| As you read this, elsewhere in the sweltering heartland of Indian politics, Rahul Gandhi is hawking hope to the living by invoking the dead. In a campaign managed by history and memory, he alone can read out from a script enriched by ancestry. There is no way any of his antagonists in the fray can beat him in name-dropping—names that are indelible from the national narrative. They swayed the mind of India. They played with its fears and anxieties. They made an emotional covenant with a country in thrall. Ranging from romance to tragedy, thriller to vaudeville, their performance kept Indian democracy in permanent astonishment.  |  | THE MODERNISER JAWAHARLAL NEHRU (1889-1964)
The first prime minister of India was too much of an idealist to be a sloganeering politician | | MOTHER INDIA INDIRA GANDHI (1917-1984)
She would outgrow the wily old men of the Syndicate and set the stage for the cult of Great Helmswoman. | | ACTION HERO SANJAY GANDHI (1946-1980)
He spoke like a man with a modernising mission, and acted like an unrefined streetfighter. | | THE DREAMER RAJIV GANDHI (1944-1991)
He was the techno-savvy gentleman politician who dreamed of taking India into the 21st century. | | QUEEN G SONIA GANDHI (1946-)
After the 2004 victory and the bathetic renunciation drama, she is the paramount leader, the power above the throne. | CROWN PRINCE RAHUL GANDHI (1970-)
He is hawking hope to the living by invoking the dead, reading out from a script enriched by ancestry. | | That is why the back story of the most privileged campaigner in Uttar Pradesh at the moment is more engrossing than his laboured ventriloquism. That is why his much-hyped roadshow should not distract us from the larger spectacles from the sidewalks of yesterday. That is why his words should be read alongside the Family text. That is why, as the Dynasty plays its latest saviour role in a state that nurtured and snubbed it in equal measure, Sonia Gandhi is not the only one who is nervous. Holy ghosts must be watching Campaigner Rahul from the back row. For the greatest of them all, party politics was not always compatible with his good taste and his project in nation building. Jawaharlal Nehru could see the Indian National Congress only as an organisation of change, as a historical instrument of national renewal. He wanted it to be more than an election winning machine. He wanted the party of the nationalist movement to play an equally historic role in free India: “Our party organisation must be something more than a party and must win confidence and respect by patient and self-sacrificing service, and thus live in the hearts of our people.” He would be let down. He put the state above the party. The moderniser of the republic was too much of an idealist to be a sloganeering politician. His stump speeches were more enlightening than rhetorical. If Nehru the campaigner sounded didactic at times, it was because he wanted to bring the India of his mind to the masses. This one from the second general elections in 1957: “Elections will be over in a few days. I am interested in other big issues and want that you should try to understand them. We must understand one another because we have great tasks at hand. We have got an opportunity to do big things after a long time in India. But the government cannot do anything alone. The people must participate in the task of nation building.” Very Manmohan Singh, isn’t it? Nehru was the original philosopher king of modern India who didn’t give in to party politics but redeemed it. And all the while in his shadow, a politician was in the making, the one who would concentrate the national mind with her power and paranoia, her totalitarian temptations and her high-wattage charisma. Nehru may not have been a consummate politician in the conventional sense. He tutored the best. In India’s first general election, Indira was the unofficial campaign manager of her father’s constituency in Phulpur and her husband Feroze Gandhi’s in Rae Bareilly. “Indira has done a man’s job during these past two months, indeed more than that,” Nehru told a friend. And when she contested her first election in 1967 from her late husband’s constituency, she was prime minister—and a sorceress of the mass mind; as a crowd puller, more magnetic than her father. Indira on the stump was too smart to confine her persona entirely to the Nehru aura. She did indeed invoke the Family, though not with a capital F: “My family is not confined to a few individuals. It consists of crores of people. Your burdens are comparatively light, because your families are limited and viable. But my burden is manifold because crores of my family members are poverty-stricken and I have to look after them. Since they belong to different castes and creeds, they sometimes fight among themselves, and I have to intervene, especially to look after the weaker members, so that the stronger ones do not take advantage of them.” She may have succeeded in the myth-making of Mother India, but the party won only 282 seats out of 520, and lost seven states including Uttar Pradesh. Two years later, the party would split, Indira would outgrow the wily old men of the Syndicate and set the stage for the inauguration of the Indira cult as the Great Helmswoman of the East. In the 1971 general elections, held one year early, she swept India by winning 325 seats. It was a referendum on Indira: she was the issue, she was the voice (Garibi Hatao) and she was the face. The Leader would soon come to occupy that uncertain space between awe and adoration. “The President has proclaimed an Emergency. This is nothing to panic about,” she told the nation on June 26, 1975, and India saw its most charismatic politician falling to her totalitarian temptations—and the rise of the reckless son. Of the joint venture of mother and son, the 25-point programme of redesigning India, Sanjay’s five points would eventually magnify the personal flaws of the heir. A beautiful, leafy, slum-less, caste-less India where illiteracy and dowry would be abolished, and where birth control would be strictly implemented—that was Sanjay’s utopia. In practice, it would turn out to be a horror story. Indira’s favourite son was the anti-hero of the dynasty. He had a vision, but his actions undid him. He spoke like a man with a modernising mission, and acted like an unrefined streetfighter. He raged against his mother’s communist allies and spoke in favour of privatisation. He was the first Gandhi who broke the Nehruvian tradition of imagining India in socialist colours. Still, he was his mother’s weakness—and the chosen one. When he was made an executive member of the Youth Congress, it was only the formalisation of his already formidable—and nightmarish—status as the Gandhi after Indira. Emergency gave the mother and son a false sense of immortality. India gave its rejoinder in 1977 when it voted out the family as well as the party. India’s disastrous experiment with the first non-Congress government would only emphasise the inevitability of the Gandhi brand. Indira returned with added glory—351 seats and among the winners more than a hundred Sanjay loyalists—in the 1980 election. As the newly-appointed general secretary of AICC, he was, as before, still an extra-constitutional power centre, soaring high. As his two-seater Pitts S-2A crashed in a Delhi summer morning, it was a death befitting the Icarus of Indian politics. As irony would have it, the elder son, a more experienced pilot, would step in, reluctantly, to help mom. He won the by-election from his brother’s constituency of Amethi and became what Sanjay was not: the gentleman politician. He first proved his organisational skills not in politics but in the preparations for Asiad 82. In accordance with the succession rite in the Family, he too became the general secretary of AICC. Systematic and techno-savvy, he marked a cultural shift: a sober prince surrounded by a loyal legion of smart boys, setting the trend of haute Congressism. As prime minister born out of his mother’s tragedy, Rajiv had an easy entry into the heart of India. “Indira Gandhi is no more but her soul lives. India lives. India is immortal. The spirit of India is immortal,” the new prime minister told the nation. Suddenly, power in Delhi looked young and clean, and when Rajiv spoke about taking India to the 21st century, it sounded so natural, as if his Toshiba laptop had already worked out the road map. He had a dream: “ I dream of an India—strong, independent, self-reliant and in the front ranks of the world.” The dream died young, and Sonia, for a long while, despite the wailing desperation of the Congressmen, refused to assume a role larger than that of the enigmatic First Widow of India, looking genuinely uncertain about her own ability to revive the dream. For her, it was a struggle between Sonia and Gandhi in the beginning. No longer; after the victory of 2004 and the bathetic renunciation drama, she is the paramount leader, the Empress Dowager of 10 Janpath. Rahul Gandhi is taking the story forward. . Index |
