Story of Ruchi Gupta and Congress

An aspect of Ruchi’s role as the NSUI in-charge was to gather feedback from India’s young for the party. Pic/NSUI Karnataka Twitter

The ending of Ruchi Gupta's Congress story is known: She quit as the national in-charge of the National Students' Union of India, a frontal Congress outfit, in December 2020. She was tired of waiting for the NSUI's state units to be reconstituted, media claimed. She did not badmouth the Gandhis; she did not join another party. Yet Ruchi's story is special because it shows how the stasis in the Congress can turn idealism into cud - and then spit it out. It is where the effervescence of enthusiasm dissipates.

Let us begin the story from the beginning.

You could begin the story when Ruchi, as a little girl, saw her father shoo away a beggar who had come knocking on their door at night. "He must have been hungry, Papa," the little girl said. Many minutes later, she and her Papa went to look for the beggar. They could not find him.

Or you could begin the story when Ruchi worked in Burger King to finance her studies in the United States. In 2006, the global consultancy giant McKinsey hired her in New York. No longer required to struggle to keep her body and soul together, she joined the Teach India incubation project for a few months. It turned into a tryst with the India she never knew, the India where aspirations invariably
run aground.

It was to comprehend this India she took to working with Arvind Kejriwal years before he spearheaded the anti-corruption movement. Her next stop was the Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan, which Aruna Roy and Nikhil Dey run in Rajasthan. She hopped from one village to another before wisdom dawned on Ruchi - idealism alone cannot make India's future glow.

Idealism must be combined with political interventions to bring about an enduring change. And because Roy was a member of the National Advisory Council, which advised then Congress president Sonia Gandhi, Ruchi became acquainted with its secretary, Koppula Raju, the 1981-batch IAS officer who took voluntary retirement in 2013. On being made the head of the Congress Scheduled Caste cell, Raju appointed Ruchi as the convenor of its Rajasthan chapter.

It seemed ridiculous to have Ruchi, a bania, head the SC cell. But when Rajasthan's Vasundhara Raje government promulgated an ordinance in December 2014, introducing minimum educational qualifications for candidates to contest in panchayat elections, Ruchi pored over the 2011 Census. The figures were shocking: 54 per cent of SCs, 62 per cent of Scheduled Tribes and 44 per cent of Rajasthan's entire population would be knocked out of panchayati elections!

This is disenfranchisement, she said, in a presentation before a meeting of top leaders, Rahul Gandhi included. Convinced, the Congress moved, in 2016, an amendment to the motion of thanks to the President's address to Parliament on this count. The Rajya Sabha adopted the amendment, just the fifth such instance since Independence.

Ruchi was made the NSUI in-charge in 2017. That very year the party won the Delhi University Student Union elections after four years. Congress leaders trumpeted the defeat of the politics of hate in the Bharatiya Janata Party's veritable den.

A jubilant Ruchi texted to Rahul declaring that she loved her job.

An aspect of her role was to gather feedback from India's young for the party. She said their complaint was that nobody listened to them. In 2018, the Congress ran a campaign in Karnataka: "We are listening."

She said the people, particularly the youth, hankered for a political identity. BJP members view themselves as striving to turn India into a Hindu rashtra. In contrast, the Congress comes across as simply a party hostile to Narendra Modi. "The Congress cannot be defined in relation to him," Ruchi said. "We need our own narrative."

She aired her views in meetings comprising senior leaders. She was outspoken. She dissed the Congress's Bharat Bachao campaign as full of negativity. Ruchi was thought of as an upstart who spoke out of turn, even though Rahul did not seem to mind.

Only those who run can trip.

So they waited for her to falter. A complaint against the NSUI president became a way to take her down. The president resigned. Yet they sat on her recommendations for new appointments for over one year. Constantly bogged down in petty internal feuds instead of focussing on the external, Ruchi resigned. The Congress, more than a year later, has still to find her replacement.

You wonder: How do I know her story so well? I spoke to Ruchi, obviously, after coaxing her for a year to speak to me. But she is a hard nut to crack. Juicy tales have been left out from this piece because she would stonewall: "I will say nothing."

Or: "I do not bitch about my former colleagues."

It is obvious her wounds are still raw. Does she hurt? No. Is she bitter? No. Does she regret the years in the Congress? No, no, no. "I just feel sad," she said, still seriously engaged with politics and trying to carve out a path where integrity and passion for building India's future can be combined, evident from her media pieces. A pity the Congress has no place for people like Ruchi!

The writer is a senior journalist.
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