Rahul (6 page)

One thing that I admire about my brother is that he has this ability to be focussed on what he wants to do … Remember the UP election, where he was berated and everything was piled on to him? But he just went ahead with what he thought was right. The other thing that I think is great about him as a politician is that he doesn’t have this thing that he absolutely has to succeed every time. And, he’s very good with things in which, perhaps, in the short term, he won’t succeed but he can see that there is a long-term success. He will work through that short-term failure.

Priyanka also dismissed what people had been saying for years, that it was she and not Rahul who had Indira’s political acumen. Rahul, she said, was the one in the family who had taken after Indira.

She [Indira] taught him and spent a lot of time with him, talking to him. I think Rahul has imbibed a lot of that. His thinking is in many ways a lot like my father’s because he is a visionary like that. He is an institution-builder like my father was but it’s a good mix. His understanding of politics is really very good, much better than he is given credit for and that, I think, comes from my grandmother.

While campaigning for him that year, when she once again dismissed the question of her contesting an election, one reporter asked her if that meant she would never enter politics. Priyanka replied that life and experience had taught her never to say never. Was that a sign of things to come in the near future? With the Nehru–Gandhi family, that possibility cannot be ruled out. After a series of crises hit the UPA government in 2011, the murmurs of Priyanka contesting the next general election grew louder.

Election 2004, meanwhile, clearly established Rahul’s presence in Indian politics. It also saw Sonia emerge as a seasoned politician with an uncanny ability to feel the pulse of the country and stump the Opposition. Having won the election, Sonia Gandhi, as Congress president, had every right to become prime minister of the country. It also seemed obvious that she would. But Sonia chose otherwise. On 18 May 2004, she made a brief speech declining the post. She said the post of prime minister ‘is not my aim. I was always certain that if ever I found myself in the position that I am [in] today, I would follow my own inner voice. Today, that voice tells me I must humbly decline this post.’ As stunned Congressmen tried to understand the import of her words, Sonia added, ‘I appeal to you to understand the force of my conviction. I request you to accept my decision and recognize that I will not reverse it.’

The gesture won her acclaim across the world. The woman who could have been leader of the world’s largest and most dynamic democracy had just given it up. It was a political masterstroke. Sonia continued to head the Party but handed over the prime-ministership to Dr Manmohan Singh, who had been the finance minister in the Narasimha Rao government and was seen within the Party as an intelligent, apolitical person, besides being an eminent economist. With that one move, Sonia won a million hearts and silenced her detractors who had called her a power-hungry foreigner. On 22 May 2004, Manmohan Singh was sworn in as prime minister of India. Sonia continued to hold the post of Congress president. Neither Rahul nor Priyanka had been in favour of Sonia’s becoming prime minister. Rahul was convinced that turning down the prime minister’s post was the right thing to do. It would be seen as an act of renunciation and trump her critics in the Opposition. For Priyanka, it was a big relief. Priyanka recalled how she had ‘one moment of complete terror’ when she saw senior leaders surrounding Sonia in her office asking her to become prime minister. She said she burst out crying and had run to Rahul.

Two years later, Sonia would find herself at the crossroads again. This time, the controversy whether she held an ‘office of profit’ as chairperson of the National Advisory Council (NAC) threatened to sully her image. She announced her resignation at a press conference at 10 Janpath with a resolute-looking Rahul standing to her left. He looked like a determined soldier with his hands clasped behind his back. Priyanka watched from behind a half-open door, barely visible through the curtains. The moment captured the political roles the three had defined for themselves.

Sonia’s decision to resign had found strong support in Rahul. He had felt that it would be appropriate for her to step down and go back to the masses. India values the spirit of sacrifice. That had become clear in 2004 when Sonia shunned the prime minister’s post. The latest controversy now threatened to weaken the gains of 2004. By stepping down, Sonia would again consolidate her image as an upright person who would not compromise on values for the sake of power. Rahul felt a win from Rae Bareli would be a befitting reply to the opposition—and it was. Sonia won with an even bigger margin than she had in 2004. All other candidates had to forfeit their deposits. Rahul played the manager’s role in this election, holding over a dozen public meetings in a single day and staying in Rae Bareli for about three weeks. Confident of Rahul’s work, Sonia only visited the constituency at the tail end of the campaign. Her victory was ascribed to Rahul’s efforts even by the CWC. Priyanka’s role remained limited to a few days of campaigning and being Sonia’s polling agent. On the day of the polling and, later, when the results came out, the focus of the media’s questions to her had shifted from ‘When will you contest?’ to ‘When will Rahul be given a bigger role?’

In the summer of 2008, Om Prakash Bhardwaj—India’s top-notch boxing coach who had been honoured with the Dronacharya Award—received an unexpected call from the Sports Authority of India. He was told that someone from 10 Janpath would get in touch with him. Some time later, P. Madhavan, who had been on the personal staff of the Nehru–Gandhi family for over two decades, called with an unusual request: Rahul Gandhi wanted to learn boxing. Would Bhardwaj agree to teach him?

‘I was surprised,’ said Bhardwaj, who was nearing seventy then. ‘Rahul couldn’t have been planning to enter the boxing ring, of this I was sure. Perhaps he wanted lessons in self-defence, I thought.’ Not wanting to let the opportunity pass, Bhardwaj promptly agreed. As for fees, all he wanted was to be picked from and dropped back at his house. The classes were to take place at 12 Tughlaq Lane where Rahul lived.

India was less than a year away from the next parliamentary elections. The UPA government, led by the Congress, had been in power for four years. The next test was nearing. Politicians in the country had slipped into election gear. Rahul did, too, with boxing lessons from Bhardwaj. The world of politics isn’t very different from the boxing arena. The right moves made at the right time can turn the game around. Underestimating one’s opponent can cost dearly. It is important to get into the mind of the rival and be prepared to strike and to defend simultaneously. Boxing and politics both call for patience, speed, timing and stamina.

Rahul learnt his lesson well. In the Lok Sabha elections that followed in 2009, he retained his Amethi seat by defeating his nearest rival, Asheesh Shukla of the ruling Bahujan Samaj Party, by over 3.7 lakh votes. Not only this, the Congress which had, for over two decades, been reduced to a marginal player in Uttar Pradesh, struck hard and re-emerged as a party to watch out for. Rahul had decided to break into the formidable Mayawati’s territory and the Party won twenty-one of the eighty Lok Sabha seats. Before the elections, an energetic RG, as he’s called within the Party, also spoke at 125 rallies, travelling more than 80,000 kilometres across India in a span of just six weeks—his numbers were higher than those of any other politician in that election. The physical endurance that he had built up during the boxing lessons came in useful.

Bhardwaj, who had decided to observe Rahul very closely not just as a student but as a man who was being touted as the future prime minister of India, said, ‘He was always ready for more. If I told him to run one round of the lawn to warm up, he would run three.’

The boxing sessions were held three days a week on the lawns of 12 Tughlaq Lane. At times, Priyanka and her children would also come to watch Rahul train. Sonia, too, would sometimes sit and watch. ‘One day, Priyanka asked me to teach her as well,’ said Bhardwaj. He explained some boxing moves to the younger and equally athletic Gandhi sibling and was quite taken aback by the punch she threw: ‘It was a beautiful punch, totally unexpected from someone trying her hand at boxing for the first time.’

The scene that summer wasn’t very different from the way it used to be when, as children, Rahul and Priyanka were forced to take private lessons at home due to security reasons after Indira was assassinated.

The day Indira was shot, Rajiv Gandhi was on an election tour in West Bengal. When he flew back to Delhi that day, the road from the airport to AIIMS was lined with security ‘unprecedented in the history of the country’, as a
Time
magazine report noted. Sharpshooters were positioned by the road on either side. Satwant Singh, one of Indira’s two assassins who survived the counterattack by his colleagues, told his interrogators that Rajiv, too, was a target of those who had planned the assassination. As Rajiv settled down in his new job as prime minister succeeding his mother, the task of protecting him and his family was taken away from the Intelligence Bureau and the Delhi police and entrusted to the newly raised Special Protection Group (SPG).

After Operation Blue Star, Indira had been advised against having Sikh bodyguards around her. All Sikh officers posted at 1 Safdarjung Road had been quietly withdrawn. But Indira was not happy with the decision. She said she could not be called a secular prime minister if she took such a step. On her insistence, the Sikh security guards were redeployed at her residence, but with riders. Rameshwar Nath Kao, Indira’s security adviser and the first chief of the Research and Analysis Wing (R&AW), gave strict instructions that no Sikh bodyguard was to be posted near her alone, writes B. Raman, former head of R&AW’s counterterrorism division, in his book,
The Kaoboys of R&AW: Down Memory Lane
. Every Sikh security guard deployed close to her would be accompanied by a non-Sikh officer. Under no circumstances would two Sikh officers be deployed together. Despite the stringent security measures, Satwant Singh and Beant Singh succeeded in manipulating the roster. On the morning of 31 October 1984, the two were positioned not far from each other and in close proximity to the prime minister at her residence. Kao was in Beijing that day. That’s where he received the news of Indira’s assassination. He immediately flew back to Delhi on a special plane arranged by the Chinese government, and later resigned from his post.

Indira’s death was followed by anti-Sikh violence of the worst kind in New Delhi and one that the government machinery did little to contain. At best, it looked the other way. Nearly 3,000 Sikhs were killed in the violence. There was violence in other parts of the country, too, but it was the most widespread and prolonged in the national capital. Rajiv was sworn in as prime minister the same evening. Indira had thought of her Sikh bodyguards being taken off duty as a non-secular act and had ordered them right back; Rajiv, on the other hand, seemed to have reacted more out of a sense of personal loss rather than as prime minister of the nation when he remarked on the violence saying, ‘When a big tree falls, the earth shakes.’ His remark did little to assuage the feelings of the Sikhs first shaken by Operation Blue Star in June 1984 and then by the young prime minister’s inaction against the rioters. These decisions only increased the family’s own security concerns.

With intelligence reports confirming that Rajiv and his family were on the hit list, their security became an issue of immediate concern. So far, the Intelligence Bureau had coordinated and supervised all security matters related to the prime minister. But providing physical security was the responsibility of the police. There was no exclusive, dedicated agency to look after the security of the prime minister of India. On 8 April 1985, the SPG came into being to fill the gap. Its task was to ensure the protection of the prime minister’s family—Sonia, Rahul and Priyanka—as well as of Rajiv Gandhi. A tight security ring was formed around them, cutting them off from the outside world.

The Gandhis also moved from 1 Safdarjung Road to 7 Race Course Road, which has remained the official residence of the prime minister of India ever since. Rajiv was the first prime minister to occupy this address. With security guards spread across the premises, the house practically became a prison for Rajiv’s family. ‘The only space outside our four walls where we could step without a cordon of security was our garden,’ wrote Sonia in her book,
Rajiv
. After Indira was killed, Sonia feared that her family would also meet the same fate that had befallen Bangladesh President, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, and his family. Rahman was assassinated in August 1975 in a bloody military coup along with his wife, three sons (one of whom was barely ten), two daughters-in-law, his brother, a nephew and eighteen other people.

It was in this atmosphere of high security—heightened by Indira’s fear for the safety of her family and later compounded by her killing—that Rahul spent his childhood. The security cover brought with it several restrictions, including homeschooling. The day Indira was killed was the last day that Rahul and Priyanka went to school. For the next five years the children were taught at home. Being an ‘outgoing, sporting type of person’, in Rajiv’s words, Rahul found ways to pursue his interest in sports. He went swimming, cycling and scuba-diving, and played squash. Like his father, Rahul trained at a shooting range in the Aravalli ranges near Delhi, and also learnt to fly.

His interest in sports later earned him a seat in the much sought-after St. Stephen’s College in Delhi in 1989. Rahul could not make it into the college on the basis of his academic score but was, instead, admitted under the sports quota for his skill in pistol shooting. He had enrolled for an honours degree in history. He would come to college accompanied by security guards and was mostly a backbencher in class. Though he had been quite a sport during the ragging session, he seldom spoke during the rest of his time in college. After one year and three months, he dropped out of St. Stephen’s. Like everybody else, the principal of the college, Dr Anil Wilson, could only speculate about the reason for Rahul’s leaving the course midway. He had found Rahul to be a down-to-earth person who had no airs about being a member of the Gandhi family. He felt that Rahul was embarrassed by the tight security that followed him everywhere and that was probably the reason he abandoned the course.

St. Stephen’s was happy to have had the young Gandhi among its students, even if only briefly. But a remark that Rahul made eighteen years later while discussing the state of education in the country left many Stephanians fuming. In October 2008, while addressing students at a university in Srinagar, Rahul said, ‘When I was studying at St. Stephen’s College, asking a question was not [perceived to be] good in our class. You were looked down upon if you asked too many questions.’ Rahul was trying to highlight the weaknesses in the Indian higher education system, where he said that completing the syllabus takes precedence over liberal discussion. But the remark upset the college faculty, students and alumni.

Principal Dr Valson Thampu dismissed the criticism saying, ‘What Mr Gandhi said is his personal experience and there’s no reason to believe otherwise. It can certainly not be correct to make such a generalization about the overall academic environment at the college.’ But he also graciously added that Rahul might have felt so because he was part of the largest class. ‘History has nearly sixty students in every class,’ Thampu said, alluding to the fact that the large number could have reduced personal interaction between the teachers and the students.

However, not every member of the faculty took as kindly to the statement. One teacher said that the college had nearly thirty-six clubs and forums, apart from informal discussion groups which were open to students from across all courses, but Rahul had hardly participated in any of these. Making concessions for the young Gandhi, Thampu said security issues might have restricted his participation in these college activities.

Soon after leaving St. Stephen’s College, Rahul headed for the United States and joined Harvard University as a student of economics. He was twenty years old. He had spent barely a year at Harvard when his father was assassinated. The tragedy took its toll on Rahul’s education. Again, security concerns were cited as the reason for Rahul’s leaving Harvard and moving to Rollins College, a private institute of liberal arts in Winter Park, Florida. The suburban city, which was initially created by rich industrialists as a resort destination, offered the ideal atmosphere to the young man whose life had until now been spent under the vigil of security guards. This time, Rahul completed the course for which he had enrolled and, in 1994, graduated with a degree in international relations, one of the six majors taught at the college.

Rahul went on to attend Trinity College at Cambridge. His great-grandfather, Jawaharlal Nehru, had also studied at the same college from 1907 to 1910 and earned a degree in law. Rajiv, too, had studied mechanical engineering at Trinity. Rahul opted for an MPhil in development studies which he completed in 1995. But in April 2009, soon after he filed his nomination papers from the Amethi constituency in Uttar Pradesh, his academic qualifications were questioned. A newspaper carried a report saying that Rahul had registered for the MPhil course in 2004–05 and not 1994–95, as claimed in his nomination papers. The news report also said that it wasn’t certain whether Rahul had completed the course.

The Congress was furious. The news report, published before the 2009 Lok Sabha elections, was damning and neither Rahul nor the Party was willing to let the matter pass. A legal notice, drafted by Congress spokesperson and Supreme Court lawyer Abhishek Manu Singhvi, was served on the newspaper. It read, ‘Deeply distressed by your wild allegations, sly insinuations and self-serving innuendos, all premised on complete falsehoods and steeped in malice, a legal notice is being issued.’ Attached to the notice was a copy of a letter from Dame Alison Fettes Richard, vice chancellor of the University of Cambridge. The letter said that Rahul had been a student of Trinity College from October 1994 to July 1995 and had received an MPhil in development studies in 1995. Professor Richard wrote, ‘It is extremely unfortunate that a controversy has arisen regarding your degree and we would like to set the controversy at rest immediately.’ She added that Rahul’s conduct at the university was ‘exemplary and he remained a good student throughout’.

Rahul did not return to India immediately after passing out of Trinity College. Instead, he took up a job in London with the Monitor Group, a global management and strategy consultancy firm co-founded by Michael Eugene Porter, a professor at Harvard Business School, and considered to be a leading authority on brand strategy. Rahul worked there for three years, but under an assumed name. His colleagues had little idea that they had the grandson of Indira in their midst. Speaking of the need for privacy that had always eluded him, Rahul said, ‘After studies in the US, I risked my life to do away with my guards to lead a regular life in England.’ His father had felt the same need to get away. After Rajiv became prime minister, when time for himself and his family became a luxury and his passion for flying got pushed back by the momentum of politics, he said, ‘I sometimes get into the cockpit, all alone, and close the door. Even if I cannot fly, at least I can temporarily shut myself off from the outside world.’