Rahul Gandhi is not fighting for power alone; he is fighting against a massive, deeply entrenched right-wing ecosystem that enjoys institutional dominance, media backing, ideological coherence, and an unprecedented electoral machinery.
Published Nov 29, 2025 | 4:27 PM ⚊ Updated Nov 29, 2025 | 4:27 PM
Rahul Gandhi does not behave like a conventional politician. He does not manoeuvre like them, speak like them, or calculate like them.
Synopsis: Rahul Gandhi’s consistency—despite defeat, ridicule, institutional obstacles, and media hostility—may be the very force that shapes a new democratic reawakening. He appears to be failing at every step. But perhaps these steps are leading to a moment when the change he envisions will look like magic.
Post the Bihar Assembly election, many political commentators have rushed to declare Rahul Gandhi a leader who “fails at every step.”
His campaigns are dismissed as impractical, his political experiments mocked as naive, and his consistency portrayed as stubbornness. Comparisons are being drawn—often unfairly—with Jayaprakash Narayan (JP), implying that Rahul Gandhi is imitating a model that collapsed under the weight of its contradictions.
Some even suggest that, like JP, he may dismantle something without having the ability to build anew.
But this reading misses the most important dimension of Rahul Gandhi’s political journey: he is failing forward. And in Indian political history, “failing forward” has often been the first phase of eventual transformation.
To understand Rahul Gandhi’s evolving politics, one has to first understand the nature of the fight he has chosen. He is not fighting for power; he is fighting against a massive, deeply entrenched right-wing ecosystem that enjoys institutional dominance, media backing, ideological coherence, and an unprecedented electoral machinery.
In such a landscape, consistency becomes a political act. His persistence—no matter the number of defeats it brings—signals a commitment to a long-term reimagining of India’s democratic framework.
This is where empathy becomes important. Rahul Gandhi does not behave like a conventional politician. He does not manoeuvre like them, speak like them, or calculate like them. That difference is easy to ridicule in the short term, but in the long term, difference is often what triggers change.
Indian political history is full of leaders who were once dismissed as failures but later emerged as transformative forces. Drawing parallels with Rahul Gandhi is not about equating personalities; it is about recognising the larger pattern through which democratic change takes shape.
It is absurd to compare Rahul Gandhi with Mahatma Gandhi. Yet, it is perfectly legitimate to recall that even the Mahatma’s early satyagrahas failed to deliver immediate results. Moderates criticised his Champaran movement; the Non-Cooperation Movement collapsed in disappointment; the Civil Disobedience Movement was riddled with setbacks.
But those failures slowly built the moral architecture that reshaped the freedom struggle. Rahul Gandhi’s experiments today—whether successful or not—may be laying the groundwork that only hindsight will fully reveal.
Dr BR Ambedkar lost almost every election he contested. He was marginalised in major political coalitions, often ignored by the groups he fought for. But his ideas—not his electoral victories—shaped the Republic. Ambedkar’s political defeats did not diminish the long-term triumph of his constitutional vision.
Rahul Gandhi’s insistence on democratic reform, institutional integrity, and social justice echoes this tradition: ideas surviving even when electoral structures resist them. The same can be said of India’s socialist tradition, where leaders like Acharya Narendra Dev and Ram Manohar Lohia rarely won big electorally, yet profoundly shaped the country’s moral and intellectual terrain.
Their work influenced ideas of justice, caste politics, and federalism—ideas that took decades to mature. Rahul Gandhi’s focus on unemployment, inequality, crony capitalism, and social harmony draws from this larger intellectual lineage.
A decade ago, during an interview, Rahul Gandhi appeared as someone still searching for his political grammar. He was sincere but unsure, earnest but hesitant.
The Rahul Gandhi of today is markedly different. He communicates with greater clarity, engages with grassroots energy, and carries a more grounded understanding of India’s socio-economic fractures. He has grown through defeats. He has matured through adversity. And he has evolved while being relentlessly attacked. His two national yatras changed him visibly: the way he listens, the way he speaks, the ease with which he connects, the depth with which he responds. He has travelled inward as much as he has travelled outward.
The Bihar election did not simply give the BJP a win; it exposed the scale of the political machinery designed to suppress Rahul Gandhi’s dissent. When he raised the issue of ‘vote chori’—digital manipulation, booth-level irregularities, and unverifiable counting patterns—he was dismissed as paranoid.
Instead of investigating, more than 200 former judges, IAS officers, and eminent personalities issued statements condemning him. This is not accidental. This is coordinated political pressure. Rahul Gandhi opened the debate; the establishment responded by trying to close it. But the conversation has already begun.
Quietly, state after state is reporting anomalies, unexplained patterns, machine inconsistencies. The issue may look like a failure today, but it will return. Rahul Gandhi will return to it, with new evidence, new cases, new voices. Bihar is not the end of that story. It is the beginning.
Rahul Gandhi’s journey right now appears to be ending in a series of defeats. But each step—each “failure”—is actually a political experiment, a moral stance, a foundational block. He is not merely campaigning; he is constructing a counter-narrative to a deeply dominant ideology.
He is failing publicly so that he can win structurally. He is losing elections but shaping discourse. He is mocked in the moment but may be understood only in retrospect. He appears unprepared for power but is preparing India for a different kind of political imagination. And this is exactly how long-term democratic transformation begins.
If Indian history teaches us anything, it is this: our most significant political shifts were born from the persistence of those who first looked like failures. Mahatma’s early setbacks, Ambedkar’s electoral losses, JP’s contradictions, the socialist struggles—none of them had then seemed successful. But each helped reshape India’s consciousness.
Rahul Gandhi today is in that pre-transformation phase. He is ridiculed for experimenting. He is dismissed for thinking differently. He is attacked for questioning the system. But the long arc of Indian politics often bends toward the ideas that survive pressure.
Rahul Gandhi’s consistency—despite defeat, ridicule, institutional obstacles, and media hostility—may be the very force that shapes a new democratic reawakening. He appears to be failing at every step. But perhaps these steps are leading to a moment when the change he envisions will look like magic.
(Views are personal. Edited by Majnu Babu).
