Rahul (3 page)

The political situation in the country at that time and Rajiv’s assassination in May 1991 ensured that the Party shelved the Dikshit report.

Twenty years later, Rahul stands at the same juncture. Aiyar said, ‘The only segment of the Congress organization structure which is genuinely democratic is the NSUI [National Students’ Union of India] and the IYC [Indian Youth Congress] at the insistence of General Secretary Rahul Gandhi.’ For him, Rahul’s formula could propel the Congress back into the dominant status it had enjoyed before the 1990s.

It is critical that the Rahul initiative be extended beyond NSUI–IYC to the Party as a whole. By a combination of democracy from within and reorienting the Party’s philosophy and image to replacing the mai baap sarkar with inclusive governance, I predict with confidence that within a decade we can restore the Congress to national prominence at the Centre and in the states, but not otherwise.

On the other hand, the absence of inner party democracy could gradually weaken the Congress. In Aiyar’s words, ‘Like a tree, you can’t have strong branches and weak roots.’

But how much can be achieved by a man who has stepped into politics at his age? Rahul was already thirty-three when he came into politics. Going by India’s life expectancy, that’s about half a lifetime. He has said that he made up his mind to enter politics the day his father died.

I took the decision when I was in the train with my father’s body [ashes] coming to Allahabad. Coincidentally, it was as we entered UP. I looked out of the train and I saw a lot of people following. And in their faces I saw a sense of loss and I felt that as my father’s son I had some responsibility.

Yet, it took him thirteen years to finally take the first step towards fulfilling that ‘responsibility’. He waited for over a decade to begin his education and do the groundwork that would equip him to understand the complexities of Indian politics. Motilal was twenty-seven when he attended the first Congress meeting, and Jawaharlal’s political innings began around the same age, though some members of the Nehru–Gandhi family have indeed been late entrants into politics. When Indira became Congress president, she was forty-two. While Sanjay was barely thirty when he stood for elections, Rajiv was thirty-six when he entered politics.

Rahul was hardly a boy when he stepped into politics, but he continued to be treated as one even after the age of forty. During an interview in November 2008, when he was asked by Shekhar Gupta of the
Indian Express
what he thought of Rahul Gandhi, the then-BJP president Rajnath Singh, who was in his mid-fifties, quipped, ‘I consider Rahul a
bachcha
[child], so I would not want to say anything about him.’ A few days later, Rahul hit back. He said, ‘I am a bachcha but the fortunate, or unfortunate, thing is, 70 per cent of this country is also bachcha.’ This wasn’t the first time the BJP had called him a kid, implying that he was a political novice and not to be taken too seriously. Before him, Rajiv Gandhi’s cabinet had been labelled
babalog
. The same term is frequently used by the opposition parties to mock the young parliamentarians now led by Rahul. During a verbal duel between Rahul and V.S. Achuthanandan, then the chief minister of Kerala, in the run-up to the 2011 assembly elections in the state, age became the flashpoint. ‘If the LDF [Left Democratic Front] is re-elected, Kerala will have a ninety-three-year-old as chief minister in five years’ time,’ Rahul said in April 2011. A day later, Achuthanandan hit back by calling him ‘Amul Baby’. He said, ‘I need not tell you that Rahul Gandhi is Sonia Gandhi’s son. He has launched a large number of Amul Babies as Congress candidates.’

It’s a clash of generations. While on one hand, the youth brigade is finding its feet in politics, on the other hand, the old brigade is still calling the shots. In Indian politics, youth is equated with naivety. Given that the average age of the Indian political leader is well past fifty, it’s not difficult to understand why. When Rahul entered politics, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh was already seventy-one, Pranab Mukherjee was sixty-eight and P. Chidambaram was fifty-eight. Opposition leaders, too, were getting on in age. L.K. Advani was seventy-six, Sushma Swaraj had already touched fifty-two and Arun Jaitley was fifty-one.

What’s interesting is how Congressmen throw their weight behind the Gandhis, especially Rahul, every time the family faces a challenge from opponents. When Achuthanandan called Rahul ‘Amul Baby’, stalwarts like Pranab Mukherjee jumped to his defence and termed the open attack as ‘uncivilized’. Congress spokesperson Abhishek Manu Singhvi also lashed out, ‘It’s an insult to the entire youth of the country who, in this millennium, are resurgent. This comment is an insult to the momentum of youth power. The Congress has a youth icon and youth symbol in Rahul Gandhi, which no other party has.’

When the Bihar assembly results came out in 2010 and it emerged that Rahul’s formula of doing away with alliances had boomeranged on the Party, Congressmen again formed a protective ring around the family, and, as always, took the brickbats for the mistakes and the failures. In times such as these, the family which owes its political existence to the Party is immediately placed on a pedestal while the Party takes the flak. In the case of Rahul Gandhi, the Party will not allow anyone to damage his image.

Another dynast from the family, however, hasn’t had it this easy. Indira’s other and lesser-known grandson, Feroze Varun Gandhi, stands at the other end of the political and ideological spectrum. Though a direct descendant of the Nehru–Gandhi family, Varun, who is Sanjay and Maneka’s son, has opted for the BJP, the party to which his mother belongs. Rahul and Varun make for starkly contrasting case studies. While one cousin is openly celebrated by his party as its next prime ministerial candidate, the other often stands practically isolated within his party. To a large extent, it boils down to the choices which Rahul and Varun and their fathers or mothers have made. While Rajiv enjoyed the goodwill of the people, Sanjay was almost hated for his policies. While Rahul makes an extra effort to be seen as secular, Varun has done just the opposite. While the Congress would like nothing better than to see Rahul as prime minister of India, the BJP remains distrustful of Varun because he is, at the end of the day, a Gandhi. BJP leaders have often pulled up Varun for his deviation from the party line. In Rahul’s case, any variance becomes the new party line.

Speaking to students at Aligarh Muslim University in December 2009, Rahul said:

You need to step up and the number of leaders coming out of your community needs to go up. Today, you have a Sikh prime minister. Nobody would have ever imagined in a country of over a billion people that we would have a Sikh prime minister. Sikhs are a very small percentage of this country.

Compare that to Varun who, before his first parliamentary elections in 2009, had targeted the community. To the nation’s outrage, he was seen on camera launching a venomous attack on Muslims during an election campaign in his constituency, Pilibhit, Uttar Pradesh. His party, the BJP, makes no pretence of being secular but Varun had played the communal card to an embarrassing extreme. The BJP immediately distanced itself from his hate speech.

Rahul, too, has made his share of controversial statements, like those on the demolition of the Babri Masjid and the making of Bangladesh. But his party has always stood by him. And though he detests being called ‘
yuvraj
’ or heir apparent, that’s the treatment he gets from the Congress. Many view Manmohan Singh as a caretaker who will happily hand over the prime minister’s chair once Rahul is ready.

Despite the initial advantage, Rahul appears to have chosen to go the hard way. Though he comes across as a well-meaning politician, the question is: Will that be enough? His father was also well-meaning but he couldn’t get very far when he tried to transform the grand old party into a professional organization. Rahul is a keen learner and evidently wants to have a good grasp over his subject—Indian politics. But at some stage, he will also have to become a leader. In October 2008, during a visit to Dehradun in Uttarakhand, he was asked whether the democratization process which he had put in place for NSUI and IYC elections would apply to the internal elections in the Congress Working Committee and for the post of Congress president. Rahul was noncommittal: ‘I am general secretary in charge of the Youth Congress. My jurisdiction ends with the Youth Congress and the NSUI. That is where my work is.’ Three years later, not much seemed to have changed. As prime-minister-in-waiting, he will need to look and think beyond the Youth Congress and the NSUI. With India emerging as a global power, can he afford to restrict his politics to the Party’s youth wings and Uttar Pradesh, which he calls his ‘
karmabhoomi
’? At some stage, he will have to show the qualities needed in a national and a global leader, like his grandmother.

In 1966, when Indira was made prime minister of India, socialist Ram Manohar Lohia had called her a
gungi gudiya
(dumb doll). Senior Congress leaders had expected her to be the perfect prop, a compliant prime minister who would do as told. How wrong their judgement proved to be! As she threw herself into politics, Indira showed that she was anything but dumb and soon earned the title of ‘Iron Lady’. For Rahul, too, these are early days. We know where he is coming from; it is where he is headed that matters. Will he show the same political acumen as his grandmother and great-grandfather? Or, will he continue to be a well-intentioned learner performing only under test conditions?

3 November 1984. Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s body lay in state at Teen Murti Bhavan, a colonial-era building that had once been her father Jawaharlal Nehru’s home. She was India’s first woman prime minister and before she was shot dead on 31 October 1984, she had been the head of the world’s largest democracy four times over. The nation was in mourning. Standing to the right of Indira’s body was a fourteen-year-old boy, also in mourning. The events of the last few days had rocked his life in more ways than he was probably aware of at that point of time. Rahul stood there, his gaze intent on Indira’s face. Then, he carefully wiped the dead prime minister’s cheek. That brief display of emotion in public was but a momentary glimpse of the bond which Indira and Rahul had shared.

Later in the day, Rahul walked a step ahead of his father, Rajiv, who had by then been sworn in as prime minister of India. Occasionally, he would turn back to look at his father or touch the plank on which Indira’s body rested—a plank that Rajiv supported on his right shoulder. At Shakti Sthal, Indira’s final resting place, Rahul stood almost hidden behind the flames that consumed his grandmother’s body as leaders from across the world who had gathered for the funeral watched. In many ways, Indira was the one who shaped Rahul’s destiny. From the time he was born till her death, she stayed closely involved with him. It was she who had named him Rahul. Family and friends say that Indira doted on her first grandchild. In a letter to her friend Dorothy Norman soon after his birth on 19 June 1970, she wrote, ‘My grandson Rahul is a darling. He has got rid of his wrinkles and still has his double chin!’ Though her work day as prime minister was packed, she would try to steal time to be with him in the morning before starting work, and would often look him up before going to sleep. Frank writes that, as toddlers, Rahul and Priyanka would sometimes accompany Indira to her morning darshans when she met hoards of admirers in her garden. And, she would often have them sleep in her room at night in order to be with them.

Indira confided in Rahul as she rarely did in anyone else. With him, she even shared her fear of being assassinated. ‘After Operation Blue Star, my mother-in-law knew that she was going to be killed. She knew that her days were numbered. She spoke to my son in particular about it,’ Sonia said in a television interview soon after taking over as Congress president.

Rahul was not at home the morning his grandmother was killed. It was on a Wednesday and at 9.08 a.m. He and Priyanka were both at school. The
Indian Express
reported that, during his visit to Kashmir University in Srinagar in September 2011, Rahul told students:

I was sitting inside the classroom looking out of a window and suddenly, someone came into the classroom and the teacher stopped teaching. He shared something with the teacher and asked me to come to [the] principal’s room. A woman, on phone, told me to reach home immediately. My grandmother had been killed.

As a frantic Sonia rushed the blood-soaked Indira in an Ambassador car to the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) with the prime minister’s aide, R.K. Dhawan, a team of the Delhi police rushed to Rahul’s school in the heart of the city. On the face of it, it seemed the police team was taking him to AIIMS, but a smaller squad quietly took him home to 1 Safdarjung Road.

Indira’s conviction that she would be killed or that her family would come to harm had already affected the lives of those around her, especially that of Rahul. She had become paranoid about the possible danger to his life. In 1981, Rahul had left to study at Doon, a school situated in an idyllic valley nestled between the Garhwal Himalayas and the hills of Shivalik. Rajiv, too, had been to the same school. But in 1983, barely two years after he had enrolled, Rahul had been plucked from that peaceful life and brought back to Delhi. Indira worried too much about his safety, and wanted him and Priyanka by her side. Punjab was on the boil and she knew that the decisions she had taken in the past could well blow up in her face. She feared that someone might kidnap the children to get back at her. In her final months, Indira had also told Rahul and Priyanka not to play outside the gate that separated the garden of their residence, 1 Safdarjung Road, from the path that led to her office.

Indira tried to spend as much time as she could with her grandchildren. On 27 October 1984, four days before she was killed, she took a break from work and went to Srinagar on a day-long trip with Rahul and Priyanka. Two days later, she was off to Bhubaneswar, the capital of Orissa, where she gave her final speech, clearly alluding to the death which she was convinced was imminent: ‘I am here today, I may not be here tomorrow … I shall continue to serve until my last breath and when I die, I can say that every drop of my blood will invigorate India and strengthen it.’

Later that evening, when she returned to Raj Bhavan where she was staying, she got a phone call from Delhi. Rahul and Priyanka’s car had met with a minor accident while bringing them back from school. The children, she was told, were unhurt, but Indira wanted to see that for herself. She cut short her Orissa trip and flew back to Delhi the same night. Rahul and Priyanka were asleep by the time she reached home. She retired to her room only after Sonia assured her that the children were fine. It would turn out to be the last night of Indira’s life.

Rahul’s birth had cemented Indira’s relationship with Sonia. A year before he was born, Sonia had suffered a miscarriage. In those days, Indira was learning yoga at her residence from Dhirendra Brahmachari, a bearded, long-haired swami who later went on to become a key figure in her life. But Sonia was not quite comfortable with yoga during her first pregnancy and, to some extent, blamed Indira’s obsession with it for the miscarriage, writes journalist Rasheed Kidwai in his book
Sonia: A Biography
. Rahul’s arrival acted as a balm, bringing his mother and grandmother closer. Between the two of them, Sonia and Indira had defined their roles very well. There was no room for conflict. Indira ran the country. Sonia ran the household. It was a choice they had made for themselves.

Rahul’s mother was not into politics. Nor was his father. At least, not yet. Though his grandmother was one of the world’s most powerful political leaders of the time, Rahul’s parents had chosen a life sheltered from public glare. Sonia was born to Italian parents on 9 December 1946, near Lusiana, a small town in northern Italy. She grew up as Edvige Antonia Albina Maino in a traditional Roman Catholic family and, in 1964, went to Cambridge to study English. It was here that she met her future husband, Rajiv, in a Greek restaurant. At that point of time, Sonia had only a faint idea of Rajiv’s political lineage. For Rajiv, too, his political background was incidental. He had no intention of letting it define his future. Instead of following in his mother’s footsteps, he chose to become a commercial pilot. As Captain Rajiv Gandhi, he flew the Avro 748 aircraft for the Indian Airlines between Delhi, Agra and Jaipur. It was his first airliner before he graduated to the Boeing. The Avro 748 was a rather uncomfortable plane to fly. Its interiors got unbearably hot in summer. The cramped seating space caused inconvenience to passengers. The cabin air conditioning was far from ideal. For those who could afford to pay for a more comfortable flight, the Avro 748 was clearly not the first choice. Rahul’s father too did not enjoy flying the Avro 748, but he preferred it to politics. An air crash, however, changed the course of his journey and sucked him and his family into the life which they had tried to steer clear of.

On the morning of 23 June 1980—four days after Rahul’s tenth birthday—Rajiv’s younger brother, Sanjay, died in an air crash near Safdarjung Airport in New Delhi. He was trying to perform an aerobatic loop in his new Pitts S-2A, a two-seater plane, when he lost control. The plane nosedived into the ground, killing Sanjay and his instructor, Captain Subhash Saxena. Indira’s politically ambitious son died instantaneously. Sanjay had been Indira’s adviser and the person to whom she turned when faced with a political dilemma. He was the one who had got her to impose the Emergency in 1975—a move that cost Indira her prime ministership in the elections held two years later. The Emergency, remembered as the darkest period in Indian democracy, forced unprecedented restrictions on the freedom of expression and gagged the press, the critical fourth pillar of democracy. It saw Sanjay and his team—‘Sanjay’s Action Brigade’—imposing forced sterilization on men as the ideal way to check population explosion and, in the name of beautification, razing slums to the ground and moving slum-dwellers to the fringes of the city. Amnesty International reported that during the first year of Emergency over one lakh people were arrested and kept in jails without trial. Among those arrested were J.P. Narayan, Gayatri Devi of Jaipur and Morarji Desai. Sanjay’s idea of Emergency violated the very tenets of democracy. It eventually left Indira jobless and without a source of income for the first time in her life when India rose to give its mandate against her in the 1977 general elections.

The defeat forced Indira to move out of her Safdarjung residence to a much smaller house, 12 Willingdon Crescent, which belonged to Mohammad Yunus, an old friend of the Nehru–Gandhi family. He had vacated it for them. It was here that Rahul’s mother and grandmother began to truly trust each other. As Sonia took complete charge of the house—from cooking the vegetables which she had grown in the kitchen garden to planning important dinners—Indira came to rely more and more on her. After her defeat, Indira had become exceedingly cautious about the people around her. With Sonia stepping forward to take control, at least one aspect of Indira’s life remained by and large undisturbed, and she could focus on her work. She set about doing what needed to be done to regain power. Her prime ministership gone, Indira now had more time on hand than she had had in years, and she spent a lot of it with her two grandchildren—Rahul and Priyanka. Her bond with her older son’s family grew.

While her political career was going through an upheaval, it was not entirely peaceful at home, either. Though Rajiv didn’t care much for politics, he did care about the situation in which his mother found herself due to Sanjay’s doings. Despite the many arguments between Rahul’s father and uncle on the issue, Sanjay’s death left a huge void. Even though his ways were anti-democratic and his policies skewed, the fact was that Sanjay had been Indira’s political heir. His death left her shattered. Rajiv and Sonia were in Italy with the children when the accident took place. They rushed back to be at Indira’s side. Sonia later described that Indira ‘for all her courage and composure, was broken in spirit’. She was a picture of despair as she walked up to Sanjay’s samadhi to pay homage, flowers in hand, wearing a white sari draped over her head. Indira still had the fire in her, but the recent storm had left the flames flickering. She was terrified of losing her second son, the pilot. An air crash had claimed her younger one, and now she was scared to let the older one fly.

The focus turned to Rajiv. Indira desperately wanted him by her side. Pressure mounted on him, not just from his mother but also from loyalists within the Congress. Sonia revealed that Rajiv was ‘tormented by the conflict’. In an interview in the documentary,
India’s Rajiv
, directed by Simi Garewal, Rajiv said, ‘I was never interested in politics or a public life. I just wanted to be out of it.’ He said he wanted to be himself, alone, the way it was when he was flying. ‘We had a little family and we were all very happy. With my brother’s accident, things changed. My mother needed help. She felt that she couldn’t get it from anywhere, except from me.’

Years after Rajiv’s death, Sonia spoke of how she had ‘fought like a tigress for our life together’. It was a tough decision but in the end Indira had her way. Sonia, though uncomfortable with his decision to enter politics, stood by Rajiv. ‘We had very long talks, my wife and I, before I gave up flying and joined politics,’ he said in
India’s Rajiv
. ‘She was not too happy about it, mainly because she felt that in a sense she would be losing me. I think that was the crux of the issue.’ Ten months after Sanjay’s death, Rahul’s father announced that he would stand for by-elections from Amethi, formerly his brother’s constituency. On 10 May 1981, Indian Airlines accepted Rajiv’s resignation. The next day, he filed his nomination. With that, his chapter as a pilot ended and so did the private life he had so carefully planned for his family. It was only a matter of time before his wife and children would also find themselves in the rough and tumble of Indian politics.

Sonia wasn’t the only one who questioned Rajiv’s decision to enter politics. In a press briefing, Rahul recalled an incident when he was campaigning with his father. Both father and son had been on the go for days, trying to woo voters. The campaign was to end in four or five days. The last few days had been long and demanding, and both of them were exhausted.

We were walking up the stairs of the plane when I asked my father, ‘Papa, why do you do this? Have you ever thought that you should leave this?’ My father looked at me, surprised, and I asked again, ‘What is this? You didn’t want to do this in the first place. You wanted to be a pilot. Have you ever thought about leaving it?’

Rajiv’s wife and children were clearly not comfortable with his being in politics. Indira’s death had only drawn him deeper into it. Within hours of his mother’s assassination at the hands of her bodyguards, Rajiv was pressed by top Congress leaders to take over as prime minister of India. This time, Rajiv did not wait to take a decision the way he had done when Sanjay died. Sonia—who had taken Indira’s bloodied body, punctured by thirty bullets, to AIIMS that morning—was completely shaken when her husband told her that he was taking up the job. The assassins had fired thirty-one bullets at Indira, of which thirty had hit her. Twenty-three bullets had passed through her body and the remaining seven were trapped inside. These ghastly details would emerge only later. Standing in the hospital, Sonia didn’t know these facts yet. What she did know, however, was that her mother-in-law had been brutally killed and her husband, who had never imagined a life in politics, was going to step into her shoes.