“No, I can’t talk to you at this moment, I am talking to my party workers.” He was absorbed in a computerised datasheet of village-wise voting patterns. “Aapke gaon se voting pichhli baar sirf 46 per cent hua tha?” he asked a villager. “Sir, the reason is many from these villages migrate to Punjab to look for work.” He nodded. “Mahilaaon ko ghar se bahar nikaliye; polling badhane ki zuroorat hai.”

“Yes brother, shoot your question now, sorry I had to talk to them,” smiled Rahul Gandhi as he walked up to this correspondent, nudging aside the SPG commando. Forty-eight hours after he told the media he would take up the Congress party’s Uttar Pradesh campaign for the 2007 Assembly election, Rahul Gandhi seemed to have made a flying start.

So what did he make of UP politics, now that he was around for some time? “Hey, that’s a complex question which I can’t answer at this moment,” he winked, glancing at the TV crews, and hopped into the Honda Captain Satish Sharma himself drove.

At the next village, gesturing the party workers to wait, he chatted with The Indian Express, safe from the glaring eyes of TV cameras. His discourse was almost a continuation of the speech on state government’s non-cooperation. “There cannot be any development without power.”

What of his being willing to take charge of UP? “Wait, wait... I never said that... I said if the party leadership decides to put me in charge, I will take up the work.”

... contd.