During the nineteen years that Sonia Gandhi was at the helm of the Congress party, the BJP had eight presidents. 12
Gujarat is also where Gandhi, the ‘father’ of the Indian nation was born. Thereby hangs another tale, a successfully contrived narrative. Indira Gandhi married a Parsi, Feroze Gandhi, who was not a relative of the Gujarati Gandhi. Many believed, and in fact continue to believe, that with a family name like Gandhi, winning elections is assured. This is a small but significant starting point to study delusional politics in India.
A young colleague in the Indian Foreign Service related an interesting story. Amongst the thousands who came to greet Sonia Gandhi and her children, Rahul and Priyanka, after the Congress Party’s unexpected victory in the 2004 elections was a person whom the children recognized as an erstwhile security officer assigned to the family. They could not recall the visitor’s name. Before the person concerned had paid his respects and reached home, he had been traced and his appointment to a gubernatorial post was being processed. 13 What, I asked, would have been the reward if they had remembered his name? Pat came the reply, he would have been appointed a cabinet minister.
Many of us have been witness to this almost feudal style of functioning that has come to define the Sonia Gandhi era in the Indian National Congress.
In June 2001, Sonia Gandhi, along with Congress leaders Manmohan Singh, Natwar Singh, Murli Deora and Jairam Ramesh, was to travel to Iceland and the United States. On their way, they made a stop in London, where I was serving as the deputy high commissioner.
Their flight was to land in London in the wee hours, and I was deputed to receive the leader of the Opposition and her party members. Two instances from this meeting still remain with me. I received them at the aerobridge and took them to the Hillingdon Suite at Heathrow. After we had settled down, I noticed that not one of her colleagues had taken a seat on the same sofa as Gandhi—Manmohan Singh and Natwar Singh were seated at one end of the room, while the others stood behind their leader. Unaware of this ‘protocol’, and finding it rather strange that senior leaders of the party refrained from even sitting on the same sofa as their president, I decided to take a seat across from Gandhi.
The second instance, which I remember vividly, happened when we were leaving the airport for their hotel. As the vehicles we had arranged arrived at the gate, not one of Gandhi’s colleagues took the rear seat in the same car with her.
I found this entire episode rather peculiar and was reminded of the ‘divine right of kings’. Gandhi was treated and put on the pedestal as though she were a monarch in the sixteenth century, asserting power over her subjects in the Indian National Congress. It is still not clear whether this kind of subservience was demanded or was readily forthcoming. God, for the Congress party, was somehow synonymous with the Nehru–Gandhi surname.
The present day ‘cult’ status of the Nehru–Gandhi is largely thanks to Nehru’s daughter, Indira. Facing a bitter revolt from within the party, she proceeded to systematically destroy the institution.
Much has been written about the legacy of Indira Gandhi. Many praise her for taking the bold decision to take on East Pakistan and liberate the peoples of modern-day Bangladesh; others are rightly unforgiving for she put the tantrums of her son (Sanjay) ahead of the interests of the nation.
Her ultimate ‘gift’ to Indian politics, however, is the deep-rooted dynastic nature of our polity. The Indian National Congress, which once had presidents of the stature of Subhas Chandra Bose and Vallabhbhai Patel, today cannot look beyond the Gandhi surname.
Under the leadership of another Gandhi, Rahul, and to an extent his mother, Sonia, the Congress party secured a total of only forty-four seats in the Lok Sabha—the lower house where the majority comes at the magical figure of 272—in the 2014 elections. The percentage of seats the Congress party secured was less than the 10 per cent benchmark required to be recognized as the leader of the Opposition.
The party, which was central to India’s freedom struggle, and governed the nation for the better part of seven decades, today considers losing an election as a sign of victory and revival. In the 2017 Gujarat State Assembly election, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), battling what was described as ‘22 years of anti-incumbency’, 14 not only won the election, but also increased its vote share compared to the 2012 State Assembly election (up from 47.8 per cent to 49.1 per cent, a 1.3 per cent increase). 15
The results of the 2018 Karnataka State Assembly election are even more striking. The left-liberal brigade, ever loyal to the Gandhi family, predicted Chief Minister Siddaramaiah faced no anti-incumbency. 16 It is interesting to note that this was the same cabal that had forecasted a strong anti-incumbency wave against the BJP in Gujarat. The Kannadiga people’s verdict put to bed any such theory. The Congress party went from 122 seats in the assembly to seventy-eight. Chief Minister Siddaramaiah, unsure of his electoral prowess, stood from two constituencies: He lost one and won by just over 1600 votes in the other; sixteen of his thirty-two cabinet ministers lost their seats. The BJP on the other hand went from forty seats in 2013 to 104 five years later, just shy of the halfway mark. Notwithstanding the unholy and opportunistic post-poll ‘alliance’ between the Congress and the JD(S), the electoral results in Karnataka are the latest example of India’s people demanding a ‘Congress-mukt Bharat’; and perhaps a ‘Gandhi-mukt Bharat’. A closer look at the electoral data, provided in the New Delhi edition of Hindustan Times on 16 May 2018, further illustrates this point. 17
Across demographics and regions, the BJP outperformed both the Congress and JD(S), particularly among the Dalit voters. Television pundits wrongly attributed a Supreme Court verdict, which sought to dilute the Schedule Caste and Scheduled Tribe (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, 1989 that protects those from backward communities, to the BJP. There was a concerted attempt to portray the BJP as an anti-Dalit party. 18 The voters of Karnataka showed they understood India better than the so-called ‘experts’.
It is particularly important to note that the Congress’s strategy of courting the Lingayat vote through vote-bank politics backfired spectacularly—of the seventy constituencies dominated by the community, Congress won twenty-one seats, down from forty-seven in 2013. The BJP, on the other hand, more than tripled its seats—from eleven in 2013 to thirty-eight in 2018. 19 The message from the people of Karnataka was clear—the age-old Congress technique of divide and rule would no longer work in an India that seeks development and not division.
In the middle of 2018, the BJP and its NDA allies were in power in twenty-one states and governed 70 per cent of India’s population—a feat even Indira Gandhi at her peak could not achieve. 20 The Karnataka result was further proof that the BJP has cemented its place as the country’s leading national party. There are two overarching factors that have propelled the BJP to this stature. First, under PM Modi, the party has India’s most popular leader of the last five decades for it was under his leadership that the BJP won an overwhelming majority in the 2014 Lok Sabha elections. The citizens of this country are intrinsically drawn to his vision that places a premium on development, one in which meritocracy trumps sycophancy to a dynasty. Second, under the leadership of the party president, Amit Shah, the BJP has made a conscious effort to transcend India’s social divisions and unite Indians under one umbrella. The BJP is no longer a Brahmin–Bania party, nor is it a party of Hindi-speaking North India. From Arunachal Pradesh in the north-east to Gujarat in the west, from Jammu & Kashmir in the north to Karnataka in the south, over the last four years the BJP has transformed into a party of and for all Indians.
What went so horribly wrong for the Congress party? At a general level, several decisions, which can only be described as ‘delusional’, need to be mentioned.
Three possible reasons suggest themselves, two of which are apparent: One, a mother’s abiding love for and persistence with the less than successful and reluctant leadership qualities of her son; two, a ‘dynasticization’ of politics, where one fami
ly is above the party, and for some Congresspersons, above the country. The third reason, which is not so apparent but more crucial than the first two, is the separation of power and accountability between 2004 and 2014.
An interesting system of ‘diarchy’ was introduced in 2004 when the Congress won and this was widely regarded as an unexpected victory.
Manmohan Singh was appointed the prime minister but the Gandhis, Sonia Gandhi in particular, wielded political power.
On 27 February 2014, I wrote a piece recalling events ten years earlier. 21 I questioned in my piece, “Does India have an elected or nominated PM?” 22, 23 The reason for writing this article was a change in the constitution of the Indian National Congress, which undermined the foundations of Indian democracy.
As per subsection C inserted in clause 5 of the newly amended constitution of the Congress Parliament Party, a new position was created which was to be headed by Sonia Gandhi. The amendment read, ‘The chairperson shall have the authority to name the leader of the Congress Parliamentary Party to head the Government, if necessary.’ Thus Gandhi had the power to nominate a prime minister, who was to serve at her pleasure.
What followed had serious and far-reaching consequences— Manmohan Singh was to head a government, without having any political authority to make and execute policy decisions. His own cabinet ministers, who as per India’s Constitution he was to lead, wailed and yearned for Gandhi.
‘The inner voice of people says you should become the Prime Minister . . . Please don’t leave us. Please continue to lead us,’ exclaimed a distraught Mani Shankar Aiyar, 24 who later went on to serve as the Union minister for Panchayati Raj; Union minister of petroleum and natural gas; Union minister of youth affairs and sports; and Union minister of the development of the north-eastern region.
Aiyar wasn’t the only Congressman to perform theatrics at the durbar of Gandhi. Kapil Sibal who served as the Union minister of science and technology and earth sciences, Union cabinet minister of human resource development and Union cabinet minister of communications and information technology, proclaimed, ‘Our faith is only with you.’ 25
Both the above statements were made at the gathering where Sonia Gandhi announced she would not be available for the post of prime minister.
In retrospect and with the benefit of hindsight, it is clear that the interests of the grand old party that had facilitated India’s freedom were being subordinated to the interests of one family. This observation has nothing to do with the qualities of Sonia Gandhi as a person or her political strengths and weaknesses. The act of ‘renunciation’, her decision to decline the leadership of the Congress Parliamentary Party introduced a new distortion in the functioning of parliamentary democracy. It recalled the psychopathic chant of the Indira Gandhi era: ‘Indira is India and India is Indira’. 26 The office of the prime minister, to which a person with excellent credentials was appointed, stood diminished.
There were, however, a set of deeper issues which have remained unresolved, and which are being aired seventy years after independence.
At no time since its inception has the Indian National Congress been an ideological monolith. Even among its senior leaders, the ideological spread has covered a vast canvas from the socialists and liberals on the left to what today would be characterized as a conservative centre-right.
The dominant narrative within the party has invariably been set by those in power. In the ten years of the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government between 2004 and 2014, the government of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh often found itself on a trajectory not just slightly different from but very often at loggerheads with the social activists and left-wing economists in Sonia Gandhi’s National Advisory Council (NAC). Deep Joshi, Farah Naqvi, Jean Dreze and Virginius Xaxa were some of the members of the NAC who represented both the categories. If Indira’s legacy was to introduce dynasty politics in the Indian National Congress, her daughter-in-law’s legacy was to diminish the office of the prime minister and his cabinet, and by extension, the Parliamentary system of democracy practised in this country.
Sonia Gandhi not only introduced a diarchy within the Indian National Congress, but set up and headed a parallel cabinet which was more powerful than the one presided over by the prime minister. It comprised of individuals who were not elected by the people of India, but as per her own whims and fancies.
And as though this parallel government was not enough, the period between 2004 and 2014 saw the establishment of numerous Group of Ministers (GoMs) and Empowered Group of Ministers (EGoMs). In theory, these groups were set up to deliberate upon critical issues before they were placed before the cabinet. In practice, they undermined the leadership of the prime minister. Prithviraj Chavan, the former chief minister of Maharashtra and a member of PM Singh’s cabinet, shed light on the heavy lifting undertaken by Pranab Mukherjee during the UPA years:
‘In Dr Manmohan Singh’s cabinet, Pranabda was the de facto number two. He was the chairman of more than 95 GoMs and EGoMs (Empowered Group of Ministers). I was a member of many such groups dealing with Enron, spectrum, WTO, Bhopal disaster and disinvestment.’ 27
Pranab Mukherjee, the senior most leader of the Indian National Congress in 2004, was relegated to the role of ‘de facto number two’, when he should have perhaps been the number one, particularly considering he was leading much of the legislative agenda within the council of ministers. In fact, I had the good fortune of working with him when he was the minister of external affairs from 2006–09, and I was serving as the secretary (Economic Relations). His knowledge of India, his relations with leaders across party lines, and his experience in dealing with world leaders, set him apart from most politicians I have come across.
Not only was he unfairly treated within the cabinet, given his stature, he should have perhaps been considered for the post of President back in 2007. The candidate who did eventually hold the highest office in the country, Pratibha Patil was a quintessential Nehru–Gandhi loyalist and in comparison to most political leaders, let alone one of the calibre of Mukherjee, was most unfit for the job. Post her retirement, there have been numerous reports questioning her propriety, 28, 29 and I too have witnessed some such instances first-hand during my days as a senior diplomat. 30
From senior leaders of the Indian National Congress, to parliamentary democracy as established by the Constitution, no institution was spared. Such is the dynamic of family politics.
Illusion and Delusion—The Early Beginnings
The true architect of India’s Independence was Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. The South Africans enjoy telling us that we sent them a Western-educated barrister (University College London and Inner Temple) and they returned the ‘Mahatma’.
Gandhi was also the quintessential politician. He had a ‘connect’ with the masses. The theory of peaceful social mobilization that he conceived and put into practice transformed the nature of India’s independence movement. It was his towering personality and stature that essentially determined the shape of India’s freedom struggle and its contours as a nation state post independence. That he chose to anchor the freedom struggle within the rule of law, through agitation by peaceful means, rather than violence and revolution, became the defining characteristic of the nationalist movement and shaped the coordinates of post-colonial India. The Congress party readily welcomed his moral and spiritual leadership and allowed him to provide the broad direction in spite of differences between individual leaders on specific policy issues or on ideological grounds.
Gandhi started, in every sense of the term, as a loyal subject of the Crown. His voice and personal effort to mobilize support for Britain’s war effort, during World War I, was very much in keeping with his overall approach. After landing in England on 6 August 1914, Gandhi lost no time in mobilizing support among local Indians for the war effort. Witness this:
I knew the difference of status between an Indian and an Englishman but I did not believe that we had been quite reduced to slavery. I f
elt then that it was more the fault of individual officials than that of the British system and that we could convert them by love. If we could improve our status through the help and cooperation of the British, it was our duty to win their help by standing by them in their hour of need. 31
Two decades later, Gandhi had changed. In a speech at a meeting of the Congress party in Bombay at the beginning of August 1942, Gandhi instructed his followers:
Here is a mantra, a short one, that I give to you. You may imprint it on your hearts and let every breath of yours give expression to it. The mantra is ‘Do or Die’. We shall either free India or die in the attempt; we shall not live to see the perpetuation of our slavery. Every true Congressman or woman will join the struggle with inflexible determination not to remain alive to see the country in bondage and slavery. 32
The head of the history department at Delhi University, during my final year as a postgraduate student, R.S. Sharma, 33 a bhumihar from Bihar, aptly described Gandhi’s style of negotiations as that of a ‘bania’. Gandhi, he said, would identify an issue, prepare an agitation and then pursue several modalities to achieve his objective. If his demands were met, he would ‘bank’ them and proceed to take up another cause. If the authorities felt the demands were excessive, he would be arrested and imprisoned. He would restart the process on his release. In either case/scenario, the people so mobilized and the movement so created, through the agitation, would be disbanded.
I was amused recently then to find some consternation regarding a reference to Gandhi as a ‘bania’. 34 Whether he was one by caste is entirely beside the point—what is important to note is his attitude towards caste.
Delusional Politics Page 9