Whoever advised Rahul Gandhi to concentrate on two electoral constituencies—India’s Gen Z, estimated at around 290 million, and women, roughly half of an electorate approaching one billion—understood electoral arithmetic. But identifying a constituency is easier than convincing it that one possesses the record, ideas to advance its interests.
For young Indians, the obvious question is historical. Congress governed India for much of the period since Independence. What did it accomplish during those decades? Where it fell short, why could it not do more when it possessed time and power?
India’s technological transformation began before 2014, of course, but it gained considerably greater momentum after 2014. Earlier governments helped build scientific institutions, telecommunications networks, the space programme, and the information-technology foundations on which contemporary India stands. That contribution should be acknowledged. Yet the past twelve years have also witnessed an unmistakable acceleration in digital infrastructure, payments, connectivity, startups, entrepreneurship, and technology-driven public services.
Whether this transformation has produced enough employment for India’s youth population is a legitimate question, and Rahul is entitled to ask it. But criticism creates a reciprocal obligation: Congress must explain why young voters should believe its prescriptions will produce better results than those of the government it seeks to replace.
A country that often appeared hesitant about asserting its interests now seeks a larger economic, technological, and strategic role internationally. One may debate individual policies, but the change in national self-perception is difficult to miss.
Rahul’s appeal to women takes a different route. He has invoked the Manusmriti as a symbol of historical hierarchy and restrictions on women, contrasting it with constitutional equality. Politically, the device is effective: an ancient Hindu text becomes shorthand for inherited injustice.
But this approach creates a contradiction.
If Rahul’s concern is genuinely the emancipation and equal citizenship of Indian women, why is his rhetoric framed so heavily through a Hindu textual and social lens? Indian womanhood is not synonymous with Hindu womanhood. Muslim, Christian, Sikh, Buddhist, Jain and other women are citizens, and their rights deserve the same constitutional scrutiny.
This becomes particularly important in relation to Muslim women. Some religious and customary practices can raise questions concerning autonomy, gender equality, and family rights. If Rahul is prepared to challenge perceived patriarchy within Hindu tradition, consistency requires equal willingness to discuss restrictions or inequalities wherever they occur, irrespective of religion.
Rahul’s argument on women’s empowerment also leaves another contentious area largely untouched: allegations surrounding coercive or deceptive interfaith relationships, often described politically as “love jihad.” The expression is frequently dismissed as a right-wing construct, but concerns about conversion, deception and the vulnerability of women in interfaith relationships did not originate solely in contemporary BJP politics; Christian organisations in Kerala, including sections of the Catholic Church, raised such concerns more than a decade ago, and related matters reached the Kerala High Court around 2009. More recently, allegations involving workplaces, including claims connected with TCS, Nashik, have circulated and deserve to be judged on verified evidence rather than political labels. The essential principle should be straightforward: an adult woman has an absolute right to choose her partner irrespective of religion, but that freedom is meaningful only when her choice is informed and free from fraud, coercion or intimidation. If Rahul’s case is genuinely about women’s autonomy, he should be prepared to defend that autonomy consistently—whether the alleged threat comes from ancient social convention, modern family pressure, religious orthodoxy or individual deception. Empowerment cannot be selective: neither community sensitivities nor partisan convenience should determine which woman’s freedom is worth defending.
The same principle of equal rights and equal protection brings us inevitably to the more fundamental question of a Uniform Civil Code, on which Rahul’s rhetoric about women’s emancipation appears considerably less emphatic.
A UCC is contentious. Objections concern religious freedom, cultural autonomy, minority protections, and the possibility that “uniformity” could become merely another name for majoritarian practice. Those objections deserve answers. A badly conceived UCC could replace pluralism with coercive standardisation.
But disagreement over the solution cannot justify avoiding the underlying problem. Family law governs some of the most consequential relationships in human life. It addresses six areas that shape freedom: marriage, including the legal age of marriage; divorce; maintenance; inheritance; succession; and adoption.
They determine when and whom a person may marry, how a marriage may be dissolved, what financial protection follows separation, whether sons and daughters enjoy comparable property rights, how family wealth passes between generations, and who may legally adopt a child.
If equality is the principle, why should its application depend upon the citizen’s religion?
This is where repeated invocation of Manusmriti risks appearing selective. Few Indians have read the English translation—which according to some scholars was not true to the original—and fewer still have read it in the original. Its textual history, interpretation, and relationship with the varied practices of Indian society cannot honestly be compressed into a campaign slogan.
The works of Robert Caldwell, Max Müller and, in a different period and genre, Katherine Mayo have generated arguments about the intersection of scholarship, missionary interests, colonial classification, and imperial politics. One need not attribute identical motives to these different figures to recognise that translation and classification are not politically neutral. Colonial categories sometimes acquired lives far beyond their authors and contributed to divisions later treated as timeless realities. The old imperial principle of divide et impera—divide and rule—therefore remains relevant to debates about how colonial knowledge was constructed and used.
In both Gen Z and women, Rahul has found subjects possessing considerable emotional force. They can produce applause at meetings. But applause at a rally and reflection in the privacy of the voting booth are different things.
Millions of Indian women are challenging inherited restrictions through education, employment, banking, self-help groups, entrepreneurship, property ownership, and political participation. Government schemes have attempted to strengthen this economic agency. Their effectiveness can certainly be debated, and inequalities, safety concerns, and employment barriers remain. Nevertheless, women are not waiting for a politician to announce their emancipation.
Economic independence changes the balance of choices within families and communities. A woman with education, income, credit, property rights, and control over her finances possesses practical freedoms that rhetoric alone cannot confer.
That is Rahul Gandhi’s central difficulty. Young Indians do not need to be taught ambition, and Indian women do not need instruction in equality. Both can distinguish recognition of their grievances from a credible programme for resolving them.
Rahul may have identified the right constituencies. He has yet to answer the harder question: why him, and why Congress?
For Gen Z, naming unemployment and inequality is not an economic programme. For women, invoking Manusmriti is not a philosophy of equal citizenship. If equality is truly the principle, it must extend consistently across religions, communities, and personal laws, including a debate over a common civil framework.
That matters in a democracy as diverse as India.
Mobilising a constituency requires an emotion that resonates. Earning its confidence requires a record, consistency, and a workable programme. When the slogans fade, voters ask simpler questions: who delivered, who failed, and whom can they trust to deliver next?
Selective reform risks becoming political expediency; genuine equality demands the harder principle that a woman’s fundamental civil rights cannot depend upon the faith she inherits.
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