 "How Rahul Gandhi's kisan yatra has helped him shed his 'pappu' image")
Today, Delhi's roads were dotted with hoardings that depicted a wrinkled Congress vice president Rahul Gandhi with salt and pepper beard.
The Congress Vice-President reaches Delhi on Thursday evening, at the end of a grueling 'kisan yatra'. The campaign lasted over 26 days traversed 3,438 km, 48 districts, 57 parliamentary constituencies, 26 'khat sabha' and an equal number of roads shows across Uttar Pradesh.
Newspaper reports might have pleaded with Rahul to spare Delhi residents of traffic jams because of his evening public rally in the heart of the city state that something has changed the way people on the streets view the man. Hoardings with his photograph weren't an object of ridicule among passersby.
There was even recognition among a group of auto-rickshaw drivers that the greying Rahul was a middle-aged man, that his 'kisan yatra' was talked about in Uttar Pradesh and that he had put in the necessary hard work and stayed the course. That a youth even bothered with throwing shoe at him was a measure of the return of the Congress Vice-President's political relevance.
Over the past month, Rahul stuck to his core discourse of highlighting the woes of farmers. He side-stepped the nationalist discourse over the Uri terror attack, even showing political maturity in giving a back handed compliment to the Prime Minister on the 'surgical strikes'. He also showed steel in challenging the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh over his comments on Mahatma Gandhi's assassination.
Rahul is prone to inconsistency, but this image of being a hard working politician committed to the cause of communal harmony and the poor flies in the face of the image that his rivals cultivated of him in the run up to the 2014 Lok Sabha elections.
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Then, Narendra Modi would refer to him as 'shahzada' – the Urdu for prince. It was clearly pejorative. Modi never assigned to Rahul the moniker 'yuvaraj', the Hindi for prince and also how Congress leaders and workers among themselves referred to their leader.
The 'shahzada' reference was aimed at bringing with it images of perceived decadence of the latter day Mughal princes when that dynasty was in decline. On WhatsApp and social networking sites, Rahul Gandhi was abused as a 'pappu', or a simple boy.
The strategy was largely successful. The Congress Vice-President became an object of ridicule and this lack of credibility contributed to the dismal party performance in the elections.
It has been nearly 30 months since then. Half of the five year or 60-month tenure of the Modi government is over. All this while, Rahul has hung about the political firmament but with little success in inspiring confidence among Congress workers and people at large.
There have been rare occasions when he has managed to get under the skin of Modi and his government – particularly his jibe 'suit-boot ki sarkar', a government of the rich and moneyed, in early 2015, hit the government grievously enough for it to drop its contentious Land Acquisition Bill.
Modi and his ministerial colleagues now talk more often about 'garib kalyan', or welfare of the poor, and have stopped deriding the MNREGA scheme. The Congress was also clever in helping put together a credible alliance in Bihar.
But none of this actually helped Rahul alter his image of a part time politician.
The worst fears of Congress leaders, or they conveyed, were confirmed when villagers took away the khats, or cots, at Rahul's first khat sabha in Deoria in early September. To them the subsequent media ridicule was a tragedy of immense proportions.
But nothing could have been more auspicious for the start of the 'kisan yatra'. Not only did it garner good publicity in the national press but people started turning up for his meetings.
The Congress might not perform too well in the upcoming assembly polls in the state, but Rahul by the dint of his hard work has prepared ground for him to be taken seriously in 2019 Lok Sabha elections.