Rahul Gandhi Won’t Be Congress Party’s Prime Minister Candidate

Rahul Gandhi Won’t Be Congress Party’s Prime Minister Candidate

Rahul Gandhi will lead the campaign of India’s ruling Congress party in national elections due to be held by May, though the scion of the country’s most famous political family won’t be its formal prime minister candidate, a party spokesman said.“There is no need for naming a prime ministerial candidate,” Congress spokesman Janardan Dwivedi told reporters in New Delhi late yesterday in televised remarks. “That’s the opinion of Sonia Gandhi,” referring to Rahul Gandhi’s mother, the party’s president. Dwivedi didn’t explicitly rule out Rahul becoming prime minister after the elections.

The decision means Congress, which trails in polls, will run without an official opponent to Narendra Modi of the main opposition Bhartiya Janata Party. The announcement came before a Congress party meeting today that many analysts had expected would select Rahul Gandhi, 43, as the formal nominee.

Gandhi’s family has dominated Congress and Indian politics for more than six decades, and he’s faced high expectations since he was first elected to parliament in 2004. Expectations, though, that he’s often tried to play down.

His great-grandfather was Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister. Indira Gandhi, his grandmother, led the country for more than 15 years before her assassination in 1984.

She was succeeded by Rajiv Gandhi, Rahul’s father, who lost power in 1989 and was killed by a suicide bomber two years later. Sonia Gandhi has been Congress president since 1998.

Election Losses

As a lawmaker, Rahul has kept a low profile, giving fewer parliamentary speeches than other party leaders and declining Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s requests to join the government. He has spent his time developing the party’s ground organization, and introduced elections in its youth wing.

That has yet to translate into success at the polls. Since 2009, when Rahul Gandhi helped Congress win a second five-year term and started playing a larger role in campaigns, the party has lost 17 of 29 elections in states and union territories that account for most of the seats in India’s parliament.

In December, Congress lost four state elections to the BJP, sending the country’s benchmark stock index to an all-time high as investors bet on the ouster of a government that has overseen the slowest growth in a decade. Standing by his mother afterward, Rahul told reporters the party “would involve people in ways that you cannot even imagine now.”

Speculation Rahul would be the Congress prime ministerial candidate mounted when Singh said earlier this month he would step down after the elections and said Rahul had “outstanding credentials” to run the world’s largest democracy. In a newspaper interview published this week, Rahul said he was ready to take on more party responsibility.

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To contact the reporter on this story: Dick Schumacher in London at dschumacher@bloomberg.net