ELECTIONS '98
COMMENTARY
SPECIALS
INTERVIEWS
CAPITAL BUZZ
REDIFF POLL
DEAR REDIFF
THE STATES
YEH HAI INDIA!
ARCHIVES

Search Rediff

The facade has blown away, Mme Gandhi

By the time this goes into print, or wherever it is that articles on the Internet go, surely Sonia Gandhi would have been persuaded by veteran counsel in the Congress party to disregard the suggestions made by the dissenting troika in her party, to ignore them despite their open defiance of Congress culture as those of my generation know it, and to carry on with the more important task at hand, which is to lead the party to victory at the hustings and become prime minister of the nation herself.

Which, given my countrymen's bottomless ability to self-destruct, their age-old tradition of treating the athithi as god which on occasion we still cling to, and of course, their utter disregard for the land that nurtures them, may well come true come October.

It is possible that despite the ravings of those of us exercised enough over the prospect of having a foreign-born decide our destinies, it will be the voice of reason, caution, erudition and what-not demonstrated by so many columnists that will carry the day. Given that Indians are notorious for not remembering their history, they can be excused that it will be a European-born who will once again be running the raaj from Lutyens' Delhi, after a break of only 52 years.

But then, such is the power of democracy. If the masses plump for something, who are the classes to object, especially since it is this section that has one foot overseas in the form of an NRI son, daughter, brother, sister, in-law, the list is endless.

And till the weekend, this argument will have carried the day, and the night as well. The arguments against Sonia's origins could all be batted, so long as they came from the Opposition camp. The BJP's criticism of an Italian adversary could be put down to Venice envy, and by stretching a point, even Sharad Pawar' criticism of his party president could be attributed to the sour grapes syndrome. But Purno Sangma who, till the other day, was acknowledged one of the few diamonds around, by all sides of the political spectrum, and he Christian to boot. It is no more an ugly Hindu argument. What about Tariq Anwar who, given that his chacha is not exactly flavour of the season has everything to gain by not doing what he has done?

Despite the advent and growth of the electronic media, I find that words capture the magic like no visual can. Perhaps it is that they goad your latent creativity, imaginativeness, for there could be a hidden poet, writer, novelist, in all of us, who doesn't want to be guided to the fare by his nose, as a television news bite does. We are so much more comfortable left to our means, left on our to find our way through the confusing terrain of noun and verb, adverb and pronoun, adjective and conjunction, subject and predicate.

There is so much to be conjured up by the mind's eye by the simple words 'Sonia Gandhi walked out of the CWC meeting in a huff' than actually showing me her stride out. And, since one has been told, that she has walked out in pique, the question naturally arises: now why on earth did she do that?

Seeing her on television, leave the room where the CWC was meeting and walking away to her official residence, which is in the same compound, would not get an answer to that question. Sonia walked away in a huff because obviously she was miffed at something. What could have been the provocation here? That she did not like something that was done. And what was done was that three of her senior party colleagues, one of whom is an undisputed heavyweight, in fact the only one in her party whose image is not sullied by electoral defeat, sent in a letter questioning her qualifications for the highest job in the nation, and these are all facts only words can provide.

At the risk of sounding like a remix artiste, let me pause here to quantify, in words, the Sonia mystique. The aura that she surrounded herself with was an asset so long as she steered clear of public life, tending to the trust set up in her late husband's memory, bringing up the children, going about with life without getting involved in the rough and tumble of governance. A year ago, when she decided to lead the Congress party's electoral campaign, it was felt that she was doing the right thing, giving back to the party, the nation something in return for standing by her family through thick and thin.

Her motives were not suspect then, as they are today. She seemed to have been motivated by a genuine need for a two-party system in the country, realised the dangers inherent to democracy at the demise of the Congress party, and was greeted warmly when she made it her mission to rejuvenate the party.

If she stopped at that, I believe she would have remained the nation's favourite bahu, the kind that mothers across the breadth and width of India wish for themselves. Selfless, motivated, were some of the adjectives used then to describe Gandhi, and all it has taken is a few days of televised appearances to shatter the myth about her, to tell Indians that yes, she is not guided by any lofty principle, at least not beyond becoming prime minister.

The fall of the Vajpayee government, in that sense, was a landmark. It showed that this apolitical woman from overseas, who is credited with having dissuaded her husband from embarking on a political career, was nothing beyond a grabber, who thought nothing of creating a parliamentary mandate where none existed so that she could become prime minister to one billion wretched souls.

The grand plan nearly succeeded, thanks to not a little help from the Communists, those glorious gerontocrats ever committed to national interest, which or whose nation being questions best left unanswered, but for a doughty, compact man from Uttar Pradesh. Suddenly, Mulayam Singh, who doesn't need a certificate in either secularism or patriotism from anyone, least of the communists, is branded a closet communalist, as if the litmus test of his commitment to the cherished ideals of Indianhood being his ability to accept an Italian-born as prime minister.

A clever ploy, to tar him with the BJP brush, that almost succeeded but for Messrs Pawar and Co. The best weapon, in the hands of the thwarted, is vilification, and the tar-brush is out with a vengeance. Pawar's own ambition -- which he has never hid under a bushel -- Sangma's dubious Christian values, and Anwar's marginalisation are held up for all to see, as if the debate could be neutered by red herrings.

But the mirror image is something else: it is of Sonia as a grabbing, seeking, power-hungry politico. Rather than resort to hyperbole and theatrics -- like walking out in a huff -- a better option for the aspiring prime minister would be to heed the suggestion forwarded to her on a platter. Indians may not care for their country, may hate it, but that is no reason for a foreign-born to assume India is up for grabs. Those pushing for her to walk the perilous path she has chosen have not calculated its damage to the nation's already damaged core, but more of that, subsequently.

Saisuresh Sivaswamy