Are desi voters impressed by Rahul Gandhi's desperate attempt to win over foreign hearts?

Rahul Gandhi is currently in the US where he is meeting and addressing students, NRIs, politicians and corporate honchos.

Many filmmakers, writers, performers, fashion designers and others from India privately and publicly have admitted that recognition on a foreign soil guarantees instantaneous success back home.

Call it our fascination for approval on the international stage (especially in Ameria and Europe) or lack of identifying talent at the grass-root level, appreciation from "videsh" (foreign) is a must for all "desi" (indigenous) talents.

Now, it seems the bug of impressing foreign crowd has hit our politicians too. In the last three years, since the time Prime Minister Narendra Modi took over the reins of the country, he (with the apt help from his team) took special care to impress leaders, residents and quintessential Non-Resident Indians (NRIs) during his foreign sojourns through his speeches, sartorial choices, handshakes and hugs.

Every clap received by Modi on foreign shores (be it in foreign press or by intellectuals and politicians) has exponentially increased the PM's ratings as the country's most powerful leader.

In an attempt to emulate Modi, Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi (often the press and the public love to pit Modi and Rahul against each other) has embarked on a journey to the United States where he has been addressing students at famous universities, meeting intellectuals, policy-makers, politicians and of course NRIs in the last few days.

Rahul's ongoing two-week long visit to the US, where he has been relentlessly talking about the PM, demonetisation, job loss and politics of polarisation, to name a few, has been hosted by the Oversees Congress to help re-brand the scion of the Gandhi family as a formidable leader who too talks eloquently like his bête noire Modi on issues close to the hearts of Indian masses.

Moreover, the chairman of Oversees Congress, Sam Pitroda, a friend of Rahul's father Rajiv who under the former PM ushered India's telecom revolution and the brain behind Rahul's current visit to America, wants to debunk what he alleges as a "machinery" employed by the rival Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to portray a wrong picture of the Congress VP as a "weakling with no brains at all".

Such an exercise to help Rahul re-enter the imagination of Indian voters as an alternative to Modi could not have kick-started on desi soil, but on a videshi platform. Rahul, even the Congress knows it well, is not held in high regards by the Indian masses. Because of his regular goof-ups and lack of interest in politics, Rahul is always seen as a "reluctant politician" forced to be a part of the political class by his mother and Congress president Sonia Gandhi and the party itself.

So, the Congress public relation (PR) machinery decided to relaunch Rahul's career (once again) in the US (remember PM Modi has a huge following of NRIs in the US and even President Donald Trump and the Indian PM share good rapport).

Last week when Rahul addressed students (mostly Indians) at the famous University of California, Berkeley in the US, Twitter exploded immediately with mixed reactions. While many were impressed by Rahul's "candid and sharp" answers on various issues (including of course PM Modi, whom Rahul praised as a better communicator than him), others including BJP's Smriti Irani and Sambit Patra slammed the Congress VP for "supporting" prevalence of "dynastic politics" in the country.

The best thing that Rahul managed to do with his first public address during his current visit to the US is that he succeeded in winning over several of his former critics.

Senior journalist and author Aditya Sinha (whom Rahul had publicly threatened to file a lawsuit against him for a story Sinha did that questioned his 1994 Cambridge MPhil), in an article titled, "Why I changed my mind about Rahul", stated that Rahul is the alternative to Modi for the Indian janata in the next General elections.

While Rahul's staunch "haters" would call Sinha's prediction too hasty and knee-jerk, but it is definitely fascinating to see that slowly and steadily public opinion is changing towards the scion of the Gandhi family.

In an article in Hindustan Times, journalist Yashwant Raj stated that during Rahul's meeting with experts from various fields in Washington DC, the Congress VP managed to impress them by speaking cohesively on a range of issues.

On Tuesday, once again Rahul addressed students in the US, this time at the Princeton University, where he kept his focus on jobs, jobs and more jobs. Criticising the Modi government over its failure to create jobs, Rahul admitted that the previous United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government under the Congress was voted out of power for failing to fulfill its promise of providing jobs to the Indian youths.

The Congress leader also spoke against centralisation of power, saying too few people control too much in India's present political system.

"The main problem is centralisation of political system. A Chief Minister decides what happens to a village road (but) it should be the local governments deciding what happens to a village road," Rahul said.

He also said that law making process is mainly carried out by bureaucrats and the Ministries and Parliament validates the law.

"What I will try to push for is transformation of the Lok Sabha, transformation of the Vidhan Sabha. I will like to open up the law making process," Rahul said.

Once Rahul will be back to India, we have to wait and watch to see if all the efforts that went into designing Rahul's trip to the US (including what he spoke) would prove beneficial for the Congress as well as its leader or not.

OneIndia News