The Rahul Gandhi matrix

It's time for the BJP to play the next move on the chessboard. What is worrisome is the prospect that the BJP's ability to swiftly position Modi against Rahul may just dwarf the scion of the Congress.

The chessboard has been spread for 2014 general elections. The Congress has made the first move. With Rahul Gandhi as the party vice-president, Congress will position its aces. On the other side, the obvious opponent is BJP. The saffron party will play the next move. In politics surprises are scant and the BJP will obviously position its mascot Narendra Modi against Gandhi.  

With the clamour for Rahul as the next Prime Ministerial candidate growing within the Congress, incumbent PM Manmohan Singh is in quite an embarrassing position. The Congress has lost its confidence in him, with full one and a half years to go for the UPA-II to complete its term. Thus, the grapevine of an early Lok Sabha poll would only get more credence with each passing day.

The Congress will have much more challenges to deal with and topping them would be undoing the failure of the Manmohan Singh led government. If the Congress itself does not have confidence in Dr Singh, the party can hope for sever backlash from the people.

Further the party is paying more attention to the idea of a new India who live in the social media. Ironically, Rahul is the most bashed politician on the social media. So, the Congress risks entering into an untested water, with questionable diagnosis that the new India lives on the social media. With Rahul's most of the men themselves spending most of their time on "tabs", he further risks himself being herded into a dark alley. 

Digvijaya Singh had been the shepherd of Rahul for most part of his political career. Singh is a man who lost his home-turf in Madhya Pradesh to the BJP. He is a politician literally in a no-man's land. The BJP riding on its politics of delivering governance has deprived Singh of any chance to claw back into his home territory. 

Singh and his other associates had wrongly taken Rahul to mask himself as an angry man ahead of the Uttar Pradesh Assembly election. A thorough gentleman that Akhilesh Yadav is scripted a campaign on ground realities, which ultimately cut Rahul and his men to size that for months they did not show their faces in the state. Therefore, Rahul will have to choose his aces well, as his opponent, who has handed over Congress defeat after defeat is a master of the political chess.

While Rahul has not much to show as his achievements apart from pushing Union ministers to draft some Bills (Land, Food, etc.), Modi has demonstrated that his is the master of the politics of delivering governance to the people.

Rahul and his team may blind themselves behind the flawed narrative of the Delhi media on Modi, that he butchered 1,000 Muslims, and hence he would always remain an untouchable, as all around him would smell the blood dripping off his body. 

The flawed Modi narrative banks on the premise that he within less than a year of being the CM of the state would have enjoyed so much power and obedience from the administration that with the drop of a hint he allowed killing of over 1,000 Muslims. Reality check: Akhilesh Yadav even after six months as CM is still pleading with bureaucrats to listen to him; Mamata Banerjee is puzzled even after more than a year how to make the bureaucrats to forget that they were still Marxists; the list is long. 

"If the BJP were to anoint Modi as its leader, Uttar Pradesh will be vertically split and the saffron party could see its fortune swinging back to those days of Adavni's peak," a Lok Sabha MP of the BSP had surmised.

The game of chess is played as an art. Politics is also an art. In politics, leaders have to out-think their opponents. Nitish Kumar out thought his opponents -- Lalu Yadav and Ram Vilas Paswan. Akhilesh Yadav out thought his opponent --Rahul and BJP -- by scripting a manifesto which answered the woes of all communities. The Manmohan magic till 2009 gave false impression to Rahul and his coterie that he has become a leader.

Rahul has been strategising for over five years to bring in youth in the ambit of the Congress. After five years, he realized that he would no more launch a membership campaign and would rather go with the model of the CPI (M) for open membership. His learning by trial and error is painfully slow. 

Ironically, slow learners risk becoming outdated in politics.

The Jaipur Chintan Shivir begun on the note that the Congress can not come to power on its own, which though is quite apparent, it is quite defeatist to state so. The Shivir is ending with euphoria with appointment of Rahul as vice-president.

It's time for the BJP to play the next move on the chessboard. What is worrisome is the prospect that the BJP's ability to swiftly position Modi against Rahul may just dwarf the scion of the Congress.

The game should be equal but chances of it becoming loaded in favour of the other is quite strong.