Implosion (32 page)

18
. ‘A Dynasty at Crossroads’, Reuters, 11 September 2011,
http://graphics.thomsonreuters.com/AS/pdf/Gandhis_2709mv.pdf

19
.
http://indiatoday.intoday.in/story/rahul-gandhi-ready-for-prominent-role-in-government/1/209257.html

20
.
https://ridingtheelephant.wordpress.com/2013/01/20/rahul-gandhis-inevitable-and-incredible-appointment-as-congress-no-2/

21
. Katherine Frank,
Indira
, p. 459

22
. ‘Maneka challenges a dynasty – John Elliott meets the Indian Premier’s ambitious daughter-in-law’,
Financial Times
, 29 March 1983

23
.
http://ibnlive.in.com/news/varun-gandhis-speech-marks-a-new-low-in-indian-politics/87851-37.html

24
. A rare television interview with Sonia Gandhi – by Shekhar Gupta, editor of the
Indian Express
on
Walk the Talk
, NDTV, partial video on
http://www.ndtv.com/video/player/walk-the-talk/walk-the-talk-sonia-gandhi-aired-february-2004/290097
and also in the
Indian Express.
Excerpts of the two-part televised interview are on the Congress Party website
http://www.aicc.org.in/new/walk-the-talk.php

25
. Sonia Gandhi,
Rajiv
, p. 9, Penguin Viking 1992,
http://libibm.iucaa. ernet.in/wslxRSLT.php?A1=27994

26
. As told to Kushwant Singh and reported in Mark Tully and Zareer Masani,
From Raj to Rajiv – 40 years of India’s Independence,
p. 131, BBC Books 1988,
http://books.google.ae/books/about/From_Raj_ to_Rajiv.html?id=clVuAAAAMAAJ&redir_esc=y

27
. Speech by Rahul Gandhi, All India Congress Committee session, Jaipur, 20 January 2013, text on
http://www.aicc.org.in/new/RG_Speech.pdf
, and video
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KLRKuBJgLgo

28
. ‘Communal forces killed grandmother, my father. Will probably kill me too’,
Indian Express
, 24 October 2013,
http://www.indianexpress.com/news/-communal-forces-killed-grandmother-my-father.-will-probably-kill-me-too-/1186526/0

29
. Vir Sanghvi and Namita Bhandare,
Madhavrao Scindia: A Life
, p. 304, Penguin Viking 2009

30
. M.J. Akbar,
Nehru – The Making of India
, p. 582, quoting words used in another context by Rabindranath Tagore, Viking London, 1988,
http://books.google.ae/books/about/Indira_Gandhi.html?id=gbEBAAAAMAAJ&redir_esc=y

31
.
http://ridingtheelephant.wordpress.com/2009/10/31/indira-gandhi-%E2%80%93-a-flawed-legacy-25-years-after-her-death/

32
. ‘An imbalance of liberalisation – L.K. Jha talks to John Elliott’,
Financial Times
, 26 January 2003

33
.
Indira Gandhi on Environment & Forests
, Ministry of Environment & Forests, Delhi, 2009

34
.
http://ridingtheelephant.wordpress.com/2008/12/14/today-is-the-25th-anniversary-of-the-maruti-suzuki-car-that-changed-india%E2%80%99s-motor-industry/

35
. JE, ‘See it in perspective’,
Financial Times
, 31 October 1986, quoting (undated)
Illustrated Weekly of India.

36
. JE, ‘One year on, Rajiv Gandhi’s India is still edging forward’,
Financial Times
, 31 October 1985

37
.
http://ridingtheelephant.wordpress.com/2012/04/25/indias-slide-leads-to-an-international-down-grade/
and
http://www.indianexpress.com/news/no-one-from-india-met-real-investigators-of-bofors-gun-deal/940978/

38
. Nicholas Nugent,
Rajiv Gandhi

14
The Sonia Years

The Italian daughter of a builder from Orbassano near Turin in northern Italy, Sonia Maino was born on 9 December 1946. After school in Italy, she went to Cambridge in Britain to learn English in a city language school. Friends who were at Cambridge University at the time have told me they remember her as ‘nice and unassuming’ – part of a ‘temporary students’ social circle in the city that understandably tried to break into the university crowd and meet boys’. She succeeded, meeting her future husband in a Greek restaurant in January 1965, soon after she arrived. They married in 1968, with no thought that either of them would end up in politics.

From such a background, it is scarcely surprising that she stayed mostly in the shadows immediately after Rajiv’s death in 1991. It soon became clear, however, that she and her advisers were dabbling in politics from behind the high walls of her central Delhi home at 10 Janpath, and she became increasingly available to be feted by important visitors from home and abroad, though she spoke little when she met them. She slowly shed her image of a shy widow and her gradual emergence was encouraged and used by various Congress factions to undermine Narasimha Rao’s prime ministerial authority, despite his successful economic reforms.

In 1996, Rao lost a general election, and the Congress floundered in opposition with weak leadership. Gradually, Sonia Gandhi was sucked further into the party’s maelstrom and, late in 1997, consulted friends about whether or not she should get fully into politics. She was reminded by one of them about a letter that Nehru had written to Indira, telling his daughter that she should either get into politics fully or get totally out because being half in and half out was ineffective and blocked others rising up in the party.
¹
Sonia’s decision to get in came quickly after that conversation.

Her aim, she said when she made the move at the end of December 1997, was to save the party from collapse, which of course was necessary to ensure that her late husband’s dynastic legacy at the head of the party was protected till it could be passed on to their son, Rahul. She became a member of parliament and then party president in March 1998, ousting Sitaram Kesri, an ineffectual but wily elderly politician, at a time when the party needed a fresh image for an imminent general election. Kesri knew his time was up but clung to his post till Sonia’s courtiers engineered a coup. This rescued the directionless and badly led party – and possibly the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty – from collapse. In the general election, she campaigned energetically, addressing large crowds at nearly 100 meetings, often accompanied by Rahul and Priyanka. This transformed the campaign into a real contest and revived the Congress’s morale, but it was not enough to stop a BJP-led coalition from winning the election.

To begin with, Sonia was far from effective as a politician, though she had sufficient personality and dynastic charisma to pull political crowds and maybe votes across India.
²
She was a poor speaker in both Hindi and English. Years later, she still delivers her English-language speeches and statements as if each carefully enunciated word and phrase is a hurdle to be jumped. Her biggest misjudgement came in April 1999 when the BJP-led coalition government lost a confidence vote in parliament. Support had been withdrawn by one of its allies, the AIADMK from Tamil Nadu, whose leader, Jayalalitha, had grown close to Sonia. Within days, Sonia met President

K.R. Narayanan and, standing in the forecourt of Rashtrapati Bhavan, proudly proclaimed to massed television cameras, ‘We have 272’ (the number of MPs needed for a majority in parliament).
³
The television sound byte acted as a catalyst for growing criticism, sharpened by the media and the BJP, that this foreign-born member of the Gandhi clan who had not proved herself in any way as a politician or party leader, was trying to vault into the prime minister’s post. A backlash in urban areas, encouraged by the BJP, ridiculed the idea of India, as a country of one billion people, turning to a foreigner.
⁴
Possible allies refused to line up behind her in a confidence vote, and the power bid failed, leading to a general election later in 1999, which the BJP won.

After the election, with the BJP-led coalition back in power with a larger majority, Gandhi remained a remote figure. She was shielded by advisers, who seemed nervous to expose her to public scrutiny lest her limited mastery of language and public affairs, and lack of experience, were again revealed as they had been with the ‘272’ claim. Slowly, however, she grew in stature and, haltingly and falteringly, began to lead the Congress in parliament and develop some charisma.

Sonia might have faced continuing challenges of the sort mounted by Pawar and Sangma in May 1999 when they broke away and formed a new party, if three leading Congress politicians of her own generation had not died within 15 months of each other while she was growing into the Congress leadership. Rajesh Pilot, who was considering standing against her in the party presidential elections that were to be held in November 2000,
⁵
was killed in a car crash five months earlier, aged 55. Madhavrao Scindia (56) died in a plane crash in September 2001 and Jitendra Prasada (62) did not recover in January 2001 from a brain haemorrhage. Their deaths robbed the Congress of its next generation of leaders, leaving no one near the top of the party who could challenge the dynasty.

Pilot told David Loyn, a BBC correspondent who was then based in Delhi and knew him well, that he had asked Narasimha Rao towards the end of 1999 whether he should stand against Sonia. Rao had replied, ‘not yet’. Pilot was, however, likely to stand a year later, as Loyn revealed in an obituary in
The Independent.
⁶
‘He believed that Congress would never be electable under its present leader, Rajiv Gandhi’s Italian-born widow Sonia,’ wrote Loyn. ‘The party gives huge powers of patronage to the leader, encouraging sycophancy, and making opposition risky. But in London last month [May 2000] Pilot told me that he was close to declaring that he would stand against Sonia Gandhi as party president later this year. He had the encouragement of several senior figures, and he thought he might unseat Gandhi if she did not stand aside first.’ After Pilot’s death, Prasada, who had been Rao’s private secretary and had been marginalized by Sonia,
⁷
did stand but was humiliatingly defeated
⁸
in what was to become the only contested presidential election of Sonia’s political career. He died soon after.

Sonia rarely allowed herself to be questioned closely in public (even in later years) but became secure as party leader because she seemed to many to be growing into a potential election winner. She gained enough confidence to woo other potential parties nationally and to do an arduous 60,000-km countrywide tour in the run-up to the May 2004 general election. Her tour marked a re-launch of the Gandhi dynasty, at a time when its future looked shaky
⁹
and the Congress was not expected to win.

Rahul Gandhi, then 33, made his political debut in the 2004 campaign after spending most of his twenties abroad. His emergence gave supporters confidence that the dynasty would continue into the future, and he was the star turn. Elected for the first time as a Congress MP from Amethi in Uttar Pradesh, his father’s old constituency, he was seen as the heir to the family dynasty and the reincarnation of his father. ‘I come as a son and as a brother – and as a friend – elections come and go but I’ll stay,’ he shyly told Amethi villagers on a day when I followed him on the election trail.
¹⁰
He had a candour that defied allegations of spin, and his audiences were impressed, not just because he was young and seemed honest and sincere, but because he looked and sounded like his father. For them, Rajiv had returned, 13 years after he was assassinated, and life might be good again.

He said his agenda was to ‘tackle the bigotry that divides caste and class against each other’. Friends of the family likened that to his father’s (unsuccessful) ambition in the 1980s to steer India away from increasingly corrupt and self-serving governance. Rahul said his 32-year-old sister Priyanka was his ‘best friend – supportive, good-hearted and sensitive’, and she said he was ‘a good sincere human being who cares for people and their problems’. Priyanka showed how she could mix more naturally with crowds than Rahul. She did not stand as a candidate, but helped with her mother’s successful campaign in Rae Bareli, the constituency next to Amethi. She looked set for wider political involvement in the future.

There was, however, still considerable disenchantment with Sonia Gandhi’s leadership, despite her visibly improved performance. During the election campaign, several leading Congress politicians were privately saying that Sonia Gandhi should step aside so that the party could mount a more effective opposition to the BJP.
¹¹
They speculated that a serious defeat in the general election could lead to her being challenged for the leadership, or that dissidents would split the party, as had happened before. This was because no one – not even the Gandhis – expected the Congress to win, so the debate was about how to react to different levels of defeat. Leaders loyal to the dynasty said it was a ‘semi-final’ for the next election that they could win, perhaps as early as 2006 if the new government did not last its full term.

Such speculation was instantly swept aside when it became clear that the Congress and its allies were winning. The party was euphoric, but the result was not primarily an endorsement of the Congress, nor of the Gandhi dynasty. Sonia Gandhi had undoubtedly prepared the ground by uniting and galvanizing her party, but the outgoing BJP government had over-sold its election slogan of ‘India Shining’ and, with its regional allies also doing badly, lost the election more than the Congress and the Gandhis won it. The result was a stunning example of how India’s electorate throws out national and state leaders when it thinks that things are not as they should be – as it had done when it rejected Indira Gandhi in 1977 after the Emergency.