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Rahul Gandhi Resigns as Leader of India’s Congress Party

Rahul Gandhi, shown in May, is the great-grandson of India’s first prime minister. His grandmother and his father also held the post.Credit...Altaf Qadri/Associated Press

NEW DELHI — Rahul Gandhi publicly resigned as president of India’s ailing Indian National Congress party on Wednesday, weeks after a crushing general-election defeat, plunging the party of Mohandas K. Gandhi into fresh turmoil over its future leadership.

In a sharply worded four-page letter posted on Twitter, Mr. Gandhi took responsibility for the Congress party’s weak performance in May’s elections, when Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s populist Bharatiya Janata Party, or B.J.P., eviscerated the opposition. The B.J.P. won a historic majority in the lower house of Parliament, cementing its place as India’s most formidable political force in decades.

The resignation of Mr. Gandhi — who is the great-grandson of India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, and the son and grandson of two others — is unlikely to end his family’s long history of primacy in the Congress party, even if an outsider is chosen to succeed him. His mother, Sonia Gandhi, from whom he took over as party president in 2017, retains a leadership position, as does his sister, Priyanka Gandhi.

But Mr. Gandhi’s letter went much further than simply announcing his decision to step down. In pointed language, he painted a dark picture of India’s future, accusing Mr. Modi’s party of “crushing the voice of the Indian people” by undermining democratic institutions and pulling apart India’s secular fabric by spreading a violent form of Hindu nationalism.

“Where they see differences, I see similarity. Where they see hatred, I see love. What they fear, I embrace,” Mr. Gandhi wrote. “The attack on our country and our cherished Constitution that is taking place is designed to destroy the fabric of our nation.”

Critics of Mr. Modi say his party has spread an us-versus-them philosophy that has allowed right-wing extremists to make villains of India’s minorities, quash dissent, and chip away at the impartiality of the country’s news media, judiciary and election commission.

Since Mr. Modi rose to power in 2014, hate crimes have spiked. Dozens of Muslims and lower-caste Dalits have been lynched on suspicion of killing cows, a sacred animal for Hindus. And though Mr. Modi has condemned religious vigilantism at points, activists found that in some cases, the perpetrators went unpunished or were celebrated by other senior officials in his party.

But in this year’s general elections, Mr. Gandhi struggled to steer Congress away from a reputation for elitism and corruption that has eroded its reputation over the years. He could not compete with the brawny patriotism espoused by Mr. Modi, whose narrative as an anti-establishment politician and the charismatic son of a tea seller overwhelmingly won over India’s 900 million eligible voters.

The result was a thundering second-term victory for Mr. Modi and his party, which promised to give India a larger role on the global stage by staying tough on Pakistan and encouraging investment and development in one of the world’s fastest-growing economies.

Mr. Modi’s party won 303 seats in the Lok Sabha, the lower house of India’s Parliament, compared with 52 for Congress, which failed to reach even the minimum 10 percent of seats required to lead the opposition. The defeat was so crushing that Mr. Gandhi lost his seat in the district of Amethi, which his family had held for decades. (He won, however, in a second seat in the southern state of Kerala.)

Immediately after the votes were tallied, Mr. Gandhi, 49, offered to resign, but party leaders urged him to stay on, with crowds of supporters gathering outside of his house in New Delhi, shouting, “Rahul, don’t quit!”

In his resignation letter, Mr. Gandhi said he had ultimately stepped down because he felt responsible for the election loss, though he made it clear he would still play a role in the party. He urged restoration of India’s “once cherished institutional neutrality” and warned of “unimaginable levels of violence and pain” against minorities if the country’s democracy was not protected.

“My fight has never been a simple battle for political power,” he wrote. “I have no hatred or anger toward the B.J.P. but every living cell in my body instinctively resists their idea of India.”

For now, analysts say the future looks challenging for Congress, the party that played a leading role in India’s struggle to break away from Britain and then governed the country for most of its post-independence history.

It has been led by four generations of the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty, which takes the Gandhi name not from the independence leader but from the marriage of Nehru’s daughter Indira to another Congress activist with that surname.

Neerja Chowdhury, a columnist and political analyst in New Delhi, said Congress was facing “a real crisis” of leadership, with no obvious front-runner to succeed Mr. Gandhi.

The real test for the Congress party, she said, was whether it would find a suitable replacement to compete against Mr. Modi, whose sheer cult of personality propelled him to become the first prime minister in nearly 50 years to win a majority in successive parliamentary elections.

“As long as Narendra Modi enjoys the good will he has today,” Ms. Chowdhury said, “it will be hard work for the Congress.”

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 10 of the New York edition with the headline: Leader of the Party of Gandhi in India Resigns After a Stinging Defeat in Elections. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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