MAGAZINE Voices Dr Vikram Sampath Anuja Chandramouli Dr Alka Pande Ravi Shankar Dr Deepali Bhardwaj Mata Amritanandamayi Buffet People Wellness Books Food Art & Culture Entertainment NEW DELHI november 8 2026 SUNDAY PAGES 12 India’s opposition The Rise, Fall, And Rise of Rahul Gandhi From being the Congress party’s blue-eyed boy to being dismissed as ‘Pappu’ and emerging as the stormy petrel of Opposition politics, the Gandhi heir has come a long way in realising his idea of India By Prabhu Chawla O Two climbs, two falls n the first Sunday of November, the road from Minto Road to Delhi’s Ramlila Maidan vanished beneath flags. Beside the Congress tricolour fluttered the red of the communists, the green of the Samajwadi Party and the lantern of , the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD), a census of anti-government India in cloth. At the head of the procession, standing in an open jeep in his trademark white T-shirt, rode Rahul Gandhi. Behind him came the regional chieftains who had spent the better part of a decade declining to call him their leader: Mamata Banerjee, Akhilesh Yadav, Tejashwi Yadav, Farooq Abdullah, Mehbooba Mufti, and assorted grandees of the Left. His sister, Priyanka, rode with them rather than ahead of them; his mother, Sonia, once the most powerful person in India, waited at the venue. At one point, cameras caught Mr Gandhi handing Mr Yadav a chocolate. It was the gesture of a host, not a supplicant. Ups and downs of a 22-year career 2004 Wins Amethi, enters Lok Sabha 2007 General secretary, Youth Congress 2009 Congress wins 206 seats 2013 Vice-president; tears up ordinance 2014 Congress crashes to 44 seats The crowd’s placards read “Vote Bachao, Desh Bachao” (“Save the vote, save the country”). Their target was less Narendra Modi, the Prime Minister, than Gyanesh Kumar, the Chief Election Commissioner, whose nationwide revision of the electoral rolls has given the Opposition its most potent grievance in years. Mr Gandhi called the 2024 general election stolen and promised to see Mr Kumar jailed for treason. Amit Shah, the Home Minister, had recently declared that Mr Modi was not going anywhere. Mr Gandhi agreed, after a fashion: the Prime Minister, he said, would not be allowed to escape. It was theatre, but effective theatre: the largest Opposition rally in the capital in the last 10 years. It also revived a question that has hung over Indian politics for two decades. Can a dynast become a leader of the people in his own right? 2017 Becomes Congress president 2019 Loses Amethi; resigns as president The family firm For most of India’s independent history , Congress was less a party than a family house with an enormous waiting room. Jawaharlal Nehru ran the country for 17 years. His daughter, Indira, split the party twice and, when the old guard resisted, built a new one around herself: Congress (I), for Indira. Her son Rajiv rode a wave of grief after her assassination to 414 seats in 1984, a record no one has matched. After Rajiv’s murder in 1991, his widow, Sonia, declined the crown. The party muddled on under PV Narasimha Rao and then Sitaram Kesri, until Mr Kesri was ousted in 1998 in a manner that still makes veterans wince and Mrs Gandhi took over. She became the longest-serving president in the party’s 140-year history from 1998 to , 2017, and returned as interim chief from 2019 to 2022. In 2004, she turned down the prime ministership in favour of Manmohan Singh, creating an awkward arrangement: the prime minister sat in South Block, but power resided at her home at 10 Janpath. Today Mallikarjun Kharge is the first , non-Gandhi to lead the party in a quarter of a century Nobody in Delhi is confused . about where its compass points. The cut-outs outside Ramlila Maidan showed Mr Gandhi, his sister, and Mr Kharge, in descending order of size. The prince of Amethi Mr Gandhi’s story begins in 2004, when, aged 33 and armed with a Cambridge MPhil and a stint at a London consultancy , he stood for the family seat of Amethi and won by nearly 3,00,000 votes. Congress surprised everyone by returning to power, and he entered Parliament as Prime Minister-in-waiting, though without a date. He declined ministerial office in both governments led by Congress’s United Turn to page 2 2020 Scindia exit topples MP government 2022 Bharat Jodo Yatra: 4,080 km on foot 2023 Disqualified; restored by Supreme Court 2024 99 seats; Leader of the Opposition 2025 Bihar rout: 6 seats of 61 Setbacks Rise Rahul Gandhi standing atop police barricades during Opposition protests in Delhi in October, 2026 2026 Kerala win; leads Ramlila Maidan rally STRENGTHS WEAKNESSES OPPORTUNITIES THREATS  Unmatched name recognition and national reach  About 12,000 km of yatras: a stamina legend  Cabinet-rank Leader of the Opposition  Now the accepted face of the INDIA bloc  95 defeats on the BJP’s count  No slogan that has converted into votes  Weak organisation; leaders keep leaving  Absences and erratic timing before polls  2027 polls in UP, Punjab, and Gujarat  Youth anger over paper leaks and jobs  Caste census and the social-justice plank  Kerala, Karnataka, and Telangana as showcases  Modi’s mass appeal and the BJP machine  Allies’ own ambitions: SP, TMC, RJD  Vote-chori pitch can read as an excuse  BJP gains in Bengal; TVK rise in Tamil Nadu