archive: The bahu's inheritance
The bahu's inheritance
Jaya Jaitly
The Indian Express
June 28, 1999
Title: The bahu's inheritance
Author: Jaya Jaitly
Publication: The Indian Express
Date: June 28, 1999
For a woman who rejected an offer to head the Congress Party in 1991,
Sonia Gandhi has come a long way in revealing her true colours. In
Indian politics, when a political leader from an illustrious family or
a popular figure, bureaucrat or police officer dies, the custom is to
cash in on popular sympathy and immediately give his widow or daughter
a ticket to fight the next election if no suitable male heirs are
available. Bahus are lower in the order of priority. The woman
concerned might learn to be a good parliamentarian or legislator only
if and after she is elected. The Italian-born head of India's oldest
political party, whose USP is apparently being the bahu of a family
that has "sacrificed" for the country is now taking whatever she can
get and even claiming the prime ministership before having been
required to contest any election.
Photo-ops and family connections don't make much of a bio-data for the
job of presiding over the destiny of a billion people, but consider
the number of cakes Sonia Gandhi has in her possession. In the early
days of her widowhood Manmohan Singh as finance minister gifted away
Rs 100 crore -to her newly set-up Rajiv Gandhi Foundation. An NGO has
to show three years of work before the government grant s it even Rs
10,000. Yet Sonia got this whopping sum without having 0 ask, and had
to enact a hasty refusal to save the finance minister embarrassment in
Parliament. Since then the RGF has received facilities and vast
amounts of money from the government. This includes a cheque for Rs
50 lakh for its own charitable work, which the concerned ministry was
then shocked to see being presented to the Spastics Society of
Calcutta, headed by aunt-in-law Sudha Kaul. Free tickets from Air
India for participants of RGF seminars and courtesy visits by foreign
dignitaries were thoughtfully facilitated by the MEA. On its
governing body are scam-tainted people on bail. Donors had their
contributions frozen when their scam links became public.
Invitations to Rashtrapati Bhavan and functions in the Central Hall of
Parliament even before being installed as head of the largest
opposition party also ensured photo-ops. A widows' home in Hardwar, a
project initiated and sponsored by the Ministry of Welfare this year,
suddenly found Sonia Gandhi inaugurating it. A photo-op that was
desperately sought by K. Karunakaran and V. George was a visit to
Sonia Gandhi by disabled children who were part of a Ministry of
Welfare float on Republic Day this year. The concerned agencies
refused, despite repeated calls, including one from the bahu herself.
The Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts quietly changed its
constitution to make Sonia Gandhi Chief Trustee for life and removed
the provision stipulating that the President would be its visitor for
a 10-year term, even though it is a fully government funded
institution. This convenient sleight of hand provides her with an
extra private secretary who is also given government accommodation.
The legacy of copyrights is stranger still. The government's
Publications Division holds the copyright of prime ministerial
speeches, including those of Jawaharlal Nehru. But in the case of
Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi, the copyright vests with the family
and its heirs. Similarly, the Nehru Memorial Fund has published
Letters to the Chief Ministers among the selected works of Jawaharlal
Nehru. The bulk of the writings are from government files, but have
been published by a private trust headed by Sonia Gandhi. The
royalties go to "the family."
Teen Murti House is a wholly government-owned property, yet it houses
the Nehru Memorial Fund, the Nehru Cambridge Trust and the head office
of the Kamla Nehru Hospital in Allahabad, all of which are private
trusts, naturally headed by Sonia Gandhi. The Nehru Planetarium was
built by the Nehru Memorial Fund on government land without formal
permission. Naturally, the bahu is also the President of the Nehru
Memorial Museum and Library, although these are also wholly
government-funded bodies. The Congress was allocated prime land by
the government to build its head-quarters on Akbar Road in New Delhi.
The Rs 9 crore building was never occupied by the party. It is now in
the possession of the RGF.
Sonia Gandhi can -hardly belabour the sacrifices of the family of
which she is now the prime beneficiary. Unfortunately, Indira
Gandhi's sacrifice was a result of her disastrous Punjab policy.
Rajiv Gandhi's owed to the Gandhi family legacy of first training the
LTTE and then sending in the IPKF to destroy it. Disastrous policies
cannot result in sacrifices, no matter how tragic the assassinations
were. Neither the sacrifice of Mahatma Gandhi nor those of thousands
who died in the freedom struggle have encouraged their descendants to
lay claim to so much.
Apart from such material legacies, Sonia has taken over the Congress
presidentship in an ugly coup and obtained the leadership of the
Parliamentary Party through a hasty amendment in the party's
constitution. And in April she told Jyoti Basu that she wanted to be
prime minister.
The supporters of the "foreigners have been accepted in India" theory
constantly harp on the examples of Mother Teresa and Annie Besant, as
if Sonia Gandhi belongs to the same philanthropic tradition. Because
the RGF is flush with government and private funds, photographs
regularly appear of Sonia Gandhi giving ambulances to the sick and
wheelchairs to the handicapped. However, Mother Teresa's life was one
of total self sacrifice. She did not play party politics on the side
or lay claim to the prime ministership. Annie Besant's remarkable
work was done on her own strength and commitment without any country
paying the astronomical costs of her upkeep. Sonia Gandhi claims the
precedent of a Besant, the service of a Mother Teresa and prime
ministership besides. Quite a claim from a person whose public
interaction consists of 10-minute speeches consisting of trite cliches
written by ghosts. She has neither demonstrated the intellectual
ability of the khandaan's Nehru nor gained the political experience of
the saas, Indira. As for pati Rajiv, there is no harm in remembering
that as prime minister in his only stint in politics, he earned his
party a defeat in the general elections of 1989. Just being married,
producing heirs and being widowed is indeed the role of most Indian
bahus, but they have not yet become the criteria for any of them to
claim such a vast inheritance, including the prime minister's chair.
(The writer is General Secretary, Samata Party)
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