Five rejoinders: What Ramachandra Guha gets wrong about Rahul Gandhi

Responses to Ramachandra Guha’s column “How the Gandhi family has helped Modi consolidate power.”

Why liberal critiques of Rahul Gandhi ignore institutional capture

By Pius Fozan

Soon after the 2024 general elections, I chanced upon a political scientist at Vienna’s iconic Café Central. Over coffee, he remarked that the true tragedy of modern Indian liberalism is its penchant for perfectionism in an age of existential crisis.

He was referring to the comfortable habit of Delhi’s intelligentsia of judging the Congress leadership by the standards of a peacetime democracy, rather than the asymmetric warfare of a computational autocracy.

We are told, with varying degrees of sociological certainty, that the Congress remains a “family firm” and that Rahul Gandhi lacks the “gravitas” and “curriculum vitae” required to unseat a formidable electoral machine.

This assessment, while satisfying to the purist, is not merely harsh: it is analytically flawed. It reduces the existential struggle for the soul of the Republic to a critique of the personal failings of a single individual, unwittingly validating the very playbook designed by Narendra Modi and Amit Shah.

The critique relies on an intellectual silo that deliberately ignores the terrifying asymmetry. To judge the opposition without addressing the ruling party’s unprecedented concentration of capital – manifest in the Bharatiya Janata Party’s Rs 10,000-crore...

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