by John Elliott
In foreign and regional affairs, Rajiv began to mend fences with the US, and also with China. He went to Beijing (with Sonia) in December 1988 on what was the first visit by an Indian prime minister after the 1962 war, and was welcomed by Deng Xiaoping, China’s supreme leader.38 He tried (disastrously) to force peace in Sri Lanka where, in 1987, he became involved in an ill-advised and thankless posting of Indian troops to the country’s troubled Jaffna peninsula. He also came (maybe unwittingly) close to war with Pakistan at the end of 1986 when escalating army exercises almost triggered a conflict.
At home, he launched an unsuccessful peace initiative on the Sikh leaders’ demands for some form of autonomy in the state of Punjab. His policies on Muslim rights and Hindu nationalism – including a highly controversial Hindu temple at Ayodhya and an equally controversial ruling on Muslim women’s rights – encouraged communalism and contributed to Hindu-Muslim riots. Overall, his political popularity slipped rapidly from 1986 onwards. Constant reshuffles of ministers (more than twelve in four years), plus defections of some trusted colleagues and changes of senior bureaucrats, made matters worse. Eventually, accused of arrogance and insensitivity – and blighted by the Bofors scandal – he lost the 1989 general election, five years after his landslide victory. He was assassinated in 1991 during the next general election campaign, before he had a chance to show if he could put into practice what he had learned in the mid-1980s.
But Rajiv Gandhi’s legacy should not be dismissed, as it often is by India’s elite, as being of little or no importance. If Nehru was greater than his deeds and Indira was not as great as she should have been, Rajiv’s hopes and dreams were greater than his ability in the 1980s to achieve them. His most important legacy was his vision of a new, young India, and the work he did that led to India’s economic development in the following 20 years. Whether he would have won the 1991 election had he lived, is an open question – results from polling that took place before his death made it appear less than certain. But his death sparked a sympathy wave that returned a Congress government, just as Indira Gandhi’s assassination had done for him in 1984.
Some observers thought that the dynasty’s political dominance was finished. Rajiv Gandhi had not been seen as a successful prime minister, and he had no obvious and immediate family successor. Sonia Gandhi, then 45, was shy and inexperienced, and Rahul and Priyanka were still young (aged 21 and 19). Furthermore, the immediate emergence and acceptance of Narasimha Rao seemed to indicate that the Congress could rule without a Gandhi in charge, even though Rao was chosen only because he was assumed (wrongly) to be too old and unambitious to be significant.
It is never wise to write off dynasties however, because admirers and advisers continue to cling to a family, even if it fades for a time, imbuing it with an aura of importance in the hope that it will gradually regain influence and eventually return to power. That is what happened during the 1990s. Sonia Gandhi gradually emerged from the mourning and seclusion of a widow and eventually became the Congress party’s leader, fulfilling her unexpected legacy as head of the family and re-establishing the dynasty with unexpected skill and patient determination. At the same time, her two children, Rahul and Priyanka, grew into potential future heirs, enhancing the dynasty’s image of perpetuity.
Notes
1. JE, ‘What can we do but vote for her son?’ Financial Times, 21 December 1984
2. JE, ‘Rajiv Plea to Shun Violence – Son named Prime Minister after assassination of Indira Gandhi’, Financial Times, 1 November 1984
3. http://ridingtheelephant.wordpress.com/2009/10/31/indira-gandhi-%E2%80%93-a- flawed-legacy-25-years-after-her-death/
4. Sunil Khilnani, ‘States of Emergency’, The New Republic, 17 December 2001, http://www.newrepublic.com/article/states-emergency
5. Kuldip Nayar, Beyond the Lines, p.169, Roli Books 2012, http://www.amazon.com/Beyond-Lines-Autobiography-Kuldip-Nayar/dp/8174369104
6. Ibid., p. 131.
7. http://www.dnaindia.com/india/report_43-years-on-mystery-shrouds-post-mortem-of-lal-bahadur-shastri_1279124
8. Kuldip Nayar, Beyond the Lines, p.169, Roli Books 2012
9. Frank Moraes, India Today, p. 232, Macmillan, 1960: ‘There is no question of Nehru’s attempting to create a dynasty of his own; it would be inconsistent with his character and career’, http://www.amazon. co.uk/India-Today-Frank-Moraes/dp/B0007ITK9M
10. Katherine Frank, Indira – The Life of Indira Nehru Gandhi, .p. 250–251, HarperCollins, London 2001, http://www. harpercollins.com.au/books/Indira-Life-Nehru-Gandhi-Katherine-Frank/?isbn=9780007372508
11. Krishna Nehru Hutheesing, Dear to behold; an intimate portrait of Indira Gandhi, p. 149, Macmillan 1969, http://books.google.ae/books/about/Dear_to_behold.html?id=mY8BAAAAMAAJ&redir_ esc=y
12. Katherine Frank, Indira, p. 273.
13. P.N. Dhar, Indira Gandhi, the Emergency and Indian Democracy, p. 329, OUP 2000, http://books.google.ae/books/about/Indira_Gandhi_the_emergency_and_Indian_d.html?id=EzRuAAAAMAAJ&redir_ esc=y
14. Nicholas Nugent, Rajiv Gandhi Son of a Dynasty, p. 47, BBC Books 1990, UBS Delhi 1991, http://books.google.ae/books/about/Rajiv_ Gandhi.html?id=gxxuAAAAMAAJ&redir_esc=y
15. JE, ‘The only man for the job’, Financial Times, 3 November 1984
16. NDTV, Walk the Talk, Indian Express, 7 March 2004, http://www. indianexpress.com/oldStory/42528/
17. ‘Her class of ’84’, The Times of India, 9 June 2004, http://timesofindia. indiatimes.com/city/Her-class-of-84/articleshow/727253.cms?
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://ridingt
heelephant.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 defeated8 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 shaky9 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 y
ears 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.