By: Nirupama Subramanian
A newly invigorated Rahul Gandhi, the leader of India’s parliamentary opposition who clocked his best-ever electoral performance as de facto Congress leader by steering the party to its highest tally since 2014 in recent national elections, will visit the US from September 8 to 10. This brief visit, announced last week by the Indian Overseas Congress, the party’s diaspora wing, will be closely scrutinized, with every word he speaks dissected by his supporters and opponents alike, as with each of his previous visits abroad, perhaps even more this time.
By itself, the visit shouldn’t be creating ripples. But from the time Gandhi inherited a senior role in 2007 from illustrious members of his family who led the party from before independence, and three family members who were Prime Ministers, his travels abroad, often personal, have been a subject of much public curiosity and even ridicule. After he largely abdicated his leadership role in 2019, the trips have triggered polarizing political debates about, among other things, his patriotism, political nous, capacity for leadership, and his personal life. But from June 4, when parliamentary election results were announced, with Congress winning 99 seats in the 354-member Lok Sabha, India’s lower house, with Gandhi energetically campaigning – twice crisscrossing the country on foot – Gandhi-bashers and supporters alike have been studying him anew.
As with Gandhi’s previous visits abroad, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the Bharatiya Janata Party will be watching closely for an opportunity to cast him in a politically unfavorable light, particularly because he is proving to be a far more formidable opponent than expected. He is now the Leader of the Opposition. His speeches in Parliament have been combative and created an impression of a person now fully in charge. His insistence on a caste census (the Indian census has so far not included caste affiliations) in the interests of social justice forced a belated agreement on the issue from the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the BJP’s right-wing Hindu nationalist parent.
Modi was also forced to cancel a plan to make lateral entry recruitments into the bureaucracy after Gandhi criticized it for bypassing caste quotas. If the BJP was targeting a down-and-out opposition leader, someone described as an irrelevant nonentity, but loved to hate all the same, it seems to have a real opponent in Rahul.
Gandhi is scheduled to address the Indian diaspora in Dallas, Texas, belatedly introducing Congress to the game of leveraging the influence of Indian immigrants for domestic political gain. Modi’s BJP established Overseas Friends of BJP in the mid-1990s given the sway of members of Indian communities abroad to influence voting behavior in their families back home, with some even arriving at election time to canvass for their chosen leader. One of Modi’s first moves in his 2014 election was to set out to woo politically influential Hindutva-minded sections of the nearly 5 million-strong Indian diaspora in the US and the 1.8 million British Indians towards his domestic success.
Modi’s diaspora shows have impressed leaders of the host countries, who also want the votes of immigrant groups, and had them eating out of Modi’s hands. In 2019, it was in Houston that President Donald Trump, unsuccessfully seeking a second term, hosted a massive gathering of the local Indian American community, where the Indian Prime Minister appeared to endorse him for a second term. External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar brushed it off later as a “misinterpretation.”
Sam Pitroda, head of the Indian Overseas Congress, a US-based member and Gandhi family friend, said he was “bombarded” with requests by Indian diaspora organizations, academics, politicians, and others that Gandhi visit and meet with them. Gandhi, who according to Pitroda, is visiting in his “individual” capacity, and not as opposition leader, will also speak at a think tank, the National Press Club, and at George Town University in Washington D.C. His tour comes just ahead of a slew of state Assembly elections in India, and in the midst of the US presidential campaign.
On his last visit to the US in 2023, Gandhi’s statements about Modi and the RSS caused an explosion of self-righteous anger in the BJP and among its supporters. He was accused of “insulting” India abroad and conspiring with anti-national groups against the Modi government. S. Jaishankar, the Minister of External Affairs, accused Gandhi of trying to get “outside” support for his fight against the BJP by talking up the attack-on-democracy “narrative”. Remarks he made in Cambridge set off similar accusations. The diasporas themselves are polarized along the same lines as in India, and in one meeting in Singapore, Gandhi was grilled on his family’s contribution, with the recorded exchange going viral in India.
Politics in India is 24-7. Top politicians rarely get to enjoy downtime, and few holidays abroad for fear of attracting adverse notice about their lifestyle. Gandhi’s tours abroad on personal breaks too have been a subject of public debate and enquiry, with questions about who foots the security bill and why he goes out of the country frequently. It was fodder for conspiracy theorists peddling “regime change” plots against India by foreign powers. In June, after exit polls predicted – wrongly as it turned out – a huge victory for the BJP, a purported boarding pass for a flight to Bangkok with Gandhi’s name on it began doing the rounds of social media. It proved to be a fake, morphed image.
Rahul’s frequent sojourns upset supporters too. In 2019, months after a crushing defeat in the elections, and the Modi government’s abolition of a constitutional provision of special status to Jammu & Kashmir in August of that year, and ahead of crucial provincial assembly elections, his planned visit outside the country caused a severe backlash, forcing the Congress out in his defense, asking everyone to respect the difference between the public and the private.
Over the past four months, Gandhi has been around a lot more. The media are finding it hard to ignore him, so he is also more visible. After his installation as opposition leader, he flew to Manipur and spent time with people hit by ethnic violence. It is a state that Modi, who abhors facing up to his failures, has conspicuously avoided since the civil war began there last year. Gandhi was in Kerala next, visiting rain-ravaged Wayanad, his former constituency, then in Modi’s home state Gujarat, meeting family members of victims in a series of man-made disasters in the state – a fire in a game zone, a boat capsizing, and a bridge collapse.
As Congress members and the party’s supporters marvel at the changed Gandhi, they are hoping the transformation of this fifth-generation Nehru-Gandhi Congress leader is not a flash in the pan. His challenges are cut out. Haryana state and Jammu & Kashmir in the north are to elect their assemblies from September 18 to October 5. The western state of Maharashtra follows soon after. Rahul has to work with demanding allies in the way he did during the parliamentary elections to win. The Congress party and its supporters will hope that his visit to the US after the elections proves that his turnaround is for good, and that nothing he says or does during the three-day outing will give BJP the opportunity to use it against him in these coming elections.