Like a fish flopping about out of water, and desperate to get back into it, Rahul Gandhi is pining for his Congress party to come back to power. After all he is the scion of the royal family of India, the Nehru-Gandhi family, and so he has a rightful claim to the throne of India, which he believes has been unlawfully seized by the BJP.
To come back to power, Rahul resorted to the gimmick called the Bharat Jodo Yatra
Since this fizzled out, Rahul was looking around for some other gimmick to clear his path to the throne of India. He saw the Cockroach Janta Party protest at Jantar Mantar, Delhi, in which youth of all castes and religions joined. This seems to have given Rahul the bright idea of galvanising and mobilising the Indian youth in favour of the Congress.
Hence he has launched a campaign called 'Chhaatron ki Goonj' ( i.e. The Thunder of Students ), and has held largely attended rallies, beginning in Kota, Rajasthan, and then in Dehra Dun, Prayagraj, Pune, and Indore, focusing on issues affecting youth, such as paper leaks, exam irregularities, and unemployment.
The problem with Rahul's thinking is that large crowds at rallies do not necessarily translate into votes in elections.
This is proved by the BJP victories in the recent Delhi University Students' Union elections and the earlier West Bengal state assembly elections. The DUSU members are young people, but the election results, in which the BJP-affiliated ABVP won the posts of President, Secretary, and Joint Secretary, while Congress won none ( the Vice President's post was won by an independent candidate ), prove that when it comes to voting, Indian youth are as much polarised on the basis of religion as elders.
West Bengal was always regarded as a bastion of secularism, but the BJP victory in May 2026 has shattered that myth.
My own forecast is that despite everything, the BJP will keep advancing all over the country, and will one day take power in southern states too.
I have given my reasons for my opinion in great detail in the article below, and hence I am not repeating the same
https://www.hastakshepnews.com/2026/07/a-study-in-contrast-justice-markandey.html
(Justice Katju is a former judge of the Supreme Court of India and a former Chairman of the Press Council of India. The views expressed are his own.)
