A senior official who is a member of the inner Gandhi circle told me Modi’s chaiwalla origin appeals to Americans, who love nothing better than a Horatio Alger-ish story of a rise from humble origins, through hard work and determination, to a lofty height

Around the time Prime Minister Narendra Modi was delivering one of his trade-mark stump speeches in Allahabad last Monday, breathing fire and arms akimbo, the pusillanimous Rahul Gandhi was making one of his querulous attacks on the Akali Dal, Punjab’s drugs crisis, and the censors’ silly chopping of the movie ‘Udta Punjab’.  

To be fair, Rahul has raised several alarms about drugs in Punjab over the past few years, but has it registered on your radar screen? It took a movie to remind many people of next year’s Punjab election. Rahul said Congress would end Punjab’s drug problem in one month. It sounded suspiciously like the joke about Lalu Prasad promising to turn Japan into Bihar if he was given a month.  

The way things are going, with recalcitrant like Haryana’s Bhupinder Hooda, turncoats like Chhattisgarh’s Ajit Jogi, and revolts in Uttarakhand, Himachal Pradesh, Arunachal Pradesh, and Manipur, the Congress party is starting to look like a wasted rump.  

But then Congress is like the axolotl, the Mexican amphibian that can regenerate various body parts, change color, and bemuse biologists. The party has split many times since Independence; it keeps going. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and its prequel, the Jana Sangh, on the other hand, is the only national party in India to have never split. You can grumble and grouse if you are side-lined, but you hang on like a barnacle on the side of the mothership — you do not like Mamata Banerjee or Sharad Pawar, go and create a new party.  

Old warhorse Veerappa Moily is convinced Rahul Gandhi will revitalize Congresspeople when he takes over as president soon. “The only regret is he has taken too much time to learn,” Moily says without the slightest trace of irony. “Now he has to take the next step. He should have done it much earlier. But now he has become totally mature. The time has come to act.”  

Moily joined the party in 1969, when Indira Gandhi and S. Nagalinga were the lead players in the Great Split. He is not bothered by the rebellions. “Those people who are opportunists, those who only want, it is better they are chucked out,” he told me. He says the party will not hold out power as glue to hold rent-seekers together. He is convinced Congress will come back to power in 2019 and win a string of state elections en route.  

The elephant in the room, of course, is the Uttar Pradesh state election. On Monday, Modi exhorted the huge Allahabad crowd to switch on their phone flashlights and shine them towards Assam, a mere 1,200 km away, where the BJP won power last month. The multitude dutifully whipped out their phones. It was a dazzling display of demagoguery.

Modi spoke of breaking the Jugalbandhi of the Samajwadi Party (SP) and the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), who have traded power in Uttar Pradesh over many years, and he spoke about development. “We need a vikas ka yagna (sacrificial fire for development) in Uttar Pradesh,” Modi thundered. “We have to make offerings (Aahuti) to this fire. And this homage will be successful only if we make offerings of ego, of nepotism, of the poison of caste and communalism, of corruption, hooliganism, dishonesty.”

It was a rousing speech, but then Modi is a quick-change artist. The same day he spoke in a more measured manner to the BJP’s leaders at a closed-door meeting, where he said it was time to stop the sloganeering. He offered his colleagues a seven-word mantra for success — Sewa Bhav (spirit of service), santulan (balance), Sayyam (self-discipline), Samanvaya (coordination), Sakaratmak soch (positive attitude), samvedna (empathy) and Samved (dialogue).  

You couldn’t ask for a better code of conduct for a ruling party. It was hard to believe that just five days earlier Modi had delivered a masterful speech to the U.S. Congress. Listening to him in Allahabad (1,277 km from Ahmedabad) it was easy to see why Modi, who roamed across India during his days as an RSS pracharak, can be so wide-ranging and felicitous. He could tell the UP crowd he was a son of their Soll; after all he is a Member of Parliament from UP and won his Varanasi seat two years ago with a whopping margin of 570,128 votes. And should American lawmakers have had any doubts that the Indian leader didn’t know their country, he reminded them: “Long before assuming office, I travelled coast to coast, covering more than 25 States of America.”  

This is what makes Modi unique. He seems to have been prepping all his life for this role, and no other political party in India has a leader who can take him on toe-to-toe. A senior official who is a member of the once-charmed inner Gandhi circle told me this is why the Americans have taken to Modi. His chaiwallah (teaseller) origin that is even now sneered at by Congress leaders appeals to Americans, who love nothing better than a Horatio Alger-ish story of a rise from humble origins, through hard work and determination, to a lofty height. With his family history and his sense of entitlement, Rahul Gandhi certainly did not have to do any hard climbing.  

The UP elections are technically not due for another 11 months, but then the BJP needs to dissemble and destabilize and be a Bahurupiya if it wants a decent shot at brushing aside the state’s ruling SP, the BSP and the Congress party. The stakes are Sky High: UP delivered one quarter of the BJP’s seats in the Lok Sabha in 2014.  

One thing is sure: Congress will not win UP. There has been no Congress chief minister in UP for 27 years. If you look at other ‘cow belt’ states, Congress has not ruled in Bihar for the past 26 years, nor in Madhya Pradesh for the past 13. In last month’s state elections, Congress lost badly in the only state it ran alone. Everywhere else it was an also-ran in alliances. 

One senior Congressman asked me: “Do you hear Congressiyas talking about development? That’s not the line they are taking at all. The line they are taking is, “These guys (BJP) are not secular, we are secular.’ And nobody is convinced. The truth of the matter is it all depends on what you mean by secular. If you mean you always stand in principle by the minorities, even when the political going is tough, the Congress cannot claim they have done that. They have very often succumbed.” They have succumbed. That sounds like an epitaph to me. 

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