New Delhi 

Ten years of incessant toil finally, yielded results for the Gandhi scion Rahul Gandhi who managed to revive his political prospects and of his party in the just concluded Lok Sabha elections.

Not only did he manage to pull off a spectacular victory from both Rai Bareilly and Wayanad with a margin of more than 3 lakh votes, but he also managed to stop the Modi-Yogi double-engine juggernaut in Uttar Pradesh, where BJP suffered the maximum losses.

Rahul’s coordinated political messaging with Akhilesh Yadav, Tejaswi, and Trinamool Congress throughout the election campaign helped in cobbling a strong opposition block against the BJP.

After a decade in the political wilderness, the Congress leader has finally managed to inject a sense of hope and confidence in the party’s leadership and workers that he can lead the grand old party on the path to revival.

Although it is still a long and arduous road, and despite Tuesday’s better-than-expected showing at the hustings. Mallikarjun Kharge, a veteran of many political battles, played the perfect foil for the Gandhi scion.

From 'Pappu' to 'Shehzada', Congress leader Rahul Gandhi has been the prime target of BJP's ridicule for years. Jabs at the Gandhi family have been the BJP leaders’ main line of attack on the main Opposition Congress in every election over the past decade.

Rahul launched his campaign with a Bharat Jodo Yatra across the length and breadth of the country. Undoubtedly, his public interactions on the trail brought him out of television screens to the people and contributed to shattering the perception the BJP had created of him.

Rahul Gandhi addresses the media at the Congress Headquarters on Tuesday

Visuals of Gandhi petting puppies, hugging people, and chatting with people from every section of society, from students to truck drivers to mechanics, showed a side of him the country had not seen before.

The Congress, which was decimated in the 2014 and 2019 elections and written off in this election by its critics as well as some friends bounced back but fell short of the three-figure mark by a whisker.

The party’s spirited campaign — centered around its populist manifesto promises, an aggressive social justice pitch, and the political rhetoric that PM Modi with a 400-plus mandate could change the Constitution and undermine the reservation regime — has helped it dent the BJP’s numbers substantially.

To some extent, the Congress has shed its image as a weak link in the Opposition alliance. Its vote share increased from 19.67 percent to 21.76 percent, while the absolute number of votes jumped from 11.94 crore to 13.2 crore.

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After the results, Rahul said the election was a “fight to save the Constitution”. “When our bank accounts were canceled, chief ministers were arrested, parties were broken… It was on my mind that the people would fight for the Constitution,” he said in a press briefing.