It has been over two decades since Congress leader and Gandhi family scion Rahul Gandhi ventured into politics. In these years, he has served as the vice president of India’s largest opposition party and then as its president. He has been elected Member of Parliament five times and has been the party’s de-facto face against Prime Minister Narendra Modi. He has been his party’s star campaigner, addressed innumerable rallies across several elections, and led two pan-India yatras. As of today, he is the Leader of Opposition in Lok Sabha—a position of heft and meaning.

And yet, despite these decades of exposure and experience, Rahul Gandhi has yet to master the basic craft of managing public perception and continues to seem callow in politics. Yet another recent instance brings to light how Gandhi’s lack of political maturity remains jarring. Earlier this week, the Supreme Court of India censured the Congress leader for his remarks against the Army in the wake of the 2020 Galwan clash with the Chinese, stating a “true Indian” would not say such things. The court, however, paused the defamation proceedings against him.

The Congress party has responded firmly, with Congress leader and Rahul Gandhi’s sister Priyanka Gandhi Vadra saying the court does not “decide who a true Indian is”. To be fair, Vadra isn’t wrong. It isn’t quite the court’s job to define a ‘true Indian’, and preaching and moral policing should hardly be its domain. This rebuke, as the opposition has rightly pointed out, is indeed unwarranted and also highly questionable.

But that is beside the point here. Politics is nothing if not a game of optics and perception. And it is in that department that Rahul Gandhi consistently slips up. His remarks that earned him the court’s rap on the wrist claimed that the Chinese Army was “thrashing” Indian soldiers in Arunachal Pradesh. It takes quite a degree of political juvenility to publicly make this claim against the armed forces—an emotive issue by any stretch. This seems particularly imprudent given how national security and an aggressive version of nationalism have been a key pillar in the rise and rise of Narendra Modi.

This, however, is hardly the first time Rahul Gandhi has displayed a complete inability to read the room, with his political career peppered with such faux pas.

The Congress leader has moulded his politics in what can only be described as a confused and often puerile, even if well-meaning, fashion. The most stark drawback of his politics has been his complete lack of self-awareness. Gandhi’s biggest liability is his entitlement of birth and the tag of being a political dynast, and yet, the Congress leader has never had the wisdom to try and detach himself from this baggage.

His ill-timed and many, many vacations (which seem to have fortunately reduced now) created the perception of him being a ‘non-serious’ politician, particularly in the face of the Narendra Modi-Amit Shah duo that has made being ‘24x7 politicians’ fashionable.

Ahead of the 2019 Lok Sabha polls, when Modi was seeking his first re-election, Gandhi mounted a campaign that was bound to be a self-goal. He pushed ahead with the slogan of ‘chowkidaar chor hai’ as a reference to corruption allegations in the Rafale deal, essentially accusing the prime minister of being a ‘thief’. With this, he gave Modi the perfect weapon against himself: The chance to launch a combative campaign that brought out the distinction between the ‘entitled, rich dynast’ who was trying to bring down a ‘self-made’ prime minister who had risen through the ranks. Needless to say, Modi’s ‘naamdaar versus kaamdaar’ (the dynast versus hard-worker) campaign hit the bull’s eye while Rahul’s chowkidaar jibe flopped.

Then there have been his on-off flirtations with soft Hindutva and claims of being a ‘janeudhaari Brahmin’ (one who wears the sacred thread), which have landed his party and him in the confused space of being neither truly secular nor showing absolute commitment to Hindutva.

More recently, Rahul Gandhi led the campaign demanding a Caste Census, which it perhaps even found to be working on the ground. The Congress made it a single-point agenda. However, Modi-Shah’s BJP isn’t one to be outsmarted, and with its sudden announcement of conducting such a census, it left the Congress agenda-less. Even though the Congress has been touting this as its victory, the BJP is bound to run with the narrative on this, given its crafty messaging.

These are merely a handful of examples from a career generously sprinkled with poor decisions and even more poorly implemented ones, combined with a slew of flawed optics.

Politics is about the right optics and the ability to manage public perception. This has further become accentuated in India in the Narendra Modi era, given his remarkable ability to manipulate perception and project an image that is palatable to his voters.

Unfortunately for the Congress, it is this very area in which Rahul Gandhi finds himself to be the weakest. Take, for instance, the latest Supreme Court incident. While Gandhi has every right, much like every citizen of the country, to question the government and poke holes in its claims, what he needs to ponder upon is whether it is really sensible of the face of the main opposition party to be seen as criticising the armed forces, and belittling them by alleging they were being ‘thrashed’. All that the BJP needs to do, and will in all likelihood do, is magnify the message of the top court of the country questioning Rahul Gandhi’s commitment to India.

Again, the right or wrong, freedom of expression and the right of the opposition to attack the government are moot points here. It is about the right messaging in the right form, using suitable language and understanding the political implications of one’s decisions and remarks.

The Bharatiya Janata Party under Modi and Shah has shown tremendous ability to fight back—its successive victories in state elections after what was considered to be a disappointing show in the Lok Sabha polls—is testimony to this. To counter an opponent like that—which has mastered the art of public perception and the science of elections—the Congress needs to be extra cautious and strategic in its messaging. To that end, Rahul Gandhi’s palpable lack of astuteness is the albatross around its neck, and the Congress leader must reinvent his path to get rid of it.