New Delhi, March 20: This week, when Varun Gandhi was in the news for the wrong reasons, an unwitting beneficiary was his cousin, Rahul Gandhi.

Varun’s alleged vilification of Muslims brought back memories of how his father Sanjay had ordered Delhi’s minority settlements to be razed, with the Turkman Gate demolitions the most infamous.

Congress old-timers recalled it wasn’t the physical act of demolition that had shocked them as much as the symbolic suggestion of a severance with Jawaharlal Nehru’s ideology of secularism and inclusiveness.

The same sense of dismay visited them when Varun’s reported speech was played, but only briefly. Varun belonged to the BJP, so the Congress didn’t have to feel “guilty” or “apologetic”.

More important, the Congress had Rahul, described as “decent, modern, circumspect and sensitive of thought and speech” by an office-bearer who had worked with his father Rajiv and claims to know the Amethi MP “fairly well”.

The Rahul-Varun contrast animates political observers, too. “Compared with Varun, the most striking thing is like his father, he (Rahul) represents pluralism and inclusiveness,” said Zoya Hasan, an academic who is a member of the National Commission of Minorities.

Rahul completes five years in politics tomorrow — he was inducted as a primary member of the Congress on March 21, 2004.

Like his father, and unlike his grandmother and mother Sonia, Rahul’s rite of passage into politics was smooth. But he is yet to carve a niche for himself, maybe because he has had it easy.

Indira fought the Congress’s Syndicate hard and triumphed; Sonia battled the campaign against her “foreign” origin. Rajiv was pushed into politics after Sanjay’s death, and three years later was catapulted to the Prime Minister’s post after Indira’s assassination. For Rahul, the initiation has been quieter.

“Rajiv is judged as a Prime Minister. Nobody remembers his tenure as general secretary. Rahul’s been a general secretary for over two years but it is unfair to compare him with his father because the two positions aren’t really comparable. He seems like a mother’s young man. There’s a great deal of humility, which is a nice thing to have in a leader,” said Zoya, the author of the book Quest for Power: Oppositional Movements and Post-Congress Politics in Uttar Pradesh.

Many in the Congress, however, feel being “goody-goody” isn’t enough. “Rajiv was like a breath of fresh air because he seemed modern and earnest. Whether these attributes will click again, I’m not sure. Rajiv represented an idea whose time had come. Most of Rahul’s peers, like him, are educated abroad, think modern. He still has to show he has freshness plus something else, like pragmatism,” a source said.

Sudha Pai, of Jawaharlal Nehru University’s Centre for Political Studies, thinks Rahul lacks a “sense of timing”. “He missed an opportunity in Uttar Pradesh. He should have stepped into politics in 2002, when identity politics was in decline. If he had brought his development agenda then, he would have revived the Congress,” said Sudha.