In the second week of September 2005, Tehelka was still an organization we had faith in. The magazine had launched over a year earlier and I had joined as chief of bureau shortly after. We had been doing stories on merit, and nothing was off-limits. So when Vijay Simha, a journalist in the news bureau, came back from Amethi saying that Rahul Gandhi had given us an interview, his first, we thought it was a good break for us.
During the editing process there was some discussion over a particular statement by Rahul where he had claimed he could have been PM at 18. It was pointed out that the minimum age to be PM in India was 25. The statement was amended to reflect this, which I thought was a mistake. This had the disadvantage of making a rhetorical statement appear like one that had been carefully thought out, but it did nothing to dilute the seeming hubris that later led to criticism. Expectedly, as soon as the article was printed, the reactions started pouring in. With allies weighing in and the criticism pouring in, Rahul, in the kind of move that has since typified his politics, chose to stand aside and let the Congress spokesperson tackle the problem, "Rahul Gandhi would like to state that he did not give any interview to Tehelka.... It arose from a casual conversation."
AFP
As far as we were concerned this was not the case. Rahul had even told Simha at the end of the interview, "Tell Tarun (Tejpal) this is for him."
Tehelka issued a statement standing by the interview. Later the same day, I was contacted by people wanting to know why we had retracted our earlier statement. The new statement had been issued by Tarun by-passing the entire editorial process, agreeing there had been a 'misunderstanding' between Rahul and his reporter.
Despite such obfuscations, this remains Rahul's first published interview, and it was revelatory about the person the Congress has reposed faith in. One of the first things one notices returning to it after a decade is how little Rahul has changed. After ten years in politics he still sounds much as he did then. This inability to learn from experience has often been commented on, but it seems engrained in the assertion he made then at the age of 35, "My personality is made. I am done. There is nothing more to be made of me. I am what I am.''
If this was really the case, then what have the past ten years been about? What has the exposure to India been aimed at? And again the answer is there in the decade-old interview. "The guy who fixes the air-conditioner at my place knows more than me about air-conditioning. The person who sweeps outside my house knows more about sweeping than I do. My job in politics is to transmit the knowledge that people have from one person to another. This outlook is central to my life.''
Rahul has spent this decade looking for structural changes that could make his party more efficient. He has interacted with experts, some on UP, some on panchayati raj, some on the economy, in the hope that he can pipe this expertise into a vision for the country.
This is an approach that has not got him anywhere and for good reason. Ramachandra Guha rather succinctly summarized Rahul's capabilities while dwelling on the possibility of what this country would have been like if Lal Bahadur Shastri had been alive for some years, "…Sonia Gandhi would "still be a devoted and loving housewife, and Rahul Gandhi perhaps a middle-level manager in a private sector company". Only a middle-level manager would continue to search for managerial solutions to what is essentially a crisis of leadership in the Congress.
Given that Rahul Gandhi has spent so much time speaking to so many `experts' over the past decade, he should spare some time to meet the president of PEN International John Ralston Saul, a writer and philosopher who has devoted considerable thought to contemporary politics. Saul currently happens to be in the country.
The same year that Rahul was giving his first interview, Saul spoke on good governance at a university in Canada. Dwelling on a question – what are the barriers to good governance? – that is fundamental to the crisis unfolding around us, Saul ended by listing several reasons and then concluded, "… Finally, a terrible confusion between leadership and management. Examine how much money goes into producing managers in the world today under the misapprehension that they are leaders. They are not the same thing: a leader has a relationship with the population; even a benign dictator has a relationship with a population. A manager does not. A manager is in charge of structure. The inability to change the discourse is tied to this terrible confusion between leadership—not heroism—and management.'' Fundamentally, this is Rahul's problem, he has no relationship with the Indian public.
(Hartosh Singh Bal is a consulting editor at Firstpost.)
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