Rahul (16 page)

The government was already on the back foot when the Parliament session began on 1 August. Yet, at this crucial juncture, Sonia Gandhi was missing, as was Rahul. Congress leader Janardhan Dwivedi announced on 4 August that Sonia was ill and undergoing surgery abroad, which would keep her in hospital and away from party affairs for three weeks or so. Her family was with her, which was why she and Rahul had not been able to attend Parliament. It was also announced that the Congress president had appointed a four-member committee—consisting of her political secretary Ahmed Patel, Janardhan Dwivedi, Defence Minister A.K. Antony and Rahul Gandhi—to look after party affairs in her absence.

Just like in the beginning of 2011, murmurs of Rahul being made the working president of the Congress began. ‘Now, again, after the Congress president’s surgery, Rahul is being asked to take on a larger role,’ said a young Congress MP considered close to him. ‘This time, he is not as reluctant, as you can see. The coming few months are going to be interesting.’ Ever since the UPA-II began floundering under the weight of scams and its own inaction, there have been murmurs of Rahul replacing Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. Sonia’s illness gave rise to rumours that he would replace her soon as the party’s president rather than be appointed working president. Reluctant as ever to take up a party position, Rahul, however, did slowly start looking at party matters beyond just the affairs of the IYC and the NSUI.

As a precursor to the eventual takeover, the Congress decided that he would unfurl the national flag at the Independence Day function at the party headquarters in New Delhi on 15 August 2011. The party office is a busy place on normal days but, during Sonia’s visits, it is sanitized and more security is deployed. The police and the SPG swung into action and made similar security arrangements for Rahul. He attended the function and saluted the national flag wearing a Nehru cap, but made sure it wasn’t him but party treasurer Motilal Vora who hoisted the flag. The function was followed by a meeting of the Congress top brass, called at Rahul’s behest, to discuss the impending crisis that Hazare’s fast would trigger. During the meeting Rahul is said to have insisted that the party spokesperson and the government’s crisis managers had made a mistake by attacking the activist in their media briefings. On the previous day, Congress spokesperson Manish Tiwari had completely misjudged the public sentiment when he alleged that Hazare was not above corruption. Tiwari, faced with a possible law suit from Hazare and having earned Rahul’s displeasure, publicly expressed regret for his statement.

On 16 August, as Hazare prepared to launch his fast against the government, the Delhi Police arrested him on the pretext that it apprehended a breach of peace. With Parliament in session and the government already in disarray, all hell broke loose. Both houses were stalled and there was outrage over the arrest. Fuelled by non-stop television news coverage, the number of Anna’s supporters slowly grew. Even those who found fault with his team’s stubborn insistence on its version of the bill opposed the government’s action of arresting Anna. Home Minister P. Chidamabaram tried to hide behind the plea that the police had acted on their own, apprehending a breach of law and order. But his defence found little acceptance.

By that evening, the Delhi Police requested the court which had sent Hazare to judicial custody in Tihar jail to release him. A triumphant Hazare, however, refused to leave the jail premises till the government agreed to let him proceed with his fast. The government relented and Hazare led a victory procession two days later to the Ramlila Maidan in central Delhi and continued his fast. As criticism of the government increased, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh made an appeal to Hazare, in Parliament, to stop the fast, with the assurance that the government would come up with a strong Lokpal. Hazare and his team relented, but only a little. He insisted on an assurance from Parliament and a resolution that his key demands—including new ones—would be met.

On Friday 26 August 2011, Rahul broke his silence in Parliament. During the zero hour that day, just a few minutes after noon, he made an unscheduled intervention to speak on the Lokpal issue and the swelling protests that had brought the government to its knees. This was the first time since he returned in May 2009 as the Amethi MP to the 15th Lok Sabha that he spoke in Parliament. As mentioned earlier, he was known more for his silence and absence than his interventions in Parliament. For about fifteen minutes, amid protests and interruptions from the Opposition, he spoke on the Lokpal impasse. The BJP protested Speaker Meira Kumar’s special allowance to the Congress leader. As Opposition leader Sushma Swaraj later explained, Rahul spoke without notice and for fifteen minutes instead of the permitted three minutes for an unscheduled intervention. It turned out to be a rather busy day in Parliament. A couple of hours after he spoke, nearly a dozen young Congress MPs staged a protest outside, in an attempt to counter the attack on Rahul by the BJP inside Parliament.

On the face of it, Rahul Gandhi’s zero hour mention in Parliament was at best a few months late or a few hours early—he is an important leader of the Congress and with the Bill having been under consideration for so long, he could have spoken earlier. The tussle with Anna Hazare, who had the backing of a large segment of civil society, had begun months earlier. Even Hazare’s second fast was ten days old by the time Rahul Gandhi spoke. Parliament was all set to debate the fresh demands Hazare had laid out in a few hours; Rahul could have spoken then. Yet, he chose his own time. He wanted to be heard separately and, in a way, set the agenda for the Party. What he said was not in consonance with what Prime Minister Manmohan Singh had said a day earlier—appealing to Anna Hazare to end the fast. Rahul, instead, said that more important than ending the impasse was tackling the issue of corruption.

I believe that the real question before us, as representatives of the people of India today, is whether we are prepared to take the battle against corruption head on. It is not a matter of how the present impasse will resolve, it is a much greater battle. There are no simple solutions. To eradicate corruption demands a far deeper engagement and sustained commitment from each one of us. Witnessing the events of the last few days, it would appear that the enactment of a single Bill will usher in a corruption-free society. I have serious doubts about this belief. An effective Lokpal law is only one element in the legal framework to combat corruption. The Lokpal institution alone cannot be a substitute for a comprehensive anti-corruption code. A set of effective laws is required. Laws that address the following critical issues are necessary to stand alongside the Lokpal initiative: Government funding of elections and political parties; transparency in public procurement; proper regulation of sectors that fuel corruption like land and mining; grievance redress mechanisms in public service; delivery of old age pension and ration cards; and continued tax reforms to end tax evasion.

‘Madam Speaker,’ he announced, in the course of his mention, ‘Why not elevate the debate? Let us take it further and fortify the Lokpal Bill by making it a constitutional body like the Election Commission of India. I feel the time has come for us to seriously consider this idea.’

Rahul then attacked the protestors and their methods, almost putting an end to the rapprochement process.

A process divorced from the machinery of an elected Government that seeks to undo the checks and balances created to protect the supremacy of Parliament, of this House, sets a dangerous precedent for our democracy. Today, the proposed law is against corruption. Tomorrow, the target may be something less universally heralded. It may attack the plurality of our society and our democracy. India’s biggest achievement is our democratic system. It is the life force of our nation. I believe we need more democracy within our political parties. I believe in government funding of our political parties. I believe in empowering our youth, in opening the doors of our closed political system, in bringing fresh blood into politics and into this House. I believe in moving our democracy deeper and deeper into our villages and our cities.

Anna Hazare’s Jan Lokpal agitation seemed to be finding resonance with the youth of India. And young voters moving away could affect the fortunes of the Congress, particularly those of Rahul. A young Congress MP admitted:

Our worry has been that it is the Congress party that has brought important Acts like the rural guarantee scheme, the right to information and compulsory education. Yet, even the youth seem more interested in joining the anti-government protests. We need to go back and tell them what the Congress stands for.

That the protests did not have a specific caste or communal base was a source of greater worry for Rahul. He had been speaking in favour of moving beyond these criteria and had been exhorting voters to choose parties that deliver good governance. Anna Hazare’s movement threatened to take away that agenda and use it against the UPA for delivering poor governance. The first indication that Hazare’s interventions in governance would be multi-pronged came two days later, when he triumphantly broke his fast. He announced that his fast was merely being suspended and the agitation had other goals to achieve. Caught in scam after scam, time was running out for the Congress and the UPA. If the urban middle class, especially the youth, moved away, Rahul’s efforts of years would be negated.

The Party was quick to take its cue from Rahul’s intervention in Parliament. Party spokesperson Abhishek Manu Singhvi said, ‘I want to make it clear that the Congress party has always stood for a comprehensive and strong Lokpal. Indeed it has made its stand clear through its general secretary that it would like the Lokpal to be even stronger, even more elevated in the sense of a constitutional status body.’ Note that Singhvi was not just an ordinary MP, but also chairman of the Standing Committee on Justice looking into the Lokpal Bill.

The BJP, on its part, was quick to run down Rahul’s views. ‘I always believe that when you have no solution to offer to a problem you talk of systemic changes and get into generalizations,’ said Arun Jaitley, leader of the Opposition in the Rajya Sabha. His counterpart in the Lok Sabha, Sushma Swaraj, while speaking on the Lokpal debate on 27 August, sarcastically remarked that Rahul’s intervention was actually ‘an address to the nation’. The BJP was feeling triumphant over the pro-Jan Lokpal protests turning into an anti-UPA sentiment. It hoped to gain from it. In the words of Bhagalpur MP and BJP spokesperson Syed Shahnawaz Hussain, ‘A lot of BJP workers and voters were part of the protests. Though they did not carry the BJP flag, they were our supporters. Inside Parliament, we are the custodians of the fight against corruption. Raja and Kalmadi are in jail because of us.’

On the day Hazare broke his fast, 28 August 2011, party president Gadkari released a statement from Nagpur, addressing Hazare:

We promise you that the BJP will always be ready to rally around you and march forward under your leadership, should the need arise any time in future to fulfil your dream of a truly democratic corruption-free India. Anna, rest assured, we will not let you down in and outside Parliament. Nor will we allow the government to betray you any further.

Gadkari’s offer to let Anna lead and have the BJP follow obviously ruffled a lot of feathers within the party leadership. The party leaders were worried that their party president Nitin Gadkari was too eager to cede the space of the Opposition to the likes of Anna Hazare and yoga guru Ramdev. However, the Congress’s worry, particularly Rahul’s, was much bigger. On the one hand the BJP seemed to be gaining from the movement and, on the other, Hazare seemed to be slowly weaning the youth away from Rahul. The Congress general secretary had tried to adopt the Gandhian model of politics in more ways than one. He had chosen to stay outside the government and encouraged padyatras, himself participating in one. In fact, before he took up his padyatra in western UP, egged on by his open support for the idea, various Youth Congress leaders, including MPs, had undertaken padyatras across the country. The IYC website also lists a code of conduct for padyatras. And Rahul had once even led a silent sit-in in front of Mahatma Gandhi’s statue in Parliament during the first term of the UPA.

At a closed-door Youth Congress brainstorming session for senior functionaries in Thiruvananthapuram, Rahul had asked the participants to emulate the Gandhian methods of people’s movements. ‘Don’t get involved in everything, Rahulji told us giving the example of Mahatma Gandhi. Focus on a few key issues but make sure those issues are important for the people, just like Mahatma Gandhi did, he said,’ recalled an IYC official who had attended the session.

Rahul had fully backed Sonia Gandhi’s renunciation of the prime minister’s position in 2004, on the call of her ‘inner voice’, and her resignation in 2006—acts which were popularly perceived as Gandhian. But, of late, the symbol of peaceful resistance, the Mahatma, had been appropriated by those protesting against the Indian National Congress and its current set of leaders. Hazare’s fast, that lasted for days—with him ensconced in front of a huge picture of the Mahatma—made a strong anti-government statement drawing protestors to the streets. Ironically, the Congress was threatened by a man who wanted to use the Gandhian satyagraha against it. Perceived to be a Gandhian and even a modern-day Gandhi, because of some smart spin-doctors in his team, Hazare could be seen as doing exactly that.

While Rahul followed a passive approach in his politics promising to usher in slow change, Hazare was more aggressive. He dictated a deadline to the government for putting anti-corruption measures in place. Anna Hazare and his team could well be the catalysts of the change Rahul desired. And it appears that Rahul can no longer control the pace of that change. The anti-government sentiment, in effect anti-Congress sentiment, and the exigencies thrown up by Sonia’s illness will decide the speed at which Rahul’s plans for the future are implemented.