Apparently, he is meeting functionaries, confabulating with advisors — Congress never had a scarcity of omniscient armchair pundits — but except for a few rallies in Bareilly and Kanpur, the UP electorate has not yet been blessed with his darshan and personal appearances. There are fears now that the young politician is becoming a card that will never be unraveled from the inner folds of an untidy sleeve. The Congress will hide him for fear of failure. Rahul Gandhi will continue to play hide and seek — more hide than seek.

The Gandhi muddle apart, the Congress has not really worked hard to confront and alter the calcifying caste arrangement. Three years after it unexpectedly captured the Delhi throne and realised the need to consolidate in UP, the Congress has had several false starts but never really been able to take off. The result is all too visible. There has been little or no grassroots growth of the party’s support base. The UP elections will be predictably fought on two tiers — Samajwadi Party versus the Bahujan Samaj Party at the backward level and BJP versus the Congress for the numerically less significant and much-divided upper caste votes. In a state where politics of caste identification has deflated and displaced other issues, the Congress could have systematically attempted an alternative formula.

Cynics might aver it is simply not possible to bring back the dream brahmin-dalit-Muslim alliance, which gave the Congress arithmetic a high percentage in the fifties and sixties. But the party did not even try consistently for the Muslim mindspace even when the SP was teetering on the brink of political and administrative disaster. The Sachar panel was an unsure effort, an unconvincing exercise with the Congress in two minds over the frightening prospect of a Hindu consolidation culminating in a politically lethal Hindu backlash.

The ordinary Muslim voter is now aware that not even an action taken report has been filed on the Sachar panel’s recommendations and this government is too politically and constitutionally careful to risk a job guarantee scheme for the minorities. The Congress brand of minority politics has been buried in internal strife with HRD Minister Arjun Singh wanting to leave his imprint on Muslim education and depriving Minority Affairs Minister A.R. Antulay of every possibility to do the little he could have accomplished.

More than the party itself, individuals have mattered. Like Arjun Singh, Social Justice and Empowerment Minister Meira Kumar tried her hand at the politics of Scheduled Caste appeasement and even went a distance with her job quota idea. It is another story that the prime minister’s office was only going to back her till she restricted herself to affirmative action. Politically, these are half-hearted measures, which never go down well with an informed 21st century electorate. The industry captains have responded with their own diluted version of altruism, which makes them Good Samaritans all right but does little for the social and economic uplift of the Most-Backwards. Similarly, Arjun Singh appeared a lonesome warrior when Delhi Police had to water-cannon students protesting OBC reservations.

When you are battling to regain lost ground after the Mandal-Kamandal twin issues have caused a tectonic shift, you cannot appear to be holding back. In an era when the city and the countryside can be as dissimilar and unattached as two separate continental shelves, the Congress has been persisting with its politics of the middle ground. But there is no treading softly on such a slippery surface. You have to take definite strides. In fact, the Congress should have known better. Inaction, or mere dalliance with dangerous issues, had hardly helped the party in the past. Looking back, Rajiv Gandhi’s response to the Shah Bano judgment did not take into account the long-term consequences. The Congress flirtation with the Babri dispute took an immense toll on the party’s electoral credibility.

If the Congress has not grown in UP, it is because of this inability to address the political duality of the urban and the rural. Both crucial segments of the population have been demanding exclusive development as the disastrous consequences of the India Shining campaign have proved. In trying to be impartial, the Congress has become equidistant and hasn’t addressed the problems of either. This rather meek and precisely centrist policy may help the Congress in a general election with its diffused focus but doesn’t take the party anywhere close to the Chhota Imambada in Lucknow. Unlike other states, UP politics at the moment is strategically not viscous enough to allow pre-electoral arrangements. The Congress, still taking its lessons in coalition politics, has fumbled and hesitated.

There is another axiom that the Congress is yet to assimilate. Even waves need an organisational structure to get translated into votes. In UP, a Salman Khursheed or a Pramod Tewari are not reliable and adept organisational talents. Were Sonia Gandhi and her son to create a tsunami of sorts and flood the Gangetic plains with a Congress sweep, even then the Congress would need the services of the aam party worker. And the party has been able to retain only a few of them in UP. When Jawaharlal Nehru swept the polls in 1952 and 1957, Congress had a problem of plenty at the constituency level. Among those seeking their electoral fortunes were Lal Bahadur Shastri, Dinesh Singh, K.D. Malviya, Tribhuban Narain Singh, Feroz Gandhi and Shah Nawaz Khan. Such was the stature of the grassroots leader and the strength of the organisation apparatus. In the past three years, the Congress could not even engineer a defection as valuable as a Narayan Rane or a Siddharamaiah. Long before the battle for Lucknow, Congress seems to have chosen the path of an inexplicable, tactical retreat.

The writer is national editor, CNN-IBN