could communicate better, who could represent the newly emerging aspirational class, who could make this class feel strong, powerful and masculine. Manmohan Singh and the Congress failed that. They failed to connect to the people. While Modi and his team took over all of social media and a host of communication tools, the Congress appeared to be hibernating. Now the same Congress has become robust on social media, countering the BJP powerfully in every sphere: propaganda is forcefully met with propaganda, lies with lies and truth with truth. The generational shift has done the magic.Rahul Gandhi himself is also no longer the "Pappu" that Modi made the country believe he was. He is confident, he is energetic, he is articulate, and he is witty in his own way.Since the Gujarat election, he is a changed person. The old doubts about his leadership qualities are slowly fading in the background. The Congress's biggest challenge was ideological. Modi's attack on the Congress' liberalism, secularism, its legacy of the freedom struggle and its icons was brutal and one-dimensional. The Congress looked helpless, withdrawn, wounded, jaded and suffering from guilt. This self-doubt was lethal.It is so ironical that the party which led the freedom struggle was painted as the party with a dark past; the party of Gandhi, Nehru, Patel and Azad was shown as leaderless; the party that was instrumental in the division of Pakistan was branded as anti-national; the party that changed India's face from a country of the poor to a bustling economy was termed a-party-that-has-done-nothing;