NEWSMAKER: Rahul Gandhi

The son also rises

Rahul Gandhi

For someone who has been the heir-apparent in the Congress for quite a few years, and Amethi's representative in Parliament since 2004, Rahul Gandhi remains an enigma to most of his partymen.

The celebrations that have followed his appointment as a general secretary of the party are part relief that he is now formally into the party hierarchy (a demand first raised at an AICC session in Hyderabad some time ago), and part expectation that he will galvanise young voters and party workers across the country.

Generally perceived as someone who lacks the natural warmth and magnetism of his younger sister Priyanka, Rahul (who is 37) is seen as the more intelligent and better read of the two, someone who prefers to understand an issue in depth "" perhaps the result of his years in the management consultancy firm Monitor, in London, following degrees from the two Cambridges in the US and UK (making him by far the most educated member of his illustrious family).

Priyanka's brand of politics is typified by the case of a Dalit who wanted to register a case of atrocities against his family in the local police station in Rae Bareli. She drove him there and made the administration register a case on the spot "" a spontaneity that has endeared her to party workers.

Rahul's approach is a sharp contrast. In his Amethi constituency, he worked to a plan. After touring a series of charitable hospitals in the south, some of whom were run by those inimical to the Congress, he started an eye hospital and a computer education centre in Amethi.

"He visited Dharmasthala, the famous shrine in Karnataka, and met Veerendra Hegde, the head of the shrine, to get ideas on how a charitable hospital should be run. Local Congressmen were baffled by Gandhi taking advice from an individual considered close to the BJP. An aide recalls Rahul telling them: "Politics should be kept out of these things."

Gandhi's idea of the welfare system is clear. "He insisted that patients pay for treatment at the eye hospital, even if only a token amount, in order to maintain quality and to foster the feeling of being stakeholders. We resisted at first, but the plan has worked," said the aide. So free lunches may not be a part of his political lexicon.

That he has his eye on the mass base is clear from his political interventions. When he first spoke out in UP, it was to complain about cane growers not being paid their dues by sugar mills "" the state government responded with alacrity to make the mills pay up.

After being made general secretary earlier this week, his first move was to ask the Prime Minister to extend the rural employment guarantee programme to all districts of the country.

And yet, after all but taking charge of the party's campaign for the assembly elections in UP in the summer, the party office in the state capital of Lucknow did not get even a look-in from him.

He has kept a studied distance from the media, and party workers say that he has often come across to them as being only partly committed to a career in politics "" he has a small firm that he has set up in Mumbai, and a private life that has occasionally hit the newspapers because of the appearance and then disappearance of a Columbian girl friend.

Those in the know say that he took the decision more than a year ago to dive in head first, and (like his father Rajiv a quarter century ago) he already has a small group of advisers with whom he works out his moves.

But his first real electoral foray, into UP's assembly elections in the summer, produced poor results. The question in partymen's minds must be whether he will deliver better results on the national stage.