RAHUL Gandhi said after this week’s electoral rout of the Congress party in Uttar Pradesh that he has learnt a good lesson from the stinging defeat in India’s most populous state.

Has he learnt something, really?

Many factors influence defeat and victory in Indian elections. But let me start by dialectically connecting the humbling of Rahul Gandhi to an early morning panic call I got from Pakistan’s soft-spoken intellectual-activist Dr Mubashir Hasan during the Vajpayee administration.

“Babu,” he yelled uncharacteristically on the otherwise clear phone line from Lahore, shouting the name he often gives to his male listeners. “This would be an act of war. What are you reporting, for God’s sake?”

I had quoted India’s former envoy in Islamabad, S.K. Singh, in Dawn that morning as suggesting publicly that New Delhi should shut down the water flow of rivers crossing into Pakistan.

The strategic thinker in the Vajpayee administration was adding his ideas to a pile of hawkish proposals on the table about how to deal with Islamabad after the botched attack on the parliament house, which Islamabad condemned.

The late S.K. Singh became one of the many intellectuals who got to advise the Gandhi family on foreign policy and domestic issues. A level-headed Mani Shankar Aiyar seems a misfit in Rahul Gandhi’s Congress.

Cut to the 2007 election campaign in Uttar Pradesh, which the current outgoing Dalit chief minister Mayawati had won. Rahul Gandhi was sighted one day near Moradabad in that campaign. Suddenly, apropos of nothing, out of the blue, he confided to theaudience that his grandmother had cut Pakistan into two.

Had Rahul Gandhi managed to get a single extra vote for making the utterance that better suits his rivals in the Bharatiya Janata Party, he could be forgiven. Coming from him, though, it sounded like an exuberant expression of inexperience laced withinputs from a right-wing hawk.

In any case Rahul Gandhi was telling only half the story. He didn’t say, for example, that Indira Gandhi became a very unpopular leader within months of her pyrrhic victory and it eventually led to her imposing emergency rule in 1975. Anunprecedented electoral rout came soon after.

In 1977, she was evicted from Rae Bareli while younger son Sanjay Gandhi was decimated in neighbouring Amethi. That this week’s election results in Uttar Pradesh heaped similar humiliation on Congress president Sonia Gandhi, who has made RaeBareli her parliamentary constituency, and on Rahul Gandhi in Amethi, should be a lesson he would do well not to ignore. Bad temper, whether at home or with a neighbouring country, alienates the voter and the neighbours.

For a fraction of the mistakes made by her mother-in-law, Sonia Gandhi lost all five assembly segments in Rae Bareli. Her son managed to secure barely two of five assembly seats for his handpicked Congress candidates in Amethi despite the trumpeted presence of the entire Gandhi family in the campaign, including his sister Priyanka Vadra.

What were the mistakes that the mother-son duo may have made to suffer the ignominy of not just a defeat in Uttar Pradesh but in Punjab, Uttarakhand and Goa, where the Congress could have won and was in fact expected to take power but failed?

The Congress’ only gain this week came in the volatile north-eastern state of Manipur. Kashmiris wrongly think that they are being singled out for rough treatment; ask the Manipuris.

I remember Rahul Gandhi making headlines with his visit to a policeman’s family in Chhatisgarh who had been brutally murdered by Maoist guerrillas. It was a widely appreciated humanitarian gesture. The poor policeman was a victim of crossfirebetween the coercive arm of the state and rebellious tribal citizens of India whose home and hearth the state and its financiers covet.

The gesture to the policeman’s family, no matter how noble, would never translate into votes. Rahul Gandhi has not spoken clearly, if at all he has said anything, on the actual strife that laid low the policeman, the object of his public grief. The fact is thatwe haven’t heard anything worthwhile from Rahul Gandhi on any topic of importance to the masses.

If anything there is a forked-tongue approach in important issues his party canvasses. Socially, the Congress claims proximity to Muslims and Dalits. In practice it has not spelt out a policy to deal with the communal politics stifling Gujarat. I am not even sure that Rahul Gandhi has visited a single Muslim ghetto in the state.

After Dr Manmohan Singh became prime minister in 2005 Rahul Gandhi declared that the BJP was a joke. It had always harmed and insulted his family, including his grandmother, he told reporters. Insulting his family? A joke? Did he have any idea of the mayhem this “joke” had inflicted on India in 1992 in Ayodhya and in Gujarat in 2002? On Christian missionaries, Dalits and tribespeople perpetually?

Towards the Dalits his approach has been a poor imitation of Gandhiji’s disastrous policy with erstwhile ‘untouchables’. We know only too well that Dr B.R. Ambedkar, who Dalits regard as their biggest leader, had little time for Gandhiji’s notion ofHarijans. Dalits see it is a condescending and insulting term, which literally means ‘children of God’. If they were the children of God, who were the parents of the upper castes?

Sleeping in Dalit homes and eating food cooked by them was a bad political a gimmick for Rahul Gandhi. Dalits want honour, justice and jobs. Mayawati gave them honour and according to the poll outcome she was routed in the number of seats but trailed behind the winner only by about a two per cent deficit.

Someone gave Rahul Gandhi a piece of paper to tear up angrily at a public. Nehru and Indira Gandhi used to get away with such tantrums. In fact, their quirks were indulged by the masses. Times have changed. Rahul Gandhi kept mocking the Dalit party’s mascot, the elephant, as a symbol of corruption as if the Congress and the BJP were unblemished by corruption.

Rahul Gandhi didn’t address the real elephant in the room — his party’s palpable political bankruptcy. Is that too difficult a lesson to learn?

The writer is Dawn’s correspondent in New Delhi.