If anything, it shows that the former Congress president is so edgy and temperamental that he can hardly be entrusted with a responsible job. A prime requirement of a person in a leadership position in an organization – whether a party or a company or a family – is that he should have a cool mind who can be depended upon at all times and especially in times of crisis.

But by retreating in a shell in an inexplicable manner, Rahul has shown how unreliable and unpredictable he is. For all practical purposes, he can be said to have shot himself in the foot in front of the whole country.

While his occasional disappearances abroad could be interpreted as the ingrained habit – foible? – of someone from the upper strata of society, his patently resentful rejection of the Congress’s success simply because the party achieved its feat under the old guard who are not his favourites is an inexcusable trait, which will be closely scanned by friends and foes all through his career.

Rahul’s resentment probably stems from the realization that his attempts to mould the party in accordance with his ideas have led nowhere. By resigning from the party president’s post after the Lok Sabha defeat, he apparently tried to break away from the Congress’s hypocritical tradition of the top leaders offering to resign in the full knowledge that their bands of sycophants will raise a hue and cry and “persuade” them to stay on in power.

It was a laudable, though futile, endeavour on Rahul’s part to tell his family members and others that assuming genuine responsibility for a defeat, and not merely making a show of it, is the right thing to do and should induce them to step down.

However, the Congress is too steeped in its subservience to the Nehru-Gandhi family for the party members to accept the idea of someone other than a Nehru-Gandhi taking charge. Sonia Gandhi, too, wasted no time to pander to such servile sentiments.

That was Rahul’s first defeat and may have provoked his sense of pique. The second was the ouster of his protégé, Ashok Tanwar, in Haryana in favour of the 72-year-old Bhupinder Singh Hooda, who was on the verge of leaving the party before he was persuaded by Sonia Gandhi to stay on.

In the event, Hooda led the Congress to a doubling of its seats in the assembly elections, showing that old men were not always devoid of fire. The same ability was shown by 79-year-old Sharad Pawar who led the charge against the BJP in Maharashtra with not inconsiderable success with his Nationalist Congress Party winning more seats than its supposedly senior partner, the Congress.

Rahul’s umbrage is perhaps exacerbated by the fact that the trio of elderly men – Hooda, Pawar and the 77-year-old Amarinder Singh – has put paid to his hopes of giving a young face to the Congress by advancing the careers of the likes of Sachin Pilot, Jyotiraditya Scindia and others.

By holding on to such ideas, Rahul has made the mistake of not realizing that in politics, what matters is success and the calibre of whoever can attain it irrespective of his or her age.

It is his fixed notions about dispensing with the elderly which nearly made Amarinder Singh walk out of the party before he was mollified and led the Congress to victory in Punjab. That should have been a lesson to Rahul, but he refused to learn it when it came to dealing with Hooda.

What Rahul should have done is to get off his high horse and campaigned with Hooda in Haryana and Pawar in Maharashtra. There is little doubt that the Congress would have fared even better had Rahul done so and not chosen to nurse his grievances in isolation.

Now, he has no options but to sulk, knowing full well that it will be at the cost of jettisoning his pet fetishes that he will have to return to a position of power in the Congress since Sonia cannot continue for long because of her indifferent health and there has to be a Nehru-Gandhi at the top

Till Rahul’s retreat into seclusion, he was the frontrunner in the “secular” camp to be the prime minister with his case being advanced, among others, by the DMK’s M.K. Stalin. He was also shedding – albeit slowly – his Pappu image. Now, he has to start all over again. (IPA Service)