Gandhi Drinking Dirty Water Paves Way for Congress Party Rebound

Supporters of India’s Congress party roared approval at an election rally last month as Rahul Gandhi draped a garland of flowers over a portrait of his great-grandfather, Jawaharlal Nehru, the independence hero who led the nation in its first two decades.

Gandhi, 41, rolled up his sleeves and told the crowd a leader who doesn’t “share the bread of a poor man and drink the contaminated water in his house and fall sick, that leader cannot understand the plight of the poor.” The appearance at Jhusi, a village in the late Nehru’s district, is part of Gandhi’s campaign to boost the Congress vote in an election to be held by May in Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous state.