Sonia Gandhi’s appeal rested in part on iconography. She had a transcendent ability to project herself as an Indian everywoman who shared the suffering of the huddled masses: she was the incarnation of a dynasty but also a tragic widow who tied back her hair and dressed in muted colours as a good widow should. Foreigners are notorious in India for looking foolish in a sari—six yards of cloth tucked into a petticoat and pleated over a blouse—but Sonia wore hers impeccably, and avoided Western clothes. Despite Bal Thackeray’s jibes, most voters did not see her as a “white skin”; with her dark hair and light brown Italian complexion, she looked as if she might be from a similar ethnic background to the Nehrus, high-caste north Indians. Had she been of blond northern European or black African origin, she would never have been credible as an Indian leader. In a country where skin tone is noticed, this was part of her allure. It helped too that she was called Sonia—it was a name, like Natasha, which had become popular in the 1960s during India’s love-in with Russia, and did not mark her as an outsider.
When the votes were counted in 1998, Congress and its allies had won 166 seats, an increase of twenty-eight from the previous election, and the BJP was short of a majority. The party had been rescued from oblivion. It still had some distance to go if it was to return to health and power, and it was at this point that Sonia Gandhi’s skills as a leader began to appear. She made some blunders, learning as she went. Unlike her late husband, she kept her friends separate from her professional career and did not allow politicians to advance any further than the office at the back of her house. Her private, culturally diverse home life with her children was kept hidden from public view, and her close friends took a tacit vow of omertà. Priyanka got married and had two children, while Rahul went to college in the United States and Britain, and bucked family tradition by gaining qualifications. He developed the art of being discreet and unobtrusive, studying under an assumed name and avoiding any public profile. In his absence, the Indian press made up stories: his real name was reported to be Raol and his sister’s was Bianca, and he had been arrested at Boston airport carrying wads of cash (in fact he had been spotted reading a flight manual a few days after 9/11—when questioned at Logan, he applied the precepts of secularism by refusing to say whether he was Hindu or Muslim, and when it became clear the problem was not going away, asked his questioners to call a contact at the FBI, who set matters straight).21
The mother and children were a strong unit, and unlike most politicians, Sonia Gandhi was not held back by family members with possible ambitions of their own. As she was an outsider, a European who had married into an Indian family, other politicians never knew quite how to handle the new Mrs. Gandhi. Where necessary, she could act detached and “Western.” Her weapon of choice was repudiation. When three of her most senior colleagues suggested only someone born on Indian soil should head any future government, she resigned her post, saying her loyalty to her country (meaning India) was so great that she did not want to cause controversy. They went; she stayed. She built alliances with regional, caste-based and communist parties and avoided being identified with particular policies, except for nebulous ones like concern for the poor and secular values. Any Congress official who became too powerful was cut adrift, such as her husband’s long-time secretary V. George. Mrs. Gandhi gave no one a second chance. In meetings she usually remained formal and aloof, using long silences to exert authority.
Despite this, Congress still had ambitious and qualified men who regarded themselves as potential prime ministers. Since Mrs. Gandhi had no experience of administration at any level, some wanted her to be kicked upstairs to a ceremonial post. She remained in a precarious and isolated position—people joked about her inability to speak Hindi well, and referred to her by her mother-in-law’s nickname, “goongi gudiya,” or “dumb doll.” In 1999 she sat for one of the only interviews she has ever done, on Star TV. The unedited tape makes astonishing viewing. Mrs. Gandhi giggles nervously at the first question, stops herself and says, “I’m sorry, I just don’t know how to face a camera.” There are two more false starts; it is apparent she has had no media training. Blinking and swallowing, her upper lip perspiring, she finally gets into her stride, talking about bureaucracy, politics and her family tragedy. When the interviewer mentions that people mock her Italian accent, she says, “I don’t blame them for making fun of it. I feel Indian. I don’t feel one bit Italian.”22 By the end of the conversation, she looks ready to collapse.
Then, in an extraordinary series of coincidences, the internal opposition within the Congress party disappeared. In June 2000, Rajesh Pilot died when his car collided with a Rajasthan State Road Transport bus; in October 2000, Sitaram Kesri passed away following a heart attack; in January 2001, the 62-year-old Jitendra Prasada suffered a sudden and fatal brain haemorrhage; in September 2001, Madhavrao Scindia was flying to Kanpur in an industrialist’s Cessna C-90 for a state election rally when the plane abruptly fell out of the sky. After this, dissent stopped: the challengers were gone. Delhi’s leading astrologers, who wield enormous influence in the political sphere because so many uncertainties are involved in a political life, warned that Sonia Gandhi was in her “shatruvinash yog,” the astrological period when planetary forces are aligned in your favour and anyone who opposes you will be destroyed. Even more than the “raj yog”—the astrological period of “rule” that politicians seek, and try to hasten through pujas and the wearing of appropriate jewels—the shatruvinash yog is respected and feared. Whether Mrs. Gandhi gave any attention to these deductions, made by assorted astrologers in the employ of politicians’ wives and mistresses, and retailed by the countless gossips of political Delhi, was uncertain, for she always kept her own counsel (though some of those close to her believed she had metamorphosed into a Hindu; after her mother-in-law’s death, she ceased to take communion from the hand of the papal legate). In the 2004 election, against the predictions of the opinion pollsters, Congress came back to power.
During the campaign, the party avoided making a clear statement about who would be prime minister in the event of victory, but it was assumed Sonia Gandhi would take the post. When it became clear that Congress and its allies were going to form a government, the BJP stepped up its personal campaign against her. Sushma Swaraj, a homely seeming BJP politician, announced in histrionic tones that she would begin a fast and fight the forthcoming battle as a sanyasin: “If I see Sonia Gandhi take the oath as prime minister … I will shave my head, sleep on the floor and eat roasted grams [chickpeas].” At the same time, large crowds gathered outside Sonia Gandhi’s house, demanding she accept. One man stood on the roof of a car noisily wielding a sword and a pistol, and threatened to shoot himself in the head if she declined.
When Mrs. Gandhi addressed her MPs in Parliament, she told them that after listening to her “inner voice” (a phrase borrowed from the Mahatma) she had decided to “humbly decline” the post. “Power in itself has never attracted me, nor has position been my goal,” she said. It was a subtle response in a land where rejection of material ambition strikes a powerful religious chord. In case anyone missed the point, she was wearing a plain white ikat sari with a dark blue border, white being the Hindu colour of mourning. There was chaos and uproar. Might she still be persuaded? Mani Shankar Aiyar, a Congress loyalist, was first to the microphone. “Madam Prime Minister,” he began, “we cannot betray the people of India.” Another MP, Renuka Chowdhury, stood sobbing in front of the lawmakers saying that Sonia Gandhi “stood like a shiny [sic] armour” in defence of “the finest traditions of being Indian.”23 Her opponents were left irate by the manoeuvre she had pulled off. “She doesn’t have a political idea,” said L. K. Advani soon afterwards, “though she got smart advice. They have a dynastic culture in her party, where one family is supposed to be a royal family.”24 Her estranged sister-in-law, Maneka Gandhi, who was herself now an MP with the BJP, used stronger language, condemning both Sonia and the party’s culture of sycophancy: “She was always adept a
t the management of people. The Congress party reacts strongly to mummies but you cannot always have mummy to take you through if you have no central ideology. It’s theatre.”25
Sonia Gandhi’s decision was a historic act of renunciation and a shrewd political move. Her position was secure. The new prime minister, the respected Sikh technocrat Manmohan Singh, would serve at Madam’s pleasure. This had been planned some years before. As far back as 1999, Mrs. Gandhi had told a close ally that she would give the job to Manmohan Singh if they took power. When asked why she did not announce this publicly, she answered astutely: “There would be a power struggle [in the Congress party] which Manmohan Singh wouldn’t win.”26
Although these political sequences might be blamed on the horoscope of Sonia Gandhi, it would be wise to consult the astrological charts of another body whose anniversary fell on the same day, the Constituent Assembly. When “Hon’ble Pt. Jawaharlal Nehru” signed his name in the register of the assembly on that day, the constitutional debates began and it was quickly agreed that India should become a democracy. The upper-class Indian nationalists had not quite abolished themselves—some aspiring mini-Nehrus can still be found in Parliament—but it did mean that less influential sections of Indian society would in time assert themselves through the ballot box. The vision of the founders took a while to come true, and in a dynamic and constantly changing form, as a multitude of political parties arose.
The smaller political movements in India today come in many shapes, but most have a link with a geographical region or a community. Some can be influential, such as the Telugu Desam Party (TDP) in Andhra Pradesh; its current leader, Chandrababu Naidu, is an energetic figure who has made pioneering attempts at “e-governance,” publishing nearly all government documents, including draft budgets, on the Internet. Similarly the Biju Janata Dal (BJD) is strong enough to influence national politics and to define the parameters of political manoeuvring within Orissa; it is led by one of India’s more unlikely statesmen, Naveen Patnaik, a figure on the Delhi and New York party scene who metamorphosed into an astute politician after the death of his father. Other parties are based on the combined power of a particular caste group. The Samajwadi Party (SP) is nominally socialist, but its main purpose is to speak for the OBCs (or Other Backward Classes, meaning they are socially disadvantaged, but in a stronger position than the Dalits, or former untouchables) of Uttar Pradesh; its leader, Mulayam Singh Yadav, is a former village wrestler with links to Bollywood who has also served as India’s defence minister. His main rival is Mayawati, who heads another influential force in the state, the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP), which is the voice of Dalits and others.
At the opposite end of India is the All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (AIADMK), a party from Tamil Nadu in the south run by the powerful J. Jayalalithaa (originally J. Jayalalitha—she added the extra “a” for astrological reasons), an actress who entered politics as the lover of the chief minister and movie legend M. G. Ramachandran; but the AIADMK should not be confused with another important Tamil party, the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK), run by M. Karunanidhi and his son, M. K. Stalin (named after Joseph). Mamata Banerjee is a brisk, mercurial woman politician who runs the breakaway Trinamool Congress (AITC) in West Bengal and hopes to undo the Marxist lock on the political structures of her state. Smaller parties include the Indian Union Muslim League, the Sikkim Democratic Front and Shiv Sena, a flamboyant outfit from Maharashtra which attacks Mumbai cinemas when they show films featuring actors it does not like. The Janata Dal comes in various guises, which disagree with each other. The Shiromani Akali Dal, or SAD, is a collection of Sikh parties, while the Democratic Indira Congress (Karunakaran), or DIC(K), is a now defunct faction of the Congress party in Kerala. This is a shame, since “DIC(K)” is no longer found painted on walls and posters. There are two significant communist agglomerations in India, one based in the south and one in the east; the most important is the CPI(M), or Communist Party of India (Marxist), which has been running West Bengal for nearly four decades.
It took almost half a century for this process of democratic diffusion to happen: since 1996, the numerous smaller parties have held around half of the seats in the Lok Sabha, meaning neither Congress nor the BJP has been able to form a government without them. The centrifugal effect of popular democracy has been extraordinary, spinning out power towards people whose forebears had never had it. The idea that Mayawati, the daughter of a Dalit, could be one of the most influential politicians in the country could never have been imagined, much less have happened, in India’s 4,000-year history. Those who in earlier times would have been classed as untouchables are gaining new status. As the nation changes, and long-suppressed communities find a voice, the paternalistic thinking of the independence era is losing its grip. A transformative revolution is taking place, and it is not always a pretty sight.
When the new nation was being built after independence, the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes were lumped together. They might more usefully have been treated in different ways, the depressed castes being integrated with the mainstream and the tribals allowed to live more traditionally. Instead, the Scheduled Caste label, which was in most ways a social disadvantage, could enable people to obtain certain benefits such as reserved jobs and college places, and seats in Parliament and on political bodies. Dalit comes from a Sanskrit word meaning “crushed” or “broken.” Dr. Ambedkar started to use it to describe his community when making speeches in Marathi. Over time, it has been adopted as a generic term to describe oppressed and untouchable castes, or those outside the Hindu caste system—a term with a political ring to it when used by Ambedkar’s inheritors.
As previously mute groups assert their power and identity in New Delhi, politics has become increasingly commercialized, with party leaders engaging in horse-trading to secure the maximum benefit for their own interest group. This has reshaped parliamentary politics, and was inevitable in some form—whatever decisions Indira, Sanjay and Rajiv Gandhi had taken during the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s, the monolithic Congress party would have fractured and given way to a multi-party system. The popular vote fractionalized between parties, and even when legislators were elected, there was a risk they might switch loyalty; everything depended on cunning and coalitions. Since the 1990s, the alliances between parties have become more complex and durable, but for the moment each prime minister has no choice but to seek unnatural allies. So when Manmohan Singh became prime minister in 2004, this man who was renowned for his personal probity was obliged briefly to sit alongside ministerial colleagues such as K. Venkatapathy of the DMK, who was charged with rioting armed with a deadly weapon, and Shibu Soren, an Adivasi, or tribal, political leader from the Jharkhand Mukti Morcha (JMM) who was later convicted (and acquitted on appeal) of murder.27
During the last twenty years, the only party that looked as if it might be capable of displacing Congress as a broad national force was the BJP. Advani’s chariot ride to Ayodhya gave way to a more professional, middle-class public image as the BJP led a government for a full term, and voters were attracted by the idea that a fresh alternative was emerging. Business families switched allegiance, as did much of the massive, and massively wealthy, Indian diaspora, lured by a party organization that promised security and good governance. This was in part wishful thinking: for years business people had wanted a centre-right party in India that worked on merit rather than on redistributive rhetoric and family connections.
Following the scent of power, Congress politicians like K. C. Pant, a senior minister under Indira Gandhi whose father, G. B. Pant, had been a stalwart of the independence movement, began to defect to the BJP. He was followed by Najma Heptullah, the grand-niece of Maulana Azad, the most important Muslim in the Congress party at the time of independence. When she switched, Najma Heptullah attacked Sonia Gandhi: “The present Congress leadership has moved away from the ideology of Nehru, Azad, Patel and Gandhi.”28 This was an opportunist move, but it caught the popular sense at the
turn of the new century that—despite its appropriation of a partially invented Hindu past—the BJP was the party of the future. Its leaders were going to be, if not clean, then a great deal cleaner than the prevaricators who had come before them. They would return to older, better and more traditional Indian values, and seek to kindle a Hindu national ethos based on social consciousness, the spirit of dedication, sterling qualities and good character. They would move away from the cult of the Congress party, with its exclusive version of India’s independence movement.
In office from 1998 to 2004, the BJP-led government tested a nuclear bomb that had been primed by Narasimha Rao, led a steady privatization drive, fought a small war with Pakistan when Pakistani soldiers moved into Indian territory in Kargil in Kashmir, started road-building projects and boosted GDP significantly: they fought the 2004 election campaign on the slogan “India Shining,” and did not expect to lose to Congress. The prime minister during this period was not L. K. Advani, who had made a notable misstep when accused of corruption in Narasimha Rao’s coded diaries case. Knowing he was not guilty—even his many enemies saw him as a Spartan—Advani had rashly said he would not hold public office until his name was cleared. He had forgotten quite how slowly the wheels of justice grind in India, and the premiership passed to his colleague, Atal Behari Vajpayee, with whom he had been imprisoned during the Emergency. Vajpayee was a more popular choice, a gifted orator who wrote poetry in Hindi and was of a softer temper than Advani. When he became foreign minister in the Janata government at the end of the Emergency, Vajpayee had said he would consign Indira Gandhi to the dustbin of history. He represented an older, more conservative tradition of Indian or Hindu nationalism, and was a unifier, clever at handling his coalition partners. Nominally a bachelor, he had lived happily for many years with his college sweetheart, her husband and their daughters. As a less ideological and more ethereal figure than Advani, he offered an acceptable public face to the party. Yet the character of the modern BJP was best exemplified not by these two ageing warhorses, but by Pramod Mahajan and Narendra Modi, the two younger men who had flagged off the Toyota chariot in 1990.
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