Suddenly, Rahul Gandhi is the flavor of the season.

If you look at the hard data, the BJP lost only 1.2% of the popular vote share, and the Congress gained 1.49%. It is not as if whopping numbers swayed from one side to the other. The BJP still has 240 seats despite being in power for 10 years, the pre-poll alliance of the NDA has a clear majority, and Prime Minister Narendra Modi has moved into his third term in office.

This was not the case with the Congress-led UPA after its 10-year stint in power (2004-14). This time the Congress was lucky that the rise in its vote share translated into more seats, nearly doubling its number from 52 to 99.

But the story goes beyond the data – and the situation has changed broadly in three ways.

Rahul Gandhi In his first speech as Leader of Opposition, Rahul Gandhi alleged that the government had spread violence and hatred in the name of Hinduism. (PTI File)

First, Gandhi has taken on the Leader of the Opposition (LoP) post and opted to lead the Congress from the front — unlike after earlier results. For 41 months, till Mallikarjun Kharge took over as the party chief in 2022, there was no full-time president of India’s Grand Old Party. It seemed to be waiting for Gandhi to make up his mind. After he stepped down as party president following the Congress’s 2019 debacle, Sonia Gandhi stepped into the breach as interim president. But behind the scenes, Rahul Gandhi continued to take all the major decisions.

Festive offer

Today, as LoP, he will deal with the Prime Minister and Union Home Minister Amit Shah on committees to select the Central Vigilance Commissioner and the CBI Director, for example, apart from engaging with the government on a host of issues. He will also need to plan the nuts and bolts of the Congress’s strategy in Parliament, ensuring that complaints against him about inaccessibility are not repeated, opening his doors to not just party colleagues but also leaders of INDIA parties.

The LoP post comes with other perks That will boost Gandhi’s stature, including Cabinet rank and meetings with heads of states visiting India.

The question ‘Who against Modi?’ appears to have been settled for now. Many opposed to the NDA government now see Gandhi as the answer. While the tricky issue has not been formally addressed by the INDIA bloc, it may not need to tackle this for some time to come. Barring possibly Mamata Banerjee of the Trinamool Congress and Arvind Kejriwal of the Aam Aadmi Party, Gandhi appears to have settled into a good rapport with other regional chieftains, such as Akhilesh Yadav of the Samajwadi Party, Tejashwi Yadav of the RJD and MK Stalin of the DMK. At the moment, most of them are occupied with retaining ground in their own states.

Gandhi is also the face of a more robust Opposition in Parliament, as was visible in the short Session that just ended, with its MPs enjoying the new space that has opened up for them given the BJP’s shrunken numbers. As Gandhi spoke for more than an hour in the Lok Sabha attacking the government, the BJP protested but both the party MPs and PM Modi heard him out.

The recent release of INDIA partner and JMM leader Hemant Soren on bail, and Friday’s news of interim bail to Kejriwal in the Enforcement Directorate case will further embolden the Opposition ranks.

However, another change that was hoped for, of a return to “normal” politics, has been belied – at least in the recent Parliament Session. As the Opposition targeted it, the BJP’s aggressive pushback conveyed that its new status of a party heading a coalition rather than a full-majority government would not mean any dilution in its take-no-prisoners approach.

At the same time, the BJP has shown a softer touch in handling its NDA partners TDP and the JD(U), which are crucial to the survival of the Modi government.

The third facet of the new Gandhi is his visibility on the ground, in some way an extension of his Bharat Jodo Yatra. Since the results came, he has paid visits to Gujarat (after some Congress workers were injured in a clash with the BJP), Manipur (to meet victims of the internal conflict in the state), Hathras (to meet victims of the recent stampede) , Assam (to meet victims of recent floods), and Rae Bareli (his constituency, where he also visited the family of an Army officer who died in Siachen); he has met railway loco pilots to talk about their working conditions, after a recent accident in which one among them was blamed; and he was seen lending a hand to laborers at a construction site in Delhi.

Gandhi has clearly come a long way from the retiring young man who had to be pulled by veteran Congress leader Ambika Soni to the front row on the dais at a Congress meeting in 2003. In 2013, he was seen to have reluctantly agreed to become the party vice-president, though his acceptance speech speaking about the ghosts he had to exorcise, having seen his grandmother killed by the same security guards who had taught him badminton, had many Congress leaders in tears.

Rahul Gandhi’s challenges?

He could get carried away by this initial euphoria, over-interpreting the 2024 mandate, which was a complex one. With no overarching Modi wave subsuming local factors, the latter played out differently in different states, unlike what had happened in 2014 and 2019.

Gandhi has shown a few signs of this oversimplification – such as equating the defeat of the BJP candidate in the Faizabad Lok Sabha seat (that covers Ayodhya) with the Opposition’s defeat of the Ram temple movement. It would be reading wrong the anger among locals over the takeover of their lands and houses in Ayodhya. Similarly, the fatigue with Hindu-Muslim talk and its cynical use for political purposes can’t be seen as a negation of people’s consciousness of their Hindu identity, nor can it be ignored that they are happy over the construction of the Ram Temple if not its use as a poll issue.

It is early days yet to know how far Gandhi can take his continuing attempts to fashion a pro-Hindu ideological alternative to the BJP’s Hindutva – arguing that “Hinduism” is different from “Hindutva”, and is not the monopoly of Modi, the BJP. or the RSS.

But the bigger challenge for Gandhi will be how to move forward in building the Congress as a national alternative to the Modi-led NDA, with signs now that the party has re-found support. Will the Congress move incrementally, carefully, wisely, in step with its INDIA allies, to prepare for the next battles in states, leading up to finally 2029? Or will it be tempted to focus solely on the party, given the window of opportunity that has come its way?

Many of the Congress’s regional allies have grown at its expense, and they will be particularly apprehensive about its moves. One of the first problems the Congress could face is from Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, unless it can come to a clear understanding with allies Samajwadi Party and RJD that they will have the lion’s share of the seats in the two states respectively for the Assembly elections ( UP, 2027; Bihar, 2025).

The hope is that, having been at the receiving end of a powerful BJP, the INDIA partners may just hang together. And that Gandhi may well and truly own up to the role of Leader of the entire Opposition, and take everyone along – which will start with becoming a 24X7 politician.