Friends, recently I read an article written by an eminent and distinguished lawyer, which offered a penetrating analysis that sheds light on Rahul Gandhi’s conduct, public persona, and political demeanour. In today’s blog, I am sharing some salient points of that article with you all.
Rahul Gandhi’s disintegration as a political leader is not just about weak messaging or poor organisational grip. It is what happens when a dynasty’s sense of entitlement collides with a country that has stopped treating it as the default setting.
For decades, the Gandhi family’s operating system was simple: power is inherited, legitimacy is assumed, and institutions are appointment boards. Who gets a ticket, who gets a ministry, who gets a post, who gets protection-the ecosystem was not built to compete, it was built to allocate. Politics for Gandhis was never a marketplace of ideas. It was a family-run distribution network.
2014 did not just defeat Congress. It broke the spell. It told an entire ecosystem, you are not entitled to rule. You can be voted out, and the country can move without your permission. For any normal party, that becomes a moment of reform. For a dynasty, it became personal humiliation, and this again happened in 2019 and 2024.
That is why the behaviour since then often feels less like opposition and more like resentment. Not, ‘how do we become better’?, but ‘how dare you replace us’? When you believe the State is your inheritance, being out of power is not a political phase-it feels like exile.
So what do you do when you can not accept the new reality? You delegitimise the referee. You question the institutions. You manufacture doubt about national achievements. You turn every moment of India’s rise into a crisis narrative. Because it is the only way to reduce the pain of irrelevance.
This is why Rahul Gandhi looks unmoored. He is trapped between two worlds: the old India where the family name could substitute for competence, and the new India where the name is no longer enough. And until Congress breaks free of the dynasty’s emotional need to be central, it will keep bleeding, because the party can not rebuild while it’s still mourning its lost entitlement
The real question is whether Rahul Gandhi and his Congress can accept the basic democratic truth: power is earned, not inherited, and the country is under no obligation to return it.
This is BITTER TRUTH for Congress.
Yet the lingering question is why seasoned and intellectual party stalwarts like Shashi Tharoor and others , which include many famous lawyers in Congress’s fold, seem unable or unwilling to grasp the reality!!
In the end, my personal opinion is, that Rahul Gandhi still thinks that, as Indira Gandhi came back in 1980 after Janata Party’s debacle, the present Congress also stands a chance and deserves a comeback. He seems to forget that the Janata party buckled under their own leaders’ personal ambitions, and there is no such similarity in the present political scenario. PM Narendra Modi and the BJP are in a strong position as far as governance is concerned, and presently, there are no other leaders in the BJP who are challenging him for top position.
Unless the Congress party revamps, there is no chance of its revival.
Anil Malik
Mumbai, India
27th April 2026