Once every few years, popular historian Ramchandra Guha emerges to warn us that the malaises that plague the Congress party, and the nation itself, cannot be cured without the immediate exit of the Gandhi family from politics. If the contents of his latest column and interview create a sense of déjà vu, it is because they are indistinguishable in essence from what he has written in 2012, 2013, 2015, 2019 and 2022. The thrust of Guha’s argument through the years remains both consistent and flawed. In a Schrodinger’s cat-like construct, he requires us to believe that the Gandhis are politically ineffectual and yet take up so much political space that they block any real alternative to Narendra Modi from emerging. By merely existing, the Gandhis therefore aid the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). The question of why this mythical alternative, that in Guha’s imagination can triumph over a religiously radicalised Hindu voter base and the massive political barriers created by the BJP’s electoral funds, institutional capture, and punitive use of enforcement agencies, cannot simply overcome the Gandhis as well, is left unanswered. It is an interesting characterisation that reveals more about the centrality of the Gandhi family to Guha’s imagination than the electorate. In Guha’s writing, the Gandhis loom like hereditary monarchs. Their supporters, whom he dismisses as incapable of anything beyond sycophancy, can only be set free and set to the task of properly opposing the BJP when the Gandhis formally abdicate the imaginary throne he sets them on. In the electorate however, the Gandhis occupy no such protected perch. Few national politicians have been mocked and derided quite as much in the public discourse as Rahul Gandhi. To his credit, he has not shied away from the punches. He has now spent 22 years continuously as an elected member of parliament. His role as the leader of the opposition in the Lok Sabha is not inherited. He occupies it as the leader of the single largest political party in the opposition. For many young members of the Congress, he is respected for the same reason that he aggrieves Guha – he has been in the trenches with them for the last decade fighting an asymmetric battle and doggedly refuses to give up. While the sentiments of his followers cannot put any leader beyond criticism, the periodic resurgence of the Rahul Gandhi discourse reveals a more fundamental intellectual problem. Reducing analysis of why the Congress failed to prevent the rise of Hindutva to a matter of personal leadership skills, demonstrates an unwillingness to engage with a deeper question – would Nehruvian nationalism, even if implemented perfectly, provide answers against Hindutva today. The social scientist MSS Pandian argues that the creation of national subjects in any nationalist ideology involves the privileging of a single subject position. That position is then taken as representative of the whole. For secular nationalists within the Congress at independence, this subject was the upper caste, Hindi speaking, Hindu. The point of difference with the Hindu nationalists was on the nature of Hinduism itself. For many within the Congress, including MK Gandhi, the Hinduism that formed a part of this national identity was rooted in tolerance. The syncretic nature of the subcontinent (and the position of India’s minorities) was understood as the natural outcome of this supposed Hindu tolerance. For the Hindu nationalists on the other hand, the Hinduism in question was in continuous conflict with the Muslim Other. The syncretic cultures of the subcontinent were therefore the outcome of Hindu defeat. While this distinction is certainly not meaningless, the ideological transition from secular nationalism to Hindutva is easier than one would imagine. It simply requires a significant majority of Hindus to reject the framing of themselves as “tolerant” and start seeing themselves as historically aggrieved victims. Nothing else about their fundamental national identity needs to change. This is a transition that Hindutva, through its use of the Internet, history, music, film, and the media has successfully accomplished. Nehruvian nationalism may not be enough to defeat HindutvaThis trajectory, for several reasons, is difficult to reverse using traditional Nehruvian nationalism. First, beyond the cultural domain, Hindutva today allows its followers to turn this sense of victimhood into material property rights. From the Supreme Court in the Babri Masjid judgment which essentially converted Hindu belief into property title, to the ostensibly secular municipal laws that are selectively used to demolish Muslim owned shops and properties in the aftermath of any conflict, the promise of Hindutva is that modern state institutions can convert Hindu grievance (whether real or imagined, historical or current) into material property rights. This creates conditions that incentivise a near permanent state of decentralised anti-Muslim violence and erasure that requires little political intervention to sustain itself. The use of professional hate influencers, to normalise and glorify such violence on the internet also creates a population that is taught to suppress any moral revulsion that violence might otherwise generate. Tolerance, for this population, is seen as a humiliating weakness, not a virtue. Second, an identity rooted in the subject position of the upper-caste Hindi speaking Hindu (whether secular or not) is in itself too narrow to politically mobilise around today. While the regional parties rooted in caste-justice in the north are no longer the electoral powerhouses that they were in the 1990s and the early 2000s, the changes their emergence made to the political discourse have not disappeared. The ostensibly caste-blind positionality of the old Congress nationalism, which often seeks to exclude and erase the everyday violence of caste from politics, is neither desirable nor likely to be politically appealing. Similarly, the political discourse in the non-Hindi speaking states has also evolved well beyond the Nehruvian imagination of the nation state united by Hindi. In the absence of a strong regional focus, there is a tendency in the regional voter to draw an equivalence between both national parties on issues that fall outside the secularism/Hindutva binary such as linguistic hegemony. Third, Hindutva also dips into secular nationalist exclusion for its anti- Muslim violence. For example, by rebranding their anti-Muslim sentiments as anti -Bangladeshi sentiments, Hindutva groups today find themselves able to enact far more violence on Indian Muslims and their property, with less pushback. The arbitrary abduction by the state and “pushing” of Bengali speaking Muslims over the Bangladesh border, the demolition of Muslim majority slums, and the widespread disenfranchisement of the marginalized that has accompanied the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) exercise have all been rhetorically couched in the illegal immigration discourse. Secular nationalism with its focus on hard territorial borders and security does not have an immediate ideological answer to such violence. Further, the securitisation discourse, that paints young Muslim men as a threat to the state, and the arbitrary policing practices like cordon and search operations in Muslim areas that this discourse encourages are as central to Congress ruled states as they are to the BJP. The nation under Hindutva rule today faces multiple challenges in addition to religious polarisation, and the erasure and exclusion of minorities. There is a floundering economy, a failed foreign policy, unemployment, high inequality, gender and caste injustice, disappearing labour protections, dispossession, spatial inequality among regions, and the near continuous degradation of the environment through unchecked capitalist exploitation. The challenges faced by the Congress, and any opposition to the BJP, today are therefore not those of leadership. Their success, or failure, will lie in their ability to reimagine the nation into a form that can absorb and resolve as many of these contradictory fault lines as possible with fairness. This is a herculean task. While an opposition should never be immune to criticism, a responsible intellectual discourse today would recognise the need to move beyond petty leadership irritation and push the opposition into thinking about articulating and committing to their alternative vision for the nation. Sarayu Pani is a lawyer by training and posts on X @sarayupani.Missing Link is her column on the social aspects of the events that move India.