by John Elliott
Among the mysteries is the question of who advises Sonia Gandhi and the family, and manages so successfully to modulate their appearances and utterances. ‘The Gandhis don’t give their very closest loyalists top posts, preferring to keep them close,’ a contact with links to the family’s coterie told me, citing, as an example, Suman Dubey, a former journalist and newspaper editor who advises Sonia as a friend on media and other matters and plays down his proximity and insider knowledge. ‘Suman is the closest outside the family and he doesn’t want anything anyway,’ said my source. Ahmed Patel, her political secretary, is her closest full-time adviser, running her office and acting as her gatekeeper, high-powered political manager, and guardian of the status quo. Then there are various Congress politicians and others who have fluctuating roles.
At a Hindustan Times Leadership Summit conference in October 2007 that I attended, Sonia was asked who her advisers were and she said (twice) that she consulted ‘my son, my daughter and my son-in-law’ when making key decisions. Sources wonder whether there is someone else in addition to Patel, maybe outside India, who provides Rahul with an elder’s advice. Lee Kuan Yew, Singapore’s veteran political leader, for example, met Rahul when he was on a week-long visit to the city state in 2006, learning about politics and development4.
In 2005, the American Embassy reported (in the cable5 that discussed Sonia’s affinity with the Left) that the party had evolved an elaborate protective culture. ‘Mrs Gandhi’s inner circle carefully controls her access to information, and inoculates her from criticism, while her carefully scripted public appearances protect her from making gaffes or missteps. This has the advantage of preserving the “sanctity” of Mrs Gandhi and the dynasty, but can also complicate her efforts to wield power.’ Gandhi, the embassy report continued, deliberately attempted to preserve the image of being above the fray politically, ‘taking maximum advantage of Congress culture, which prescribes that the party figurehead be surrounded by an “inner coterie” to provide advice, and shield the leader from criticism and dissent’.
That protection, however, went too far on 4 August 2011 when a Congress party spokesperson announced that Gandhi, then 64, had been diagnosed ‘with a medical condition’. On the advice of her doctors, she had travelled abroad and was likely to be away for ‘two-three weeks’, said the spokesperson, adding that the surgery had been successful and her condition was ‘satisfactory’.6 Beyond that, her health was a ‘personal matter’ and the people of India should respect her family’s request for privacy.
She had appointed four people to look after the party’s affairs in her absence – Rahul Gandhi, A.K. Antony, Ahmed Patel and Janardhan Dwivedi, the party spokesperson. The naming of this group indicated that the illness was serious, as did the fact that Rahul and Priyanka had left the country with her (even though Rahul was one of those left in charge). Yet there was no official announcement on the nature of the illness, nor of where she had gone, though she was widely reported to have had a cancer operation in New York’s Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center where she had apparently already been treated for several months.7 (A year earlier, she had left Delhi at short notice, cancelling meetings with David Cameron, the British prime minister, who was visiting.8 She flew with Rahul, and it was thought Priyanka, to the US, reportedly because her mother was ill there, though later it was suspected that she was tested or treated for her own illness.)
It arguably borders on arrogance and disdain – and a lack of responsibility – for the leader of a ruling coalition and its main party to go abroad without explanation. The reasons have remained officially a secret, as have the nature of her illness and whether the suspected cancer has been successfully removed. She returned to Delhi after just over a month away, and appeared to recover and stabilise from the operation in the following months though she never looked completely well. She gradually returned to political work, but occasionally cancelled appointments because of ‘ill health’ and made regular return visits to the US for tests, and maybe treatment.
Tamed Media
The media’s response to her disappearance was relatively limited after the BBC and AFP broke the news internationally. There were prominent reports in India, but only two newspapers – curiously, both business titles – ran critical editorials within a few days of the announcement. ‘Such lack of clarity on the well-being and whereabouts of someone who, right now, is the most important political leader of the country is just not acceptable,’ said The Economic Times on 6 August. Normally pro-establishment, its headline was explicit: ‘Sonia Gandhi a national leader and her health not just a private matter.’9
The Business Standard (then edited by Sanjaya Baru, an economist and journalist, who had been Manmohan Singh’s trusted spokesperson and speech-writer from 2004 to 2009) ran an editorial on 7 August under the headline ‘Right to information – Ms Sonia Gandhi’s health is a matter of public concern’. ‘In a democracy the people have a right to know detailed information about the health of their leaders,’ it said. ‘This is neither a “private matter” nor can the family of the concerned public personality have the last word on the matter.’10 There was a good television panel debate (including Baru) on some of these issues a few days later,11 but there was little more comment for several weeks. Congress party spokespeople stated that only information the family wished to share would be publicized. In another formulation, they said the government could only issue information that it received – suggesting that the government itself did not know about its leader’s health.
The only thorough reporting of the illness came much later in the India Today weekly news magazine, which ran a cover story in its 16 October issue headlined ‘How ill is Mrs Gandhi?’12 Challenging the family’s insistence on secrecy, the story broke new (but not necessarily accurate) ground on the illness by reporting an (anonymous) New York doctor saying it probably wasn’t cancer but ‘was most likely an unusual disorder, pancreatic tuberculosis’ whose symptoms can be very similar to cancer.
Politicians around the world enjoy varying degrees of privacy, as The Hindu discussed on 22 September 2012 when, some weeks after Gandhi’s return, it ran an editorial headlined ‘The omertà on Sonia Gandhi’s illness’ – mischievously, given her origins, using the Italian word omertà, which means code of silence13. Such scattered coverage scarcely amounted to a real attempt to discover – either through an official spokesperson or other sources – the nature and seriousness of the illness. This sort of disregard by the media of its proper role in guarding the public interest is surely not healthy for a democracy. Even if one recognizes that politicians like Gandhi will guard their privacy as much as they can, this still leaves the question of the Indian media’s largely hands-off response – a reaction that enabled the family to ignore the limited criticisms.
Reports on the private lives and personal liaisons of politicians are rare, but that is surely different from failing to explore why the country’s top leader had gone abroad for a possibly life-threatening operation. Presidents in the US are accustomed to public exposure and even the illnesses of Cuba’s former ruler, Fidel Castro, have been publicly discussed. In India, a heart bypass operation on Manmohan Singh in 2009 was announced, though the illnesses of former prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, 87, have been largely kept private.
The family’s wish for secrecy has also blocked information on frequent private visits abroad by Rahul Gandhi. A right to information request in 2012 failed to produce any answers.14 Rahul’s private life has been a mystery. Everyone, of course, has a right to privacy, but that surely reduces with increased public importance and responsibility. So little is known that Delhi buzzes with gossip about where he regularly vanishes – is it abroad as is often rumoured (Dubai, Bangkok, London?), or just to the homes of friends near his central Delhi home? Does he have a girlfriend?15 The only one ever seen publicly was Colombian (or Spanish, as he reportedly said in 2004), but she is rumoured to have married in Colombia and he was said to have moved on to an Afghan girlfr
iend or someone in a south Delhi colony, among others. The most visible side of his private life has been regular evening exercise sessions at the gym in central Delhi’s Lodhi Hotel (previously the Aman), which is owned by DLF.
The illness saga also underlined how the Gandhis expect favourable treatment in the media without briefing journalists and editors, and without making many public appearances or any effort to generate good reporting. In October 2005, I wrote a piece in The Economist16 which, I discovered later, the family did not like. I had asked for an interview with Rahul Gandhi and, if not with him, with someone he nominated, but nothing had been forthcoming. In the piece I wrote that ‘Rahul Gandhi, whose weekend hobby is racing motorbikes with friends on a private dirt track near Delhi, has refused to emerge as an iconic figure’. He had ‘not made much of a mark as an MP, having spoken only once in parliament’ since he was elected in 2004. And he was ‘prone to political gaffes’.
The previous month, I wrote, he had reportedly told Tehelka,17 a weekly newspaper, that there was ‘no governance’ in the state of Bihar, which was embarrassing since the state had been under direct rule by the Congress-led central government since earlier in the year. He had also said that he did what he liked, despite his mother’s views, and appeared to boast (probably flippantly) that he could have been prime minister when he was 25. The Tehelka story revealed, I wrote, ‘a straight-talking, sometimes naive, young man, with firm views and ambitions’. He had said his idea of politics was ‘very different from what is being done now’. In the 2004 election campaign his advisers had kept him as quiet and out of the public eye as possible, fearing, as he put it, that ‘every time I want to do something... it may go wrong’. The Congress insisted the Tehelka story was based on an un-taped ‘background chat’.
A few weeks later, I was introduced to Sonia Gandhi at a Hindustan Times conference dinner and mentioned I had written an Economist piece on Rahul Gandhi, and that I wished I had been able to talk to him. ‘Not a very good piece,’ came her instant reply, which was remarkable because she’d had no idea that she would meet the (anonymous) author. She said she was unhappy that I had failed to state that the Tehelka article was not based on an interview (which I had in fact indicated). She showed more interest in that negative point than in taking the conversation further or suggesting a meeting.
What the family does encourage – or at least makes no effort to stop – are vast spreads of large advertisements placed in newspapers by government ministries at taxpayers’ expense to mark various family anniversaries. On Rajiv Gandhi’s 69th birth anniversary on 20 August 2013, there were nine half-page advertisements and three full pages just in the Delhi edition of The Indian Express celebrating his birth, two of them also marking the launch for a Sonia Gandhi promoted food security programme that day. The previous year, on 21 May, named Anti Terrorism Day to mark Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination in 1991, advertisements remembering and praising him included 5 3/4pages in the Hindustan Times, 5 in The Times of India, 4 in The Hindu and 3 1/2 in The Indian Express. Analysis on a media blog, Sans Serif, showed that Jawaharlal Nehru’s birth anniversary in November 2011 was marked by 58 government advertisements covering 26 1/4 pages in 12 English newspapers.18
Reluctant Rahul
Sonia Gandhi’s central political importance was demonstrated by the UPA government’s erratic behaviour while she was away ill, especially on two key issues – the Anna Hazare anti-corruption movement and an on-going telecom scandal. Manmohan Singh failed to seize the opportunity to exert the authority that should have gone with his job, and Rahul Gandhi equally failed to rise to the challenge as heir apparent. Other key politicians such as home minister P. Chidambaram and telecom minister Kapil Sibal fumbled their briefs, while the four leading Congress party figures Sonia Gandhi named as being in charge (including Rahul) made no public impression. She was clearly missed and it gradually began to be apparent that this Italian-born non-political mother and housewife had developed what some would see as her psychic chakra so that it not only protected her but also gave her a position of command.
That, of course, begs some questions. Did the disarray while she was away develop because the government was missing her and her advisers’ sure touch, and had she developed a little-known sense of what needed to be done politically? Or were ministers and officials scared to make decisions that might arouse her (or Rahul’s) wrath later? Or was it because the Gandhi dynasty dominated government channels of authority and decision-making to such an extent that the cabinet and administration could not function without her? Whatever the answer – and maybe it was a mixture of all three – it certainly demonstrated how lost the government was without her.
Rahul played little part in this dynastic dominance. In the previous couple of years, he’d had flashes of success – for example, in February 2010, when he made a dramatic foray into Mumbai and challenged the street power of Maharashtra’s chauvinist political party, the Shiv Sena. I wrote on my blog – over-optimistically, as it turned out later – that this ‘was a significant step forward in his emergence as a national figure’. By using local trains instead of a planned helicopter to cross the city, he had showed ‘more courage than most of India’s prestige-oriented politicians would contemplate’.19 He spent some years laboriously touring the poorest parts of India, meeting people and hearing their problems, and trying to regenerate the Congress party’s youth organization – preparing himself, he often said, for his political future. He garnered widespread though not always favourable publicity for visiting and chatting with poor villagers, and staying with them – even taking David Miliband, then Britain’s foreign secretary, to a high-profile village sleepover early in 2009.20 These were the sort of flying visits that might be made by a paternalistic monarch, and were easily mocked by his critics, especially when it emerged that there was none of the follow-through action expected from a practising politician.
His appearances in parliament were rare, and he made only three important speeches and interventions in his ten years as an MP. The first was in July 2007 on energy security and the benefits of nuclear power, soon after he had been appointed a general secretary of the Congress. The second was in August 2011, on anti-corruption measures in a Lok Pal Bill – that was the only time he took part in a debate in the first four years of the 2009 government, when the average count for other MPs was 33 times.21 (Sonia Gandhi’s record was no better). The third came in December 2013, again on the Lok Pal Bill.
Marketing experts were commenting late in 2011 that Rahul needed to develop himself as a brand because not enough was known about him and what he stood for.22 As general secretary in charge of the Youth Congress, he had reorganized structures and local party elections, and contributed to other organizational matters. But he had shown absolutely no grip or interest in policy. More importantly, he had shown no continuity of purpose, often vanishing without trace from the public scene.23 He rarely spoke out on major issues or crises, such as the country-wide mass protests about corruption, gang rape and the treatment of women in 2011 and 2012. He made adequate election-style speeches to crowds of thousands but rarely engaged in public debate or gave media interviews. This matched his mother’s reclusive approach, but he seemed far more detached than her.
Rahul continually resisted public invitations from Manmohan Singh to join the government as a minister, and also resisted suggestions that he should play a larger role in the party. Eventually, however, he put his political reputation on the line when he energetically led the Congress party’s campaign in Uttar Pradesh’s 2012 state assembly elections, and developed during 200 meetings as a powerful (though inconsequential) speaker.24 The Congress, however, was routed in what in effect was a rejection of him and his election campaign.25 The party won only 27 seats in the 403-seat assembly, up from 22 in 2007, and its share of the votes went from 8.61 per cent to just 11.63 per cent. It even lost heavily in three parliamentary constituencies (Amethi, Rae Bareli and Sultanpur) that were regarded as the family’s fiefdo
ms where Rahul and Sonia Gandhi and another loyalist had been MPs.
The results showed that Gandhi had little impact in many constituencies that he had visited during the campaign (and in places where he had gone in the previous couple of years). The family had projected their dynastic credentials with aplomb – some reports suggested arrogance – but Rahul was not identified personally with the state’s future. He was not standing as the potential Uttar Pradesh chief minister (that would have been an extraordinarily difficult job, which he scarcely needed to tackle when the prime minister’s post was within his grasp), and he had not developed any brand image. He spent most of his election speeches telling his poor audiences about what they did not have and how awful the incumbent government had been, instead of producing concrete proposals about how he would boost their livelihoods. The result was a serious blow because it underlined his failure to emerge as a capable politician in the years since he became a member of parliament in 2004.
I noticed his lack of presence in an informal atmosphere one afternoon in August 2012 at Delhi’s Visual Arts gallery where he and Sonia Gandhi had gone (with impressively minimal security) to see works by Devangana Kumar, daughter of the Lok Sabha Speaker, Meira Kumar. Although she looked tired and unwell, Sonia had a presence, but what struck me most was how unimpressive Rahul looked on an occasion when he was not performing publicly. He dutifully followed his mother around the exhibition but he showed scant curiosity while she asked questions about the socially significant works (photographs of servants of the British Raj reproduced as large prints on velvet). He did not have any of the presence and charisma that one would expect from a 42-year-old leader.