It's perhaps one of the greater ironies of Rahul Gandhi's spectacularly effective return from sabbatical that his almost casual aside during his Lok Sabha speech on the agrarian crisis, dismissing the Modi government as a "suit-boot ki Sarkar", has struck home - and stuck home as well. Ironical, because in the election campaign just a year ago, the BJP had managed to caricature the Congress Party as somehow out of touch with the needs and aspirations of a new India, while portraying itself as the truly authentic voice of a nation on the march. Eleven months is a long time in politics, and the boot, quite literally, is now on the other foot.
Of course, the Modi government invited this opprobrium upon itself through its conduct in office. From statements to photo-ops -- from the ubiquitous pictures of the Prime Minister accompanied by prosperous fat-cats on increasingly obscure junkets to the now notorious pin-striped suit with the PM's name embossed on every stripe - the Modi Sarkar advertised its distance from the people in whose name it claimed to rule.
The transformation of Mr Modi himself epitomized this change. To move from the assiduously-cultivated image of the chai-wallah with the ascetic lifestyle who had sacrificed the comforts of home and a doting wife to serve the RSS and the nation, to the omnipresent celebrity figure changing from one gaudily expensive outfit to another while hobnobbing with other celebrities, was a long way to travel in a very short while. The PM's evident relish at being on first-name terms with "Barack", having the Chinese President celebrating his birthday at his hometown and being one of four Twitterers followed by the Japanese PM may have been good diplomacy, but it was poor politics.
Indian voters had been sold a down-to-earth solver of their practical problems. They woke up and realized they had bought a fashionista with lavish tastes and a lifestyle far removed from their own concerns.
Disillusionment with the Modi Sarkar has been rampant. I cannot recount the number of Delhi voters, from all social classes and a variety of backgrounds, who told me their vote was to punish the PM's, and by extension the BJP's, "arrogance". The sweeping victory of the Aam Aadmi Party had less to do with great faith in their extravagant campaign promises than in the widely-professed desire to teach the Modi Sarkar a lesson.
That lesson has probably been learned, if the prompt auctioning of the offending suit (and the modesty, even drabness, of Mr Modi's subsequent attire since) was any indication. But it may have been too late: certainly what went before made the Government much more vulnerable to the suit-boot barb that Rahul Gandhi so casually, and so unerringly, skewered the Sarkar with.
The Indian voter does not like being taken granted. The Indian voter does not like being patronized. And the Indian voter does not like rulers flaunting their difference from the aam aadmi in the in-your-face manner of the pinstriped suit and all the trappings that preceded it.
What Rahul Gandhi has effectively done with one throwaway phrase is to construct a narrative of an elitist, overdressed regime ignoring rural realities, favouring foreign summits over domestic distress, and cozying up to capitalists instead of attending to the country's debt-ridden farmers. This may be a gross simplification, but as the BJP knows all too well, such simplifications are what political perceptions are made of. The Modi wave was built on caricaturing the Congress as a "scam Sarkar". It now has to live down its own image of a "suit-boot Sarkar".
But beyond the political phraseology and the sound-bite moment, the entire episode is reflective of one of the great strengths of Indian democracy - its capacity to bring its rulers down to earth with a bang. In the old days you had to wait till the next election to achieve that result. In the Information Era, the pendulum swings much faster.
I have not always been a fan of the 24/7 television era in our politics, which in many ways has been guilty of dumbing down the discourse and elevating TRPs above reasoned argument. But there's nothing like TV to convey the visual images that make political perceptions so potent - the pinstriped suit, the suicidal farmer, the arrogance of the well-heeled. "Suit-boot ki Sarkar" sticks because the truth it tells is reinforced by a hundred images from the last eleven months of all-Modi-all-the-time TV coverage.
When Rahul Gandhi embarks on his padayatra visiting suffering farmers in a lean monsoon, while the PM flaunts his designer suits in one exotic foreign locale after another, "suit-boot ki Sarkar" will not just haunt this government, it will oblige it to pay attention to the problems it had preferred to ignore, and the people it had taken for granted. If it doesn't do that, the perception battle will be irretrievably lost. And so will the next election.
One phrase can do that. And by using it to such telling effect, Rahul Gandhi has not just announced that he is back. He is making us all wonder if he had ever gone away.
(Dr. Shashi Tharoor is a two-time MP from Thiruvananthapuram, the Chairman of the Parliamentary Standing Committee on External Affairs, the former Union Minister of State for External Affairs and Human Resource Development and the former UN Under-Secretary-General. He has written 15 books, including, most recently, India Shastra: Reflections On the Nation in Our Time.)Disclaimer: The opinions expressed within this article are the personal opinions of the author. The facts and opinions appearing in the article do not reflect the views of NDTV and NDTV does not assume any responsibility or liability for the same.