by Barkha Dutt
‘No one in my family would ever stop me from contesting an election. My brother, mother and husband would whole-heartedly support me if I wanted to contest,’ she told me in 2014. ‘My brother has expressed to me many times that he thinks I should contest.’
The enmity between Narendra Modi and the Gandhi family was not merely ideological or political; it was visceral and often deeply personal. While the rhetoric used against political opponents is always overstated and often ugly, the exchanges between the Gandhis and Modi had always been of an entirely different order. In 2004, while campaigning in that year’s national election, Modi taunted Sonia’s foreign origins while he was on the stump by likening her to a ‘Jersey cow’ and her son to a ‘hybrid’ bacchada (calf). During the 2007 Gujarat state elections, Sonia called Modi ‘Maut Ka Saudagar’ (Merchant of Death), alluding to his alleged role in the Gujarat riots of 2002.
There were no across the aisle moments of brief friendliness or social civility in Parliament—at least not until after Modi became prime minister. The Gandhis were friendly enough with other BJP politicians. For instance, BJP leaders Arun Jaitley and Sushma Swaraj had shared some moments of cordiality with Sonia, despite their political combativeness. Right after the 2014 elections, when Jaitley was hospitalized for surgery, Sonia picked up the phone and called his wife Dolly to enquire after him. Sushma Swaraj had moved well past the shrillness of her 2004 election threat to shave her head if Sonia Gandhi ever became prime minister and was frequently photographed with her, chatting amicably. As Opposition leader she had even offered respects at Rajiv Gandhi’s samadhi. (This was well before a controversy in the cricketing world in 2015, involving businessman Lalit Modi, would sour relations between the Gandhis and Swaraj.)
The rift between Modi and Sonia and her children went beyond political differences. In some ways, both tapped into the other’s political and psychological insecurities. Beyond the overt ideological clashes, especially when Modi was still Gujarat chief minister, the Gandhis epitomized the culture of entitlement that had treated people like him as unwelcome outsiders. They were the anglicized sophisticates who had been born into power and affluence in contrast to his own humble origins. With his slogan of ‘Congress Mukt Bharat’ (that aimed to make the Congress party an irrelevance) Modi was determined to overthrow the political royalty of the Gandhis. He was the citizen who had come to take a kingdom.
Apart from the stated ideological differences, the Gandhis were unused to Modi’s brand of confrontational politics; so far even Opposition leaders had been awkwardly polite around them. Modi’s contempt for them, on the other hand, was undisguised—he once called Sonia ‘Pasta Ben’. His consecutive victories in Gujarat made it impossible for them to ignore him. But trapped between offence and defence, they were unsure about how to tackle him.
Sometimes they worried that they made him stronger every time they attacked him directly. During one of the Gujarat state elections, photographs of Sonia and Rahul Gandhi simply went missing from Congress election posters and banners so as to not draw direct comparisons of style and personality between them and Modi. On the other hand, there were times they would lurch in the opposite direction and make direct, personal attacks, such as dragging his marital status into the campaign—these would often boomerang on them. In this battle, they didn’t know whether to duck his precisely targeted sniper shots or retaliate with mortar fire. Modi had changed the rules of war and the Gandhis—certainly the daughter—understood that even in victory he would be an inscrutable opponent to formulate a strategy against. Had Modi not been the BJP’s prime ministerial candidate—had it been, say, Rajnath Singh or L. K. Advani—Priyanka would not have jumped headlong into the campaign of 2014.
But here we were, listening to the self-professedly ‘reclusive’ sister urging her brother to begin talking more to the media. Or so, I thought. When Rahul Gandhi ambled in, his terrier Piddi at his heels, I got the distinct impression that he was more persuaded than willing when it came to being interviewed. His party had just been reduced from three terms in power in the political capital to an embarrassing single-digit presence in the Delhi state assembly. But if he was dismayed or nervous about either the recent defeat or the imminent debacle in the general elections (that exit polls were prophesying), he betrayed few signs of that anxiety. The electoral rise of bureaucrat-turned-crusader Arvind Kejriwal had already occupied the alternative democratic space that he had long wanted to grab. Yet he spoke casually, confidently and somewhat complacently about his plans for the future.
In the notoriously fickle drawing rooms of Delhi, I had often heard Rahul being described as not-too-bright (in far less charitable terms). But the few times I had spoken with him I had thought otherwise. He was well read, respectful of academic expertise, and keen to meet specialists to mine their minds. His problem was not that he had read too few books—it was that he had a clinical, statistical approach to a profession that was often about instinct and human connections. He was like a man looking for the exactitudes of mathematics in the mysteries of poetry. His ways befuddled many of his own party colleagues. In Congress circles there was the hilarious story of the Punjab Member of Parliament who thought the only way he’d get Rahul’s attention was if he sent him a regular supply of research papers. So he hired a group of MBA students just to draw up documents that he could send to Rahul. He didn’t understand a word of them—something he freely admitted to—but he had given the researchers standing instructions. ‘Write about issues like malnutrition. That’s what he likes.’ Of course Rahul never got back.
In some ways, he was like his technocrat father Rajiv who had been forced into politics as a rank outsider without any understanding of either his own party’s power dynamics or that of the system at large. Except that, unlike his father, whose career had had its genesis and abrupt end in violent assassinations—first that of his mother, then his own—Rahul had the luxury of several years of authority without any responsibility. He neither became a minister in the government, nor took charge within the party.
Amartya Sen, the acclaimed economist, had a telling story about Rahul. Once over dinner in Delhi, Sen told me that when he was Master at Trinity College in Cambridge University, Rahul came to meet him, apparently on Sonia’s advice. In Sen’s recollection, Rahul—who studied at Trinity under the name of Rahul Vinci—‘was not interested in politics at all’. Nor did Sen believe at the time that the young man was suited for it. The impression of his lack of interest in his profession and his unsuitability for it persisted over the years amid whispers that it was his mother who had insisted on him entering politics over his more charismatic sibling in order to sustain the family legacy.
In contrast to his mother, however, who was advised by old-style back-room strategists who were much more instinctive than studied, Rahul Gandhi’s aides seemed to be detached, America-returned analysts who weren’t exactly sure of what to make of the rough and tumble world of politics. His mother relied especially on the subtle political cunning of Ahmed Patel, her political secretary, who kept a low public profile, but virtually ran the party from the small, covered annexe verandah of his Delhi residence. Ministers of the UPA government used to vie to get an appointment with him; during Cabinet expansions they would worriedly call different journalists and ask us if ‘AP’ had given any hints about what ‘Madam’ had in store for them. AP, or Ahmed Bhai as he was universally referred to, had friends in every party. In political circles, it was widely known that it was his phone calls to a section of the BJP that had stopped that party’s leadership from creating a storm over the issue of Robert Vadra’s business deals in Parliament in 2011. (It was eventually not the BJP but Arvind Kejriwal who would question Robert’s business dealings at a press conference a year later.) Patel, who slept in the morning and worked by night, also made it a point to keep in regular touch with journalists, handing out dribs and drabs of gossip and information to keep us engaged. His boss, Sonia Gandhi, may not have been media-friendly, but her pol
itical secretary was acutely aware of how the media worked and would sometimes test possible public reactions to party decisions by leaking information in advance to journalists.
By contrast, Rahul’s chief of staff, the St Stephen’s and Wharton educated Kanishka Singh, or ‘K’ as he was more commonly known, was as opaque and inaccessible as the man he worked for. Forget talking to journalists, older party leaders resented him for being a hurdle to their being able to meet with Rahul; weeks could go by before most of them could get an appointment. Other key members of his team—whether it was Sachin Rao or Mitakshara Kumari—all had the right pedigree and degrees (Harvard, MIT and Oxford) but clearly lacked the emotional quotient needed to pick up the pulse of the people.
I listened to Rahul expound on his alternative model for the Congress while his sister sat by his side on the sofa letting him dominate the conversation, occasionally looking up with a smile. He did not deny the malaise in the Congress was severe enough to make it almost moribund. The rot within, he suggested, needed surgical excision—‘open heart surgery’ was the phrase he used—and repair. It was almost as if he planned to raze the party to the ground and then rebuild it. He said he didn’t agree with half the things the Congress leadership said and did. His comments were confusing. Was he suggesting that he did not see eye to eye with his mother or just her band of advisers? Or that the institutionalized resistance to change was so entrenched in the Congress, admittedly a status-quoist organization, that even he, the would-be king of the fiefdom, could not issue a firm diktat for change? This helplessness, whether feigned or felt, was unconvincing.
I’d heard this a couple of years earlier as well, in 2012, during the assembly elections in Uttar Pradesh when Rahul had fronted the campaign with unflattering results. At the time, as I’ve said earlier, a small group of us had been invited for coffee—which was being dispensed from a Café Coffee Day machine placed on the pocket lawn of his house. In response to our questions on why he did not build a more permanent, grassroots network in India’s most politically significant state, one from which his father, grandmother and great-grandfather had made their way to the prime ministership, he had claimed an absence of authority to take his own decisions. He said he had expressed a wish to run as the Congress candidate for the post of chief minister—an attempt to prove that the party’s commitment to the state was serious and long-term—but the ‘higher’ authorities wouldn’t hear of it. So he quietly fell in line.
Now, in 2014, just a few months before what would be the biggest electoral wipeout for his party since its inception well over a hundred years ago, he was clearly distancing himself again—at least in private—from the Congress way of doing things. I asked him whether he was ready to take Modi head-on by becoming his party’s official candidate for prime minister. There was a moment of awkward silence and a quick look exchanged between the siblings before he replied saying that the decision had been left to people ‘more senior’ than him—in other words, his mother. Eventually, of course, the party would avoid the direct confrontation with Modi; his mother decided that Rahul would not formally run for the post of prime minister.
As Rahul spoke to me of lowering the entry barriers for politics and empowering MPs with real authority to frame policy—he could be quite garrulous in private—I got into an argument with him over the evident contradictions in his formulations. These went well beyond his (until then) tardy attendance and glaring lack of participation in Parliament. He spoke of democratization but represented entitlement, he speechified on creating a level playing field but was the only one who did not even have to compete for a spot on the team. I argued that Kejriwal had already appropriated one of his pet slogans—to make politics a professional option for regular, middle-class folk.
Kejriwal and he were almost exactly the same age—youthful men in their early forties. Yet, their journeys were a study in contrast. Kejriwal’s trajectory was that of any young man or woman from a middle-class family who was industrious and well-educated. He had competed hard to secure admission to the prestigious Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), and had then moved on to a career in the bureaucracy before spearheading the Right to Information campaign for greater transparency and an anti-corruption crusade before joining politics. Only the last part—politics—was atypical of tens of thousands of Indians like him.
Kejriwal’s life stood for everything Rahul claimed to be, or more accurately, wanted to be. But the circumstance of birth alone cast him in the role of political dynast rather than liberal democrat. I asked Rahul why he did not do something more dramatic (and democratic)? Why didn’t he declare, for instance, that there would be a vote for the post of party president and he or his mother would not be among the candidates? Surely, he needed a radical fix if he wanted to compete with the badge of proud self-made-ness that bonded the otherwise different personas of his principal opponents, Narendra Modi and Arvind Kejriwal?
He had no convincing answer. He believed that if his family vacated the leadership position the Congress would splinter. ‘If my mother and I were to leave for the hills tomorrow, the party will not survive,’ he told me. He made this seemingly arrogant statement in a perfectly dry and matter-of-fact voice. Opting out, he said, was not an option for him or his mother, at least not in the near future, not until there were fundamental structural changes to the party. He may well have been right but it spoke to a grim reality. A party that still treated one family as veritable royalty, no matter if it was the adhesive that held them together, was out of sync with changing, contemporary India. It’s not that other parties were not replete with dynastic leaders—in particular, many smaller regional parties, like the Shiv Sena, Samajwadi Party and Akali Dal, were effectively family-owned companies—but Rahul’s two principal challengers, Modi and Kejriwal, had no political sugar daddies. Their extraordinary journeys resonated with the average Indian whereas Rahul’s offered no points of easy identification.
When I met him Rahul appeared to already know that the Congress was not going to win the election. Their ten years in power, from 2004-2014, had been marred by corruption, controversy and a crisis of leadership. Curiously, I got the sense he was almost looking forward to electoral defeat—so he would finally get the opportunity to recast the party in a mould that he had designed. There may have been other reasons he was unconcerned about the disaster that loomed ahead. Either it was because he had no idea of the scale of the loss; or it was because he had worked out that even if Modi were in power for a decade, he would only be fifty-three years old at the end of that period. He had the subconscious arrogance of a man who had age on his side and who took it for granted that he would be prime minister one day.
They would never have admitted to it, but it was this right-to-rule mindset that would prove to be fatal for both the party and its first family. The Congress was the last to wake up to the currents of change that threatened to sweep it away. For forty-nine of India’s sixty-eight years of independence, the Government of India had been a Congress government. On the eve of the 2014 elections, the party’s long years in power had lulled its leadership into believing that they were indestructible, that nobody could threaten them beyond a point. The Modi juggernaut that swept the 2014 polls would soon dispel this notion, and show them how wrong they were.
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It was under its most powerful prime minister—Indira Gandhi—that the Congress party’s institutional decline began. The political dominance of the Indian National Congress was derived from India’s freedom struggle. Founded in 1885, it began as a political movement. Its influence expanded when Mahatma Gandhi took the battle for independence to the British; the organization he fronted, and was the mainstay of, was soon everywhere in the mind and soul of India. Jawaharlal Nehru, like thousands of others, joined the Congress in response to Mahatma Gandhi’s call. Even after independence was won and the Mahatma was murdered by Nathuram Godse, the Hindu zealot with links to the RSS (between 1930 and 1934), and the Congress became the party that rule
d India, it was anything but a family firm; it was democratic and made plentiful room for spirited dissent. Like India itself, the Congress party was a patchwork of personalities and ideologies.
Today, sycophantic phrases like ‘high command’ are used by Congress workers to describe its central leadership, and chief ministers are appointed from Delhi by a tiny cabal of decision makers. Then, even towering personalities like Nehru had to contend with the demands of strong provincial leaders, especially those known famously as the ‘Syndicate’, who in turn guaranteed votes and ensured that the electoral dominance of the party remained unchallenged. Nehru called the Congress an ‘agent of historic destiny’, but even he understood that for this high ideal to be a reality he had to be pragmatic and make peace with the relative political independence of the state satraps. It may have restricted the centre’s authority but it allowed for a certain efficiency and stability in governance.
All this was well before the age of coalitions and fractured political mandates of the late twentieth century. For several years after Independence, Indian politics was defined by one-party dominance. Yet, as political scientist Rajni Kothari has captured in his seminal work, Politics in India, within the Congress ‘System’ there was plenty of open disagreement—this did not allow the leadership to become authoritarian. Kothari explains how in the years between 1947 and 1967 it was within the Congress, and not between the Congress and Opposition parties, that the major debates of Indian politics took place. All strands of opinion, from the left to the right, found voice in a party that was then a microcosm of the country. This plurality within the party not only made it more representative; according to Kothari, it also ‘provided flexibility and sustained internal competition’.
