Waiting for Rahul - Implosion: India's Tryst with Reality - page 178

as home minister P. Chidambaram and telecom minister Kapil Sibal fumbled their briefs,
while the four leading Congress party figures Sonia Gandhi named as being in charge (in-
cluding Rahul) made no public impression. She was clearly missed and it gradually began
to be apparent that this Italian-born non-political mother and housewife had developed
what some would see as her psychic chakra so that it not only protected her but also gave
her a position of command.
That, of course, begs some questions. Did the disarray while she was away develop be-
cause the government was missing her and her advisers' sure touch, and had she developed
a little-known sense of what needed to be done politically? Or were ministers and officials
scared to make decisions that might arouse her (or Rahul's) wrath later? Or was it because
the Gandhi dynasty dominated government channels of authority and decision-making to
such an extent that the cabinet and administration could not function without her? Whatever
the answer - and maybe it was a mixture of all three - it certainly demonstrated how lost
the government was without her.
Rahul played little part in this dynastic dominance. In the previous couple of years, he'd
had flashes of success - for example, in February 2010, when he made a dramatic foray
into Mumbai and challenged the street power of Maharashtra's chauvinist political party,
the Shiv Sena. I wrote on my blog - over-optimistically, as it turned out later - that this
'was a significant step forward in his emergence as a national figure'. By using local trains
instead of a planned helicopter to cross the city, he had showed 'more courage than most
of India's prestige-oriented politicians would contemplate'. 19 He spent some years labor-
iously touring the poorest parts of India, meeting people and hearing their problems, and
trying to regenerate the Congress party's youth organization - preparing himself, he often
said, for his political future. He garnered widespread though not always favourable pub-
licity for visiting and chatting with poor villagers, and staying with them - even taking
David Miliband, then Britain's foreign secretary, to a high-profile village sleepover early in
2009. 20 These were the sort of flying visits that might be made by a paternalistic monarch,
and were easily mocked by his critics, especially when it emerged that there was none of
the follow-through action expected from a practising politician.
His appearances in parliament were rare, and he made only three important speeches and
interventions in his ten years as an MP. The first was in July 2007 on energy security and
the benefits of nuclear power, soon after he had been appointed a general secretary of the
Congress. The second was in August 2011, on anti-corruption measures in a Lok Pal Bill
- that was the only time he took part in a debate in the first four years of the 2009 govern-
ment, when the average count for other MPs was 33 times. 21 (Sonia Gandhi's record was
no better). The third came in December 2013, again on the Lok Pal Bill.
Marketing experts were commenting late in 2011 that Rahul needed to develop himself
as a brand because not enough was known about him and what he stood for. 22 As general