Where’s the party tonight?

Politicians may live very public lives, but they have a right, like all other people, working or otherwise, to private lives as well. India clearly doesn’t understand this well enough.

Otherwise, there wouldn’t have been such an unseemly controversy over pictures and videos of Rahul Gandhi in a dimly lit pub in Nepal.

The Twitter-fuelled indignation was problematic on at least three counts.

First, those who claimed that Gandhi was partying with a Chinese diplomat were totally wrong.

Secondly, the fact that Gandhi was seen talking to a woman in the pub should have never become the basis for scurrilous insinuations. And finally, it is really nobody’s business to question his decision to spend his leisure time as he decides to.

As it turned out, we now know that Rahul Gandhi was in Kathmandu to attend the wedding of a journalist friend.

Quite clearly, he was on a private visit, something that the Twitter-mob, deftly manipulated and led by some BJP leaders and supporters, either ignored or failed to take note of.

They used it to create an image of the Congress leader as someone whose real interests lie elsewhere – as someone who is interested in living the good life, who forsakes the (ostensible) austerity of other leaders, and has no commitment towards tackling the real problems that India faces.

Unfair though this characterisation of him as a dissolute and self-indulgent politician is, the controversy over the pub visit draws attention to another kind of problem that Rahul Gandhi must deal with – that of bad optics.

Politics, after all, is not only about who you are, but also how you come across to people – a place where images are carefully cultivated and maintained, even if they are not entirely true.

This, at the cost of sounding cynical, is the nature of the game, and Rahul Gandhi doesn’t understand this well enough.

His main political opponent, Prime Minister Narendra Modi, is regarded even by his staunchest critics as a relentless workaholic, someone who works 24/7 for the sake of the country.

Ironically, the large number of foreign trips that Modi makes – arguably, more than what is really necessary – has done nothing to affect this image.

The problem with Rahul Gandhi in contrast has been his periodic tendency to go underground and remain incommunicado to even his own second rung leadership for significant periods of time.

The most striking example for this was the secret ‘sabbatical’ that he took in Myanmar soon after he stepped down as party president following the 2019 electoral debacle.

Rahul Gandhi needs to change in many ways, perhaps starting with his indecision about whether or not to reclaim the presidentship of the Congress.

But while he does all of this, he also needs to work on changing his image. In the absence of this, there will be controversies about him spending time abroad, shirking political work, while his party lurches from one crisis to another. He needs to break the image trap.

He needs people to believe that on most evenings, what occupies his mind is the Congress party rather than merry-making in a foreign land.