2014: The Election That Changed India by Rajdeep Sardesai

fostering inner-party democracy
could not break the well-entrenched cliques of patronage within the party system.
    In a sense, Rahul Gandhi was a prisoner of the very
system that had spawned him. Once the top leadership of the party observes the dynastical principle,
it is difficult to impose a different set of rules for those down the line. The deep paradox
remained that Rahul could not radically alter the Congress and yet insist on quasi-royal status for
himself—the road to genuine glasnost would have to include his own abdication. He may have
genuinely wanted to change the organizational structure, but in a party as old as the Congress, as
ossified and as crowded with big egos, rival camps, an entrenched old guard and byzantine intrigue,
no quick fixes were possible.
    But the problem was not just with the Congress
party—it was also with the method adopted by Rahul Gandhi to try and effect change. In her
book,
Decoding Rahul Gandhi
, author Aarthi Ramachandran claims that Rahul Gandhi wanted to
adopt a Japanese style of management to revamp the NSUI and Youth Congress. ‘The Toyota
Way’ is how Gandhi saw the future, urging his team to develop the right
‘processes’ and ‘systems’ which would make standardization of practices
possible. Apparently, a few of his team members were even sent to the Toyota factory in Japan to get
first-hand experience of how the auto company was able to arrive at a zero-error system of
production.
    Rahul Gandhi failed to
recognize that a political party is not a corporate house. Business practices that worked in the
automobile industry simply could not be replicated in the Congress party. A senior MLA from
Maharashtra told me how he had to wait almost a month in Delhi for an appointment with Rahul.
‘In a business, you can interact on the computer. In a political party, there must be direct
contact. What is the point of having a “system” when I cannot even get access to my
leader? A party worker feels on top of the world when his leader talks to him; he doesn’t want
to be told to fill in a form first and wait in a queue!’ The frustrated politician later
joined Sharad Pawar’s National Congress Party (NCP). In fact, more than one Congressman
complained that if they rang up Rahul’s office, they would be put through to a voice recording
machine.
    The people chosen by Rahul Gandhi to implement his
agenda reflected a desire to have strategic consultants, management-oriented corporate types and
well-meaning scholars around him rather than full-time politicians. The one member of Team Rahul
whom I met on a couple of occasions was Kanishka Singh. A slight, bespectacled, soft-spoken young
man, he was the son of a former foreign secretary, S.K. Singh, who later became a governor. Kanishka
had a degree in international studies and business from the University of Pennsylvania, a degree in
economics from St Stephens College and had even done a stint in an investment bank in New York. In
other words, he was the perfect child of Delhi’s elite Lutyensland, complete with
well-connected parents, a foreign degree and a CV that would probably have got him a top job in
corporate India. But was he the right man to be strategizing politics for the Congress’s
future?
    Kanishka had, interestingly, written about the need
to restructure the political system in an article in
Seminar
magazine in December 2005:
‘Our leaders are older than they ought to be. Our citizenry is young. A severe and visible
disconnect exists between the separate time horizons that each of the two groups are focused on and
invested in . . . If India is to leapfrog into the millennium we live in, we need to be proactive in
demonstrating that political andorganizational capital is being invested in
the domain of future-oriented implementation.’ The words sounded perfect, echoing Rahul
Gandhi’s similar desire for change. But in the cut and thrust of electoral politics, what did
these high-sounding fancy words really