Title: The public life
of Sonia Gandhi
Author: M J Akbar
Publication: The Asian
Age
Date: March 19, 2000
An old friend of the
Nehru-Gandhi family, a calm gentleman free of ambition, untainted by prejudice
and provoked largely by sympathy drew a one-line portrait of Sonia Gandhi.
"She is not a natural friend-maker."
The unspoken - with him,
speech is a controlled art form - implication was that while this may be
a virtue for a recluse, it is less than wholesome in a person who seeks
to prosper through a career in public life.
I had a question. Mrs
Indira Gandhi did not seem to those of us who watched her from a distance
to be a natural friend-maker either. How did he explain her success in
politics? She had an instinctive feel for the right option, he responded.
She had a tremendous
array of information rivulets, he added; she always kept more than one
stream available, and believed that truth had more than one dimension.
But friend-maker? I insisted. As an admirer of Indira Gandhi, he could
not quite get himself to admit a weakness.
Instead he pounced on
a strength: she knew how to build instant chemistry with anyone she met.
In a few minutes a visitor would be jelly. Sonia Gandhi tends to build
instant ice with her visitors. The latest reports, from the states that
went to Assembly polls, suggest that even public meetings have become frosty.
There are understandable,
if not entirely acceptable, reasons. When Sonia Gandhi entered politics,
her great strength was the fact that she was apolitical. Her great weakness
now is that she is still apolitical. The party which welcomed the "cleanliness"
of a clean slate, is in deep depression because the slate still remains
clean. They now call it vacant.
By this time - and president
Sonia Gandhi is now a few serious elections old - Congressmen expected
her to have learnt, at the minimum, the alphabet of Indian politics. No
one thought she would pick up much grammar; but no one expected continued
ignorance of the alphabet either.
This characteristic has
long been on display to all those who have the privilege of a private royal
audience with her at 10 Janpath. The weakness has become public with Mrs
Sonia Gandhi's presence in Parliament.
Her deputy in the Lok
Sabha, Madhavrao Scindia, can compensate for her silence up to a point;
but he cannot usurp her role without seeming rude or, worse, implicitly
stressing her incompetence. That is a dangerous thing for deputies to do
to their leaders.
Mr Scindia would be well-advised
to show a little more ineptitude if he wants to retain his job. For the
moment, the result is a charade which Doordarshan broadcasts every working
day of Parliament to the country.
A political party cannot
be inspired by a speech-written leader; and its voters cannot be enthused
by a leader whose eye-contact is with the text rather than them. At least
some of the tension that Sonia Gandhi exudes when she meets the political
class comes from the simple reality that she has nothing to contribute
to the dialogue.
This helplessness becomes
dangerous when mixed with ambition. Once, in those distant days of self-imposed
exile, Sonia Gandhi was merely powerful. Today, power has been fuelled
with ambition. She wants to be Prime Minister of India, and will not let
anything come in the way, least of all the Congress Party.
The manner in which she
has brushed aside any suggestion of accountability after the pathetic performance
of the Congress in the last Assembly elections is an indication of her
ambition. The rules that she applied to her predecessors in the Congress,
P.V.
Narasimha Rao and Sitaram
Kesri, do not apply to her. She is beyond rebuke, above suspicion; she
is both Caesar and Caesar's wife.
It is a fact of political
life that the weaker you are the more possessive you become about power.
You do not have the confidence to make space for another point of view.
Mrs Indira Gandhi, who never veered away from democracy either before or
after, became a dictator only at her weakest hour.
This in turn fed delusions
among her chosen sycophants, with her loyal party president Dev Kanta Barooah
confusing India with Indira. Sonia Gandhi has, with far less justification
than her mother-in-law (there is no comparison), begun to confuse herself
with the Congress. Sonia is Congress and Congress is Sonia.
The nominations to the
Rajya Sabha have been remarkable for their self-centred motivation. She
did not treat the Congress as a political party, as a collection of individuals
and interests through whom she had to string a common denominator; she
treated the Congress as an extension of her personal needs and demands.
Anyone who did or could
have challenged her was denied a ticket, and replaced by a nonentity whose
only qualification was complete subservience to Sonia Gandhi. Sitaram Kesri
was only the most glaring instance.
While it is true that
Mr Kesri never rocked the Rajya Sabha with his intellectual discourse,
the man who replaced him, Phaguni Ram, is unlikely to create history. Loyalty
to Sonia Gandhi was far more important in the selection procedure than
loyalty to Congress, whether you were Phaguni Ram or R.P. Goenka.
No one is certain what
good R.P. Goenka has done to the Congress, but there is a lot of evidence
for how much good R.P. Goenka has done to Sonia Gandhi. Deception was used
where necessary to de-fang actual or potential dissidents.
Vijay Bhaskar Reddy was
told that he would get a Rajya Sabha seat if he, as head of the disciplinary
committee, expelled Matang Singh from the Congress. Vijay Bhaskar obeyed,
and that was the last he heard from 10 Janpath. His promised seat went
to yet another delighted unknown, a film producer who had thrown his son
out of his home after the son married a Dalit. The Rajya Sabha ticket has
become a lottery ticket.
Paradoxically, Sonia
Gandhi is only as strong as Congressmen are weak. She can be confident
about their impotence. As they themselves cheerfully admit, cowardice is
one of the elements that unites the party. There is something about this
family that makes them even more united than they are under other leaders.
There is possibly a case
to be argued in favour of cowardice; perhaps there is nothing else which
will work with as fractious a lot as Congressmen. But even cowardice needs
a justification. Congressmen were happy to advertise their cowardice under
the dominating leadership of Indira Gandhi, but there was a quid pro quo.
Congressmen gave Indira
Gandhi their loyalty; she in turn gave them victory in elections. Even
when she lost an election, which she did but once, she gave them hope.
The equation between Indira Gandhi and her Congress worked because it was
a two-way street.
Sonia Gandhi's tenure
is unusual because she is demanding total obedience after she has sucked
out all hope. No one believes that she can deliver any election victory.
They are quite certain that even where the Congress does win it is because
of circumstances rather than her.
Between the disastrous
general election and the pathetic Assembly elections, the Congress has
actually dropped its share of the vote. The brief bump in Uttar Pradesh,
which promised some redemption last year, has disappeared, and it is certain
now that if the BJP is going to be at all defeated in Uttar Pradesh next
year it will be by Mulayam Singh Yadav rather than the Congress.
The party contemplates
the prospect of five years in Opposition with Sonia Gandhi as its leader
with, once again private, despair. There is no doubt about it; as long
as she is leader, it will be five years in Opposition no matter how abysmal
the performance of the government.
Sonia Gandhi is a problem
on two counts: she is incapable of mounting a serious political challenge
to the BJP; and as long as her ambitions take precedence over party interests
there cannot be any plausible unity among non-BJP parties.
It is that dreaded 272
Syndrome again. Her politics does not revolve around defeating the BJP;
it evolves around making her Prime Minister. There is a significant difference.
Those close to her will not tell her, and those far away have no occasion
to, that even if the government's credibility begins to sink, as it has,
this does not mean that her credibility is on the rise.
Mrs Sonia Gandhi possibly
feels that she has time on her side. She is comparatively young; five years
is not going to hurt her as much as it will hurt most of the members of
the working committee.
Neither her age nor the
age of her colleagues is the issue. The issue is what will the state of
the Congress be in five years. The party has disappeared from most of India.
It would be a tragedy if the only Congress to survive after five years
were the Overseas Congress.