Implosion (30 page)

While leaders of India’s other parties have changed, with a flood of dynasties only appearing relatively recently, the Nehru-Gandhis have resolutely stayed at the top of the Congress and of politics. The party has been out of power for only about thirteen years since the country’s independence in 1947. Members of the dynasty have headed the party for all but nine years and have provided three prime ministers – Jawaharlal Nehru, Indira and Rajiv Gandhi – plus Sonia Gandhi, who is the undisputed chairperson of the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) coalition elected in 2004 and 2009.

This raises various questions:

• Have successive members of the Gandhi family sought to perpetuate the dynasty, or has its survival been dictated more by events?
  
• Has the family been good, or not, for India since it began to wield influence in India’s struggle for freedom from British rule nearly a century ago, and has it slowed down the country’s development?
  
• Can such a dynasty continue to perpetuate itself at a time when people’s instinctive loyalties to long-established icons are changing and they become more aspirational and better educated, demanding economic development, not sops?
  
• Are the Nehru-Gandhis the only people who can hold the Congress party together and enable it to win general elections?
  

The Dynasty Begins

Jawaharlal Nehru’s father, Motilal, a patrician Hindu Pandit and prominent lawyer whose family came from Kashmir, was active in India’s freedom movement and in the Indian National Congress in the 1910s. He linked up with Mohandas Karamchand (Mahatma) Gandhi, India’s leading independence campaigner, and also brought Jawaharlal into politics. Gandhi spotted Jawaharlal Nehru as a budding young political leader around 1918–1920 and ensured that he became India’s first prime minister in 1947. (None of Mahatma Gandhi’s descendents have claimed a stake in politics, though a civil servant grandson, Gopalkrishna Gandhi, became High Commissioner in Sri Lanka and later Governor of West Bengal from 2004 to 2009.)

A later coincidence helped promote the name of the modern dynasty. Indira Nehru married Feroze Gandhi, a young Parsi political activist, whose family name was spelt Gandhy (though some members of the family deny this).

Sunil Khilnani, a historian who has been working on a biography of Nehru, has written that the change of spelling was done at Nehru’s suggestion to hide Feroze’s Parsi origin.
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Whatever the reason, it gave the family an association with the stronger brand name that still causes helpful confusion today. No one knows how many of the poor, who have instinctively voted Congress in past general elections, believe that the Gandhis are descendants of the nation’s founding father, but there must be many. (Foreigners who do not know India well also assume that there are direct family links.)

It seems that Nehru did not consciously set out to found a dynasty, which contrasts sharply with the family’s later, more overt, ambitions. While he was prepared for Indira to be involved in politics and have a chance of becoming prime minister after him, he did not want to trigger an automatic succession. As it happened, she did not become prime minister until 20 months after her father’s death when his immediate successor, Lal Bahadur Shastri, died during a visit to Tashkent in the then Soviet Union. Kuldip Nayar,
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a veteran journalist who was Shastri’s information officer, writes that Shastri was convinced he was ‘not uppermost in Nehru’s mind’ as the successor and says that when asked directly who he thought Nehru had in mind, Shastri replied: ‘
Unke dil main unki saputri hai –
‘In his heart is his daughter’.
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(The circumstances of Shastri’s death are a mystery.
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Suggestions that he was poisoned have most recently been raised by Kuldip Nayar,
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who was with Shastri in Tashkent at the time.)

Other writers disagree about Nehru’s intentions. Various historians and biographers have argued, as Frank Moraes did in 1960, that Nehru did ‘not want to create a dynasty of his own’.
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Katherine Frank, in the most detailed biography of Indira Gandhi, writes that Nehru ‘had always gone to great lengths to avoid any behaviour that could be interpreted as nepotism’.
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She quotes an earlier biographer and Nehru family member saying that he was ‘not grooming her [Indira] for anything’ and that he had said he did not want to ‘appear to encourage some sort of dynastic arrangement’.
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Nehru was not keen on Indira being made a member of the Congress party’s central working committee (CWC), but did not stop her becoming a somewhat reluctant party president in 1959. Some Congress leaders undoubtedly had ulterior motives in promoting her, assuming that she would be malleable and would act as a conduit to Nehru at a time when there was rivalry between Shastri and others to become Nehru’s eventual successor.

Indira’s own views are not clear and it seems that insecurity and a wish for privacy made her at times something of a reluctant heir apparent – she initially resisted taking the party presidency in 1959 and refused a second term. When she was questioned about becoming prime minister by journalists on a visit to New York in April 1964 (just a month before Nehru died), she said she ‘would not’ like the job. The journalists pressed her, and eventually asked, ‘But are you going to say that you would refuse to serve?’ To which she answered: ‘Well, shall I say that 90 per cent I would refuse.’
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She did avoid the job a month later, but took it in 1966, having served in Shastri’s government as information minister. She had strong personal ambitions to exercise power, and these were initially more concerned with her own authority than with dynastic perpetuity. Later she wanted to be succeeded by her younger son Sanjay, whom she had brought into politics to help her in the 1970s. Sanjay revelled in the brutal exercise of crude political power and, according to P.N. Dhar, one of her closest officials, ‘was impatient for the driver’s seat’ by 1976.
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He played a leading role in enforcing Indira Gandhi’s controversial State of Emergency (1975–77).

With a career as an Indian Airlines pilot, Rajiv Gandhi never wanted to enter politics, and only did so reluctantly to help his mother after Sanjay was killed when a light plane he was piloting over Delhi crashed in June 1980. I met Rajiv in January 1984 and asked him whether he would one day succeed his mother. He was an MP and a Congress general secretary at the time and had made a success of organising preparations for the 1982 Asian Games in Delhi.
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‘That’s a very long way off,’ he said.
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But if something were to happen to his mother, was he ready for the top post, I asked, echoing the question asked of his mother 20 years earlier. ‘That’s a very difficult question because I’ve only been in this game for a couple of years. Yes, I think I’m in it for life, but I do think I need more experience,’ he replied. In it for life indeed – and his widow after he was assassinated in 1991, and their children too.

Sonia Gandhi had no political ambitions for years after she entered the family, but eventually became active a few years after Rajiv’s death when she was encouraged by a coterie of eager courtiers to do her dynastic duty. She has said that she felt ‘cowardly to just sit and watch things deteriorate in the Congress for which my mother-in-law and the whole family lived and died’,
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though that may not have been the complete story. Some private sources have suggested to me that she feared legal action over a 1987 Swedish Bofors gun contract that had dogged her husband’s later years, and needed to get into politics so that she would have the power to defl ect official investigations and legal cases. Others say she wanted to rebuild the power and influence of the family in various ways so as to secure them an elite, stable future.

Basically, however, she felt she had to act as a bridge for the dynasty so that the succession would pass via her from Rajiv to their son Rahul (or, as a second option, if Rahul failed, their daughter Priyanka). That has made her the family’s most single-mindedly dynasty-driven member, determined to secure the top slot in the Congress and thus access to prime ministership. Perhaps her determination to ensure the succession stems partly from the insecurity of being foreign-born and not a blood relation of the Gandhis, plus an Italian mama’s concern to ensure her family’s station in life. Rahul and Priyanka, says their tutor, were ‘taught of sacrifices and patriotism from the cradle to adulthood’.
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Sonia cleverly sustained her ambitions when the Congress unexpectedly won a general election in 2004 by making Manmohan Singh the prime minister, while she stayed in overall charge. She then pushed Rahul, who was reluctant to take on a major role. When he was a teenager, Rahul once told his father that he wished they could go back to happier days when Rajiv had been an Indian Airlines pilot with no political aspirations. ‘I can’t now, because now I have a belief in my people. There is no going back,’ was Rajiv’s reply, according to Mani Shankar Aiyar, a leading Congress politician and Rajiv confidante.
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Aiyar said that was ‘the ethos of these kids growing up’. Rahul tried to buck that trend and not live up to the ethos, preferring to spend long and unaccounted-for time abroad and it took a long time for his mother and others to rein him in. Eventually, in July 2012, making a rare public appearance at an official function in Delhi, he announced: ‘I will play a more proactive role in the party and the government,’
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which he eventually did six months later when he became vice president of the Congress and official number two to Sonia.
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Other members of the Nehru-Gandhi family could have bid for an active political life, but none has done so, apart from Maneka Gandhi, Sanjay’s widow, and her son, Feroze Varun Gandhi. Maneka and Sanjay had a stormy six-year marriage before his death. She did not get on with her mother-in-law, who preferred the quieter and more cooperative Sonia, and eventually Indira threw her out of the family home in March 1982.
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A year later, I interviewed Maneka for the
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on the first anniversary of her eviction. She had just founded her own political party, the Rashtriya Sanjay Manch, and I asked the inevitable question about her prime ministerial ambitions. She said it was ‘a bit early to say “yes” at the age of 26’, but when I tempted her further, she said (with hindsight, somewhat unrealistically), ‘If I’ve gone into something, I might as well make a success of it.’
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She eventually became an MP in 1989, having merged her party with the then Janata Dal, and held various ministerial posts, moving on after a spell as an independent to the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). She remains an MP but is no threat to the mainstream dynasty, though she hopes that her son Varun, who became a BJP MP in 2009, will emerge as a national figure. Feroze has adopted his father’s hard-line approach to politics and transformed himself during the 2009 election campaign from a soft-spoken young man to a ranting Hindu nationalist speaker, delivering widely condemned tirades against Muslims.
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This was said at the time to be a carefully planned and orchestrated strategy aimed at developing a distinct dynastic brand but, although he was elected to parliament, the BJP has been slow in encouraging him to develop into a national figure.

To return to my initial question, the efforts of successive members of the family to perpetuate the dynasty have been far more important to its survival than the course of events – and that has become increasingly true with successive generations. Nehru seems not to have been wholly committed to the idea of his daughter succeeding him, whereas Indira saw first Sanjay and then Rajiv as her helpers and likely successors. Rajiv did not have time to consider such things before his death, and would probably have said that Sonia was a most unlikely successor because of her foreign and non-political background. Sonia then saw it as her maternal and dynastic duty to bridge the gap and establish Rahul as the born-to-rule successor, and pushed this far more overtly than earlier generations had.

Tragedy, Death and Acceptance

The family’s history has been laced with tragedy and the premonition of death. Sanjay Gandhi was killed in a plane crash. Indira Gandhi then unwittingly sowed the seeds for more catastrophes when she encouraged a militant Sikh leader to become a political activist in Punjab in the late 1970s, and condoned separatist Tamil activity in Sri Lanka in the early 1980s. That led to her assassination by her Sikh guards in 1984, and indirectly to her son Rajiv’s killing by a Tamil suicide bomber in 1991. Indira had a premonition of her own death, and Sonia has said the family feared for Rajiv’s life: ‘After my mother-in-law (Indira) was killed, I knew that he too would be killed... all of us, my children and me, knew that it was just a question of when,’ she said in a television interview in 2004.
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She pleaded with her husband not to become prime minister but he held her hands, hugged her, and said he ‘had no choice’, adding, ‘he would be killed anyway’.
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Indira Gandhi said earlier that Sonia had threatened to leave him if he entered politics.
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Rahul Gandhi spelt out the trauma of assassination – and how it lives on in the minds of his family – when he accepted his appointment as vice president of the Congress in January 2013. In an unexpectedly emotional speech, he referred to Indira Gandhi’s killing by her Sikh security guards: ‘When I was a little boy I loved to play badminton. I loved it because it gave me balance in a complicated world. I was taught how to play, in my grandmother’s house, by two of the policemen who protected my grandmother. They were my friends. Then one day they killed my grandmother and took away the balance in my life. I felt pain like I had never felt before. My father was in Bengal and he came back. The hospital was dark, green and dirty. There was a huge screaming crowd outside as I entered. It was the first time in my life that I saw my father crying. He was the bravest person I knew and yet I saw him cry. I could see that he too was broken.’
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