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The Rediff Special/Janardan Thakur

The real Mrs Gandhi versus the make-believe

Politics is always about winning, but never more so when party lines and policies have ceased to count.

What is happening in the Congress today is a rather old syndrome that has kept repeating itself, often like a tragedy, but more often like a farce. Looking at Sonia Gandhi and the pathetic politicians called 'Congress leaders' holding on to her sari tails, one cannot help remembering the lady's role-model, Indira Gandhi.

Remember the iron-willing autocrat who cut and trimmed the Constitution to her size and closed down Indian democracy for eighteen months? India is Indira. Indira is India, Dev Kanta Barooah had intoned, just months before she lost power, and he stabbed her in the back.

At some of the most crucial junctures in Indira Gandhi's political career an old Congress war-horse, Dwarka Prasad Mishra of Madhya Pradesh had been one of her closest advisers. He had become her Chanakya, never mind if he had once crossed swords with Jawaharlal Nehru. That had no longer mattered to Indira. With all her love and regard for her late father, hadn't she herself thought rather poorly of him as a politician? She admitted Nehru was a great statesman, but as a politician she fancied herself the greater.

In dire straits there was always D P Mishra's wisdom to draw upon for many years. Mishra had distanced himself from the hurly-burly of politics, and yet he had remained an authentic concentrate of politics. Once it gets into the bloodstream, he would say, politics is even more difficult to get rid of than myodil from the spine.

The 80-year-old Indian Machiavelli lived politics, breathed politics. And now Indira Gandhi had summoned him from his Panchgani retreat to tell her what to do with some Congress leaders who were becoming too big for their size, most of all her former pipe-smoking banking minister from Bengal, Pranab Kumar Mukherjee.

In between his sessions with Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, Mishra would sometimes call me over to his suite in the Madhya Pradesh Bhavan in Chanakyapuri for a little chat. What was remarkable was his deep insight into the principal players in the Congress drama at any given point, especially because of objectivity that had come with his sense of detachment. 'You ought to go a little,' he said one day, 'into the antecedents of all these Congressmen who are ganging up against Indira and Rajiv. You know too well their past, don't you? What credibility do they have?'

Mishra had never been in sympathy with the Nehru-Gandhi dynastic syndrome and had never allowed his proximity to the top to warp his political judgement or distort his convictions. An avid practitioner of the power game, he wasn't totally swamped by it. Towards Indira Gandhi's later days in politics, he had fallen more and more out of tune with her but when she sought her out for advice he never minced his words.

Mishra never failed to warn her against some of the worthless sycophants who hung around her. Sometimes she needed his advice, sometimes she didn't, but it was not this that put him off so much as his belief that the prime concern of Indira had become to hold on to power no matter what the cost. He thought it was different with Rajiv Gandhi, that he was a well-meaning young man who would not mind using his position for the greater good of the country.

'The young man's handicap,' he said, 'is his inexperience. But this is also his biggest strength. People do not blame him for the failures and follies of his mother, or even for her autocratic actions. He has a great fund of goodwill which he ought to use for a wholesale clean-up in the party and the government.' Rajiv, he felt, had nothing to lose but the deadwood. 'Forget about what they can do to him. They are a gutless bunch of so-called leaders.'

Even as I sat listening to the old man's observations, an aide brought in an agency flash saying that the party had taken action against Pranab Mukherjee and several other rebels. A little smile played on the old man's lips, and I couldn't help wondering if he had a hand in it. But his delight was marred by the inadequacy of the action. He thought it was a half-hearted measure. 'They could have been braver.'

But Mishra was more concerned on another score. Indira Gandhi, with all her faults, had a unique quality which her son seemed to lack. Indira could touch the hearts of the people as few other politicians could, and this was an essential quality for any leader. Rajiv Gandhi, he told me, had failed to do this. He came through with a synthetic public mask covering his face. 'The boy must learn how to touch the people's hearts.'

Which is precisely the point that the old Chanakya might have made in the case of Sonia Gandhi. For all one knows, her acquisition of Indian citizenship may be perfectly in order, it may be good enough to make her India's prime minister. But she does not touch the hearts of the people. The trouble perhaps lies with her total dependence on her image-makers and ghostwriters who are quite incapable of manufacturing an authentic Indian leader. It goes beyond copying the Indira saris or the Indira body language.

The public face of a person can be fabricated by people who have specialised in marketing consumer items or manipulating public opinion, but to create the genuine persona of a leader is a different matter. Authentic words are not a coat of paint sprayed on a building that someone else has built.

Undoubtedly, most leaders and public men need to be supplied with material and advice in preparing their speeches and statements, but beyond that a leader has to be on his own. No one, said Walter Lippmann, can write an authentic speech for another man -- it is as impossible as writing his love letters for him or saying his prayers for him.

Whether you see Sonia Gandhi in person or on Doordarshan, you get the impression that he wears a disguise which has been contrived for her. It is the image of a synthetic person. Most people have an intuitive sense of the real and the phoney when they are spoken to, and if a leader fails to create this bond between himself and the people he also fails to put across to them wheat he genuinely is. To quote Lippmann again, anyone who knows what he is doing can say what he is doing, and anyone who knows what he thinks can say what he thinks. Those who cannot speak for themselves are, with rare exceptions, not very sure of what they are doing and of what they mean. The sooner they are found out the better.

The real question to ask about Sonia Gandhi is not what she will do with Sharad Pawar or with P A Sangma (anyone who knows the book she follows knows the answer), but what she thinks and what she stands for. She cannot touch the people's hearts unless she takes off her mask.

The Rediff Specials

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