Rahul Gandhi’s ascent is more a case of succession planning than the rise of new talent through any vicious intra-party competition. Given how the old Congress vote banks have depreciated, his challenge is much greater than that faced by any of his ancestors. He has to learn on the job, in a manner of speaking. And, regrettably, he has to learn, first of all, to deal in cynical, minimalistic coalition management and vote-bank arithmetic rather than have the opportunity — as his late father did in 1985, or Obama does now — to build a new politics, of new ideas. Change is the idea that fires popular imagination in a democracy. That is why Obama is so exciting now, and Rajiv’s first phase was so heady.

Modi and Mayawati have their own strengths and limitations. Modi is by far the most promising leader today, at least for his party’s pan-Indian supporters, because of his 2002 riots record and also for the patrician tradition in his party. The whole fixation with mythology has kept his party trapped in the old, Ram-Lakshman-Bharat-Shatrughan type of succession strait-jacket. An Obama had no seniority issue to leap-frog in his party. And now Biden, two decades his senior and one of his harshest critics during the primaries, has no hesitation being his running mate. A Modi, a Vasundhara Raje or an Arun Jaitley can have no such opportunity, no such level playing field.

We spend more time talking about the BJP here not because the party is more guilty than the Congress on this score, but because fundamentally it has a lot more internal democracy than the Congress. And while it is not quite as devoid of the dynastic pulls as the Left, it is still freer from that than any other party in India.

... contd.