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A new electoral promotion video shows Congress dynast Rahul Gandhi as a brilliant chess mind. It is meant as an allegory for his supposed political astuteness.

In the video, he says: “One of the most interesting things about chess is once you start getting slightly better at it, the opponent’s pieces actually start operating almost like your own…and then very often, a very powerful piece for the opponent, is actually working for you.”

Rahul Gandhi’s lines would be tantalisingly prescient, only if they were not so wet with irony.

The Nehru-Gandhi family scion has long and consistently operated as the BJP’s unwitting but widely acknowledged asset. Even in this general election, he has decided to concede no exception.

Each day he fumbles and stumbles and loudly grumbles. For a man born into one of the world’s most powerful political dynasties, he has disarmingly retained his political naivety at 53.

While it is impossible to count his minor self-goals, at least seven blunders in the run-up to and during this election stand out.

First, it took the Congress four-and-a-half years after the last Lok Sabha drubbing in 2019 to start working on an alliance — the awkwardly abbreviated and punctuated I.N.D.I.A.

India’s best-known political consultant Prashant Kishor wondered aloud in an interview about what took the Congress and the rest of the Opposition so long to come together.

And if they did, why did they not lock themselves up and put their heads together for at least a couple of days and come out with some solutions and a strategy? What took so long to come, however, swiftly unravelled with the personal ambitions of leaders like Mamata Banerjee, Nitish Kumar, and Rahul Gandhi himself.

Rahul’s second blunder was going after India’s big business, in particular the Adani and the Ambani group. Like his Rafale deal campaign in 2019 which crashed not with a bomb but with Rahul’s grovelling apology in the Supreme Court, these reckless attacks have backfired too.

The Adani group got a clean chit from SEBI and the Supreme Court, Congress’s own state governments asked and got investments from it, and his socialist fear-mongering did not even impress the poor in today’s India who have tasted at least small doses of new prosperity and aspire for more.

Third is his obsession with a caste census and OBC reservation, caring little that PM Narendra Modi himself is an OBC and plays that game like a master. Rahul had probably been inspired by the idea of dividing the BJP’s solid and growing Hindu vote on caste lines, a trick straight out of the British colonisers’ playbook.

Modi let him play. The PM launched no counterattack initially, emboldening Rahul to go harder and harder on caste.

The Congress obliged with its fourth and fifth blunders: A manifesto reinforcing the naked minoritism that the party has long been accused of, and Rahul Gandhi grandly announcing ‘wealth redistribution’ if the Congress comes to power.

One of Rahul’s closest advisors, Sam Pitroda, topped it up by suggesting an inheritance tax whereby the State can grab up to 55 per cent of one’s wealth.

This was like bowling an in-form Virat Kohli successive full tosses.

Modi first dispatched the “Muslim League manifesto” out of the park for cheering for hijab in schools and personal laws.

He then linked the caste census, wealth redistribution and inheritance tax to the Congress’s intent of taking away a share of reservation from SC, ST and OBC and giving it to Muslims. He invoked Manmohan Singh’s historic self-goal in which the then PM had said that “minorities, particularly the Muslim community”, have the first right to the nation’s resources.

Sensing that Rahul was trying to polarise the Muslims to vote en bloc, Modi in one stroke polarised the majority, put fear in the minds of the backward castes, and told women that even their mangalsutra or holy matrimonial thread could be taken away and “redistributed” among minorities if the Congress comes to power.

The Congress then executed its sixth blunder. It circulated a deep fake in which Amit Shah is heard saying that the BJP would scrap all reservations.

This gave the BJP a chance to aggressively discredit the entire Congress social campaign as fake and full of lies. It has been arresting those who circulated the video and expose the Congress further.

Also, it is doubling down on its claim that the Congress wants to rob SC, ST, and OBC of their quota to appease Muslims.

And finally, Rahul and Priyanka Gandhi Vadra have still not filed their nominations from Amethi and Rae Bareli, which once used to be Nehru-Gandhi family bastions. There are a few more hours left to the May 3 deadline to file nominations, but the sheer delay and dithering has done enough damage.

It has sent a jarring message to the cadre across India that the siblings do not have the courage to fight even in what used to be their backyard in north India after Rahul’s humiliating defeat to Smriti Irani in 2019.

They have already hung the label of ‘confused’ on themselves in large font. In case they do not fight from Amethi and Rae Bareli, the ‘confused’ would change to ‘coward’.

It would be as good as conceding defeat.

Abhijit Majumder is a senior journalist. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect News18’s views.