The Quiet Revolutionary

Rahul's makeover couldn't have come at a better time. Apart from regional players and corrupt special interests, the Congress Party had come to rely on vast amounts of black money to run its campaigns in recent years. Other parties were even worse, dominated by people who used fear and hatred to widen caste, religious and ethnic differences. Campaign slogans were often divisive and negative. Politicians became notorious for siphoning government resources and filling their coffers with kickbacks and bribes. While India now has some of the richest citizens in the world, it also has huge areas wracked by destitution, and more than half of its 1.2 billion people still live on less than 20 cents a day. Over the past two decades the Congress Party, which has ruled India for 45 out of its 62 years of independence, had gradually lost ground to its major rival, the anti-Muslim Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, and smaller caste-based and sectarian parties. Forced to cobble together coalition governments, Congress had fallen hostage to pressure and blackmail from its junior partners.

Rahul observed this decline from a front-row seat. His was a life of both privilege and tragedy. He was barely 14 when his grandmother, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, was killed by her Sikh bodyguards in 1984. Suddenly, Rahul and his younger sister, Priyanka, found themselves enveloped in a security cocoon and lost whatever vestiges of normal teenage life they'd once enjoyed. Then, less than seven years later, the children also lost their father, Rajiv, who had catapulted into politics from his job as an airline pilot after Indira's death. Rajiv was killed by a Tamil suicide bomber at an election rally in 1991 in southern India.

After being shuttled from one school to another for safety reasons, Rahul was eventually sent to the United States, starting university at Harvard and eventually graduating from Rollins College in Florida. He then received an M.Phil. in development studies from Cambridge University. It was an academic career marked less by dramatic achievement than a desire for privacy. After graduating, he spent the next three years with the Monitor Group in London, a consulting firm founded by the management guru Michael Porter, before returning to India in 2002. Colleagues at the firm had no idea who they were working with—Rahul was using an assumed name—which meant Gandhi got no special treatment. His reputation within the company was "very impressive," in the words of one senior partner. And he'd go on to apply the training he got with Monitor in the careful, methodical way he would study the Indian electorate.

During Rahul's period abroad, the BJP, taking advantage of the rudderless Congress, had captured power with a coalition of a few other sectarian parties, and Congress had been reduced to a worn-out shell of its former self. Party leaders were dejected and desperately wanted another member of the storied Nehru-Gandhi line to rescue them. They ultimately managed to rope in Rahul's reclusive, Italian-born mother, Sonia. And she soon managed to save her husband's party from virtual extinction. Her tireless campaigning, political acumen and hands-on leadership revived Congress and helped return it to power in 2004.

Although Sonia tried to reform the party, she remained surrounded by elderly time servers and family retainers with no connections to the grassroots. Though the Congress Party had traditionally held the middle ground of Indian politics by appealing to all sections of society, factionalism and lack of ideas had drained its strength. Many advisers began pushing Sonia to let the articulate and savvy Priyanka become Congress' new face. But she was married and focused on raising her children, and was not inclined to join active politics.

Meanwhile, away from the public gaze, Rahul—often seen as shy and reclusive—began closely studying the Indian system and the way its parties were run. He began visiting his mother's parliamentary constituency in Amethi in Uttar Pradesh, India's largest state and a place where Congress had become a nonentity. When the general elections were called in 2004, Rahul made his move: he ran for a seat from Amethi. He and his mother campaigned vigorously around the country and their efforts paid off: Rahul won his seat and nationally Congress managed to overthrow the BJP-led coalition. Declining the office of the prime minister, Sonia installed Singh—a former finance minister and an economist with sterling credentials—in the top job, signaling a break from the party's corrupt power brokers.

Sonia's critics saw her renunciation of power as nothing more than a clever move to keep the seat warm for her son by letting a loyal follower take the job till Rahul was ready for it. But Rahul had different plans. He stayed away from the media and devoted his time to studying ways to advance development—and Congress—focusing on his own constituency and the divisive, caste-based politics of Uttar Pradesh.