Rahul Gandhi’s vacationing whim is no longer news; the nonchalance with which he embraces the habit may yet be. His outings appear to take scant notice of either the Congress’ dwindled fortunes or to widened sense of commitment deficits to party and to public life.

The former and will-be-will-be-not president of the Congress departed for Italy just ahead of the party’s 136th foundation day, underlining yet again that the political is still struggling to get precedence over what is personal to Rahul. He was vacationing while Delhi burned at the beginning of the year and wasn’t around to attend a key CWC meeting on the issue. He went vacationing in the middle of the battle for Bihar, and was slammed by RJD allies for making light of the contest, leaving his party to punch above its weight. He was abroad for his mother’s treatment while the contentious farm bills were being hurried through Parliament.

Official word from the Congress on the face of the party has come differently worded as “out on a short personal visit” or “gone to see his grandmother”. Neither version is quite able to erase the perception, or allegation, that Rahul has flown to take the year-end off while, of all concerns that should keep him in harness, an extraordinary farmer tumult, endorsed by him, rages on the doorsteps of Delhi.

The farmers’ stir is merely the tip of what many in the Congress believe should have prompted Rahul to forsake his prized break and stay the course. “Everybody is entitled to personal time,” a senior Congress leader told The Telegraph, “But Rahul Gandhi is not everybody. No matter what spin you keep putting on personal time, these breaks serve to mar his image and the future of our party. He should know better than most that we are grappling with ourselves when we should have been battle-ready for a government that has performed abjectly. That we cannot build momentum around it may be our collective failure, but that we are not led is an issue burning at Rahul’s doorstep.”

Now more than ever, many in the Congress would add, with Ahmed Patel gone, and nothing demonstrable having come off confabulations to close ranks between the old guard and the new crop, between those who bait Rahul and those who bat for him.

Often, the explanation put by loyalists on Rahul’s routine furloughs is that he is merely one of several party MPs, that he has no organisational position or role, that to hold him to responsibilities not defined by the party is to be unfair to him.

That explanation is shot through with subterfuge, rigged to allow Rahul the privileges he feels entitled to. The truth may be closer to this: Rahul Gandhi is the Congress MP from Wayanad in Kerala but he is not only the Congress MP from Wayanad. Rahul Gandhi may not be anybody in the hierarchy of the Congress party, but he cannot be nobody in the hierarchy of the Congress party. He stands at the core of the Congress, its crisis and its resolution, one way or another.

He is, for all purposes, the leader of the party, its chief spokesman and campaigner, and, for the better part, its chief arbiter. If the critical issue of the formal leadership of the party — to be decided at an election whose dates remain undecided but cannot be forever put off — lies unresolved, it is also because Rahul Gandhi has chosen not to resolve it. He will not categorically say he is prepared to lead the party, he will not categorically say he will not.

The question many in the Congress have been asking, with growing urgency and unease, is whether Rahul has time for the party. “We have been in deep and consistent decline for nearly a decade now, we need leadership and direction, and for that we need a leader who is seen to be leading every day, every hour. That’s what Narendra Modi is able to do. But that never was the case with Rahul Gandhi, even when he was Congress president,” lamented a senior partyman.

A former aide who worked closely with him post 2015, said this of Rahul: “He is impatient, he is inconsistent, he is excited by an idea one day and he has forgotten about it the next. He was right to feel frustrated by the so-called old guard, but he was party president for two years, enough time to have restructured. He either did not have the will, or failed at it, or merely let things drift because he did not want the responsibilities of taking full grip. Rahul Gandhi, he never completes the circle…” In flying off to Italy, he may have delayed the rounding off yet again.