Rahul Gandhi’s grand tour of India

With Jawaharlal Nehru his great-grandfather, Indira Gandhi his grandmother and Sonia and Rajiv Gandhi as his parents, the latest star of the dynasty that has dominated the last 60 years of Indian politics has some family to live up to. Young, charismatic and popular, Rahul Gandhi has embarked on a nationwide tour of India in a bid to boost the profile of his party, the Indian National Congress, and announce himself as a potential leader of the future. His messages, whether encouraging youths to participate in politics or bemoaning the failure of the national hockey side to qualify for the Beijing Olympics, have largely been well-received.

But the tour is turning into something of a nightmare for the security teams charged with keeping Gandhi safe. He won't be unaware of the family history – his grandmother was assassinated by her own bodyguards in 1984; his father blown up by a Sri Lankan militant. Yet still Rahul chooses to cross the barricades and get close to the public on his 'Discovery of India' tour. Last week, he slipped away from local police to spend the night in a tribal village. On Sunday, he repeated the trick, leaving his hotel to spend the night with a family in a poor hamlet called Tanmana.

Gandhi, 37, has been involved in Indian politics since 2004, and was made the general secretary of his party last September. Along with his folk-politician bravery and charm, he also appears very capable in the darker arts of contemporary politics. When Newsweek uncharitably suggested that he’d dropped out of Harvard and had failed to hold down an early job with a consulting group, Gandhi's lawyers swiftly forced a retraction.