Rahul Gandhi Steps Forward

Manish Swarup/Associated Press Congress Vice-President Rahul Gandhi addressing business leaders at the annual general meeting of the Confederation of Indian Industry in New Delhi on Thursday.

NEW DELHI â€" He described himself as “irrelevant,” said he did not want to be a politician, or at least a hard-nosed one. And he worried openly that he is going bald.

Rahul Gandhi, the vice president of the Congress Party, which dominates India’s ruling coalition, gave one of the most important speeches of his political career Thursday before the Confederation of Indian Industry, but despite widely being seen as the present government’s best hope for holding onto power, he insisted during his hourlong remarks that he did not have the answers and was not particularly important to the country’s future.

“Give one individual all the power you want. Give him everything. He cannot solve the problems of a billion people,” Mr. Gandhi said in a perhaps a veiled reference to his most important rival, Narendra Modi, who has said his record as chief minister of Gujarat demonstrates that he can improve India’s economy. “Give a billion people the power to solve their problems, it will be done immediately.”

In a sea of people wearing suits and ties, Mr. Gandhi wore a white kurta pajama and brown sandals. And he spoke repeatedly about the need to bring the poor and the marginalized into India’s political processes and economic growth.

He was dismissive of the notion that one man or one leader could transform the country, which he described as the Indian political model “where you’re going to have the one guy who is going to come, and he’s going to fix everything. He’s going to come on a horse.”

Mr. Gandhi is of course the son, grandson and great-grandson of previous Indian prime ministers. His forebears are so much on the minds of those around him that in introductory and concluding remarks Thursday, two different people from the Confederation of Indian Industry referred to him as Rajiv Gandhi, India’s assassinated prime minister who was Rahul Gandhi’s father and the husband of Sonia Gandhi, Congress Party president.

Mr. Gandhi spoke of radically transforming the country’s political parties to improve grassroots participation in politics, and he spoke admiringly of the primary system in the United States in which President Obama had to prove his mettle as a candidate before being able to run for president.

“The legislative engine in India is basically 5,000 people,” he said, including members of parliament and state legislatures. But he said that fewer than 200 million people select who those people will be.

“A lot of problems come from this,” he said. “No one talks about this and says, ‘Let’s open this thing up.’”

Mr. Gandhi spoke for about 25 minutes from prepared remarks in which he said the government needs to accelerate the building of infrastructure, particularly “the roads on which our dreams are paved.” And he told a lengthy story of taking a 36-hour express train from Gorakhpur to Mumbai and speaking to many of the passengers about their hopes and dreams.

“That’s the spirit of this country,” he said. “Forward-moving, brave, not one of them was pessimistic.”

During the rest of his remarks, he strode about the stage with a hand-held microphone, speaking extemporaneously for nearly 40 minutes in response to just two questions.

He said that India’s power comes from its complexity and its compassion. He told of meeting a Chinese official who asked Mr. Gandhi why the world was talking about China and not India. Mr. Gandhi turned the question back on the official, who answered that China was an object of interest because it was powerful and India was not.

Using a member of the audience, Mr. Gandhi demonstrated how he answered back by squeezing the person’s hand in an iron grip and saying, “This is how China applies its power.”

Then he embraced the person and said, “This is how India applies its power.”

“India is sometimes described as an elephant. We’re not an elephant,” he said. “We’re a beehive.”

He said the decentralized, blindingly complex and seemingly chaotic nature of Indian society is a strength, not a weakness.

He said his role in Indian society is “an accident of fate. I come from a chain of people.” But from that accident, he had a single aim in his life, he said: “I want to give. No, I want to help Indian people to find their voice.”

The speech won him a standing ovation from a crowd of nearly a thousand, and he promised to return.