak. “He didn’t like it,” the consultant told me. “I said: ‘Why are you so cagey about this?’ He said: ‘No, I don’t like putting religion on my forehead and walking around. All religions are equally important for us.’” But this was a popular photo of his, the consultant persisted. “It might be popular, but I don’t like it,” he recalls Gandhi saying.
As an anecdote, it’s an interesting window into a particular kind of division within the Congress. One school of thought has considered it practical to play soft Hindutva cards, in order to tempt away the more centrist among the BJP’s voters. The other school sees it as important to stay true to a secular ideology, however flawed the Congress’ practice of this ideology may have been in the past and however frequently it is derided as “idealistic.”
The village
I spent many of my February evenings reading Raag Darbari, a terrific comic novel by Shrilal Shukla. It had been recommended to me by a member of the Samajwadi Party, as a kind of mood music to my days on the yatra. Towards the end of my trip, in Gandhi’s former constituency of Amethi, the novel seemed to come to life. A local Congress functionary named Sanjay Singh invited me to his house for tea and conversation. We sat in his courtyard, along with five other men from the village. The fields around us were quiet, and the sun sank. In that spell of stasis, it felt like we could solve all the world’s problems right there, perhaps even by our third cup of tea. I was reminded of Vaidyaji, the most dominant influence in the village of Shivpalganj in Raag Darbari, presiding over just such a little court. People came to him with their problems. He heard them out, or solved them, or sent them on to others. He was a political agent, in every true sense of the term, but he was outside the formal structures of politics. Singh was like that—political unto himself, and perhaps far more political than Rahul Gandhi knows how to be.
(Here’s the piece again.)