Rahul's approach is a sharp contrast. In his Amethi constituency, he worked to a plan. After touring a series of charitable hospitals in the south, some of whom were run by those inimical to the Congress, he started an eye hospital and a computer education centre in Amethi.

He visited Dharmasthala, the famous shrine in Karnataka, and met Veerendra Hegde, head of the shrine, to get ideas on how a charitable hospital should be run. Local Congressmen were baffled by Gandhi taking advice from an individual considered close to the Bharatiya Janata Party. An aide recalls Rahul telling them: "Politics should be kept out of these things."

Gandhi's idea of the welfare system is clear. "He insisted that patients pay for treatment at the eye hospital, even if only a token amount, in order to maintain quality and to foster the feeling of being stakeholders. We resisted at first, but the plan has worked," said the aide. So free lunches may not be a part of his political lexicon.

That he has his eye on the mass base is clear from his political interventions. When he first spoke out in Uttar Pradesh, it was to complain about cane-growers not being paid their dues by sugar mills -- the state government responded with alacrity to make the mills pay up.

Image: Congress President and UPA Chairperson Sonia Gandhi with her son Rahul Gandhi at the Red Fort on the occasion of India's 60th anniversary of independence in New Delhi on August 15, 2007

Photograph: Raveendran/AFP/Getty Images