The answer, for the outfit being groomed under the guidance of Rahul Gandhi, is foreign direct investment (FDI) in retail.
That’s the message from the monthly Youth Congress newsletter, which has now been upgraded to a well-produced magazine titled Yuva Bharat.
One article in the journal argues that the opposition to FDI in retail “only benefits the middlemen and political parties who make a living out of people’s misery”.
It doesn’t name the Trinamul Congress, which staunchly opposed retail FDI a few weeks ago, but has a subtle message for it: “The Left has been voted out of West Bengal because they did not understand their economics.”
The article, whose authors are not essentially from the Congress, cites how Parliament was stalled on the FDI issue by parties of different ideological hues, from saffron to red, who are all “out of sync with what the nation wants”.
It recalls what Rahul had told a rally in Farrukhabad: “FDI is more about potato farmers of central UP and Punjab than about anxious executives of multi-national corporations planning investment in India.”
The Youth Congress, which has left the parent party far behind in matters of organisational elections and institutional training, seems to have beaten it in the quality of its journal, too.
The Congress mouthpiece is a shoddily produced publication that contains old speeches of Sonia Gandhi and Manmohan Singh in addition to sycophantic articles by in-house writers. Yuva Bharat, on the other hand, offers a wider perspective on a range of subjects, dealt with by authors from varied fields.
If there is a party-centric article on the recent convention of elected Youth Congress office-bearers, there are write-ups by outsiders ranging from cricket experts to a JP Morgan executive who is an IIT and IIM alumnus.
The cricket World Cup triumph, however, has been treated from the angle of the youth’s aspirations.