PRIYANKA GANDHI deftly works a small crowd of women, hugging a few, telling an assistant to note names of two who have a complaint. After waving comfortably to television cameras she says she enjoys being on the road: “It is always how I have campaigned.” She does not believe the result in the constituency will be close. Yet the reality threatens to be painfully different, as Amethi and other constituencies see voting in the eighth (of nine) round of voting in India’s national elections, on May 7th.
Trail Mrs Gandhi in the heat and dust around Amethi, the constituency in Uttar Pradesh where her brother, Rahul Gandhi, is the sitting MP and several things become clear. First, she is well liked by those she meets, but the crowds are small. Striding into a farmer’s field she charms a gaggle of villagers, keeping her security men mostly at a distance. She is confident, willing to take questions from journalists and offer rebuttals. Corruption, she claims, has not been raised by voters (relevant, since her husband, Robert Vadra, has been accused of involvement in shady land and property deals, though he denies any wrongdoing). Locals, she admits, are frustrated by bad roads and rotten electricity supplies. But she is dismissive of Narendra Modi, the prime ministerial candidate of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), dismissing talk of a “Modi wave” as media speculation. She thinks little of Smriti Irani, the BJP candidate and a former actress, put up against Mr Gandhi. Her performance raises speculation that she could yet be the family dynast who takes over Congress, assuming the party suffers a heavy defeat nationally.
That is because, second, constituents are unimpressed by the man they twice elected, most recently in 2009 with a margin of victory of 370,000 votes. Rahul Gandhi is dismissed, even by some fellow Congress workers, as an absentee MP, aloof, poorly served by his local flunkies, with no natural gifts as a politician. Whereas Mrs Gandhi is said to remember easily the names and faces of local party workers and those she meets, Mr Gandhi does not. Mr Gandhi, grumble many, visits his constituency too rarely, then hides away. None of these complaints are new, but they are telling. Constituents said much the same, for example, in 2011, just before state assembly elections in which Congress fared dismally, even in areas in and around Amethi. He barely speaks in parliament and in ten years has not once mentioned his constituency there. Worse, Amethi has evidently benefited too little from decades of association with the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty. Prolonged power cuts, poor water supplies, a lack of industry, many broken roads (though some are decent) and a general sense of backwardness are all prevalent. The Gandhi family likes to tell voters they should be proud of living in a “VIP constituency”, yet that suggestion rankles those who drive through a darkened Amethi at night. One of the only buildings with lights blazing is a government guesthouse where Priyanka Gandhi and Rahul Gandhi stay.
Mrs Gandhi may be a better politician than her brother, but if the result in Amethi proves much tighter than last time—which it almost certainly will—they both should rethink how they conduct politics, and even reconsider whether to remain in it. They should note, for a start, the strong motivation and idealism within the Amethi office of an upstart movement, the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), formed barely two years ago. It is crammed with young volunteers, many from Delhi, who are likely to appeal to those most angry with years of corruption and rotten government services. The AAP inspires young, urban, educated and aspiring middle-class voters who are unwilling to switch to the BJP. Congress has many failures, but one of its most glaring is the neglect of this rising block of voters that is not loyal to any one party. They are helping to reshape Indian politics, and the ruling party has failed to appeal to them.
The dynasty at the heart of Congress must learn, too, to drop its offensively feudal behaviour. Mrs Gandhi, when she speaks at smallish rallies, such as one at Lalganj village, chides gathered farmers and labourers, telling them not to trust outsiders as “they do not love you, they come for their image” whereas “we consider you as family”. Mr Gandhi attempts the same message. He is introduced with messages of sacrifice—that his grandmother Indira Gandhi and father Rajiv Gandhi were killed by assassins as they “served the country”. Yet talk of family, of sharing a “relationship of love”, and of “making Amethi shine” sound unconnected to the reality of those listening to him. In blistering heat, they have trudged to the meeting along bad roads, and complain at a lack of electricity to spin fans or charge mobile phones at home. They say they want jobs, and more of the good life that they know others in India enjoy. Talk of love and family ties from a distant man who drives away in a luxury SUV, leaving them covered in dust, is hardly inspirational.
Thus the contrast was striking on May 5th, when Mr Modi turned up by helicopter to campaign in Amethi. Doing so, he broke an unwritten rule of Indian politics—that party leaders usually give each other a soft ride in their home territories. Mr Gandhi never before faced a serious challenge in his own constituency: for example a big regional force in Uttar Pradesh, the Samajwadi Party, has not fielded a candidate against him. Last time, in 2009, the BJP candidate was a weakling, coming third and losing the deposit. Now both the BJP and the AAP have mounted strong campaigns.
Mr Modi’s speech was forceful, often personal and delivered with scathing aplomb. It certainly cheered and excited BJP supporters, plus the many who are curious simply to see Mr Modi—widely expected as the next prime minister—and to feel a part of a national sweep that is predicted in the BJP’s favour. It is hard to know how many of the large crowd who listened and cheered the BJP leader were bussed in from afar and how many were locals who might vote, but the gathering was impressive in either case. Mr Modi’s attack on the feudal nature of the Nehru-Gandhi approach, twinned with rather devastating attacks on the lack of development in Amethi, must have left Congress dismayed. By contrast Mr Gandhi’s rally in Allahabad, in Uttar Pradesh, garnered relatively little attention.
What is to be discerned from this? Those seeking glimmers of hope for Congress suggest that the BJP may not be doing as well as it claims. Earlier on May 5th, Mr Modi spoke at a rally in Faizabad, with a large picture of Lord Ram as his backdrop. This is near to Ayodhya, the site of much dispute over whether a Hindu temple should be built where a mosque was destroyed, in 1992. Using an image of Lord Ram was presumably intended to stir up Hindu voters. A confident BJP, goes one theory, would not be “communalising” voters at this late stage of an election campaign, as that contradicts Mr Modi’s claims to be interested only in development, not Hindu nationalism. Similarly, a truly confident Mr Modi would not have lashed out at Bangladeshi (Muslim) migrants who supposedly still cross into West Bengal. Over 30 people, mostly Muslims accused of being settlers from Bangladesh, were killed in Assam between May 1st and 3rd, in clashes with indigenous Bodo militants. That Mr Modi spoke after the attack, in effect criticising the victims of such violence, hardly bodes well for communal harmony in the long run. Just possibly he felt obliged to do so, because he considers the message a necessary one to get his voters in West Bengal and eastern bits of Uttar Pradesh to come out.
More likely, however, the BJP feels rather confident. Mr Modi in recent days has been making ever more boastful claims about how well his party will do in the election. He talks of Congress being reduced well below 100 seats and seeing a fight for the leadership that might get the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty ejected. He claims that his party and his closest allies might themselves get 272 or more seats, enough to form a majority in the lower house of parliament. Certainly his foray into Amethi was intended to project an aura of confidence in the “Modi wave” that he says will sweep into eastern Uttar Pradesh, to Varanasi and beyond, in the coming days. The last voting takes place there, on May 12th, with results due on May 16th. In addition to the overall outcome, there will be many individual constituency races to watch with interest. For example, might the BJP’s potential finance minister, Arun Jaitley, stumble in his first-ever attempt to be an elected MP, in Amritsar? On the Congress side, if Mr Gandhi’s margin were massively cut—let alone if he were to lose the election—the humiliation will be strong.
