In the next general election, the Congress will most likely project Rahul Gandhi as the future prime minister and not Manmohan Singh. As one of the Generation Next in the party put it, if voters are given the option between the 37-year-old Rahul Gandhi and the 80-year-old L.K. Advani, the choice is obvious. The party wanted to install Gandhi as the new face of the Congress ahead of any announcement of a snap mid-term poll or a cabinet reshuffle.

Incidentally, Janardhan Dwivedi was given such short notice to vacate his office in the Congress headquarters to make way for Gandhi that his charts and other material were still in the room when Gandhi arrived.

Yuvraj’s vizier

If Rahul Gandhi has emerged the yuvraj of the Congress, then Jairam Ramesh sees himself as his vizier. For Ramesh, the hours he has spent in Parliament listening to debates and chatting with Gandhi, who sits in the row immediately behind him in the Lok Sabha, have paid off. Gandhi, who worked for the Monitor Consultancy Group, is impressed by people who mouth management jargon and have a World Bank approach to development. As convener of the newly set up group that looks into future challenges, Ramesh will be in charge of what could turn out to be the Congress’s key think tank, which will set the agenda for both the party and government. Some even describe it as the cabinet of the next government.

Ramesh, who was part of the strategy group that coined the successful aam admi campaign in 2004, will be writing Rahul’s English speeches. Meanwhile, contrary to popular impression, Ramesh’s publicly attacking his former mentor Ambika Soni has not gone down well with either Ahmed Patel or Sonia Gandhi.

... contd.