Newsmaker: Varun Gandhi - trying to not just go along

Gandhi might be viewed well in his constituency but is viewed warily by his party

Cut motions on the Union Budget and Private Members’ Bills are two parliamentary devices that usually don’t get passed. However, they’re also a great way to tell the world, society and political parties what the representatives of the people are thinking. 

Rajiv Chandrasekhar, an independent member of the Rajya Sabha, piloted a Private Member’s Bill, seeking parliamentary endorsement of a motion declaring Pakistan a terrorist state. Earlier, the rights of transgenders were recognised via such a Bill. Now, the Bharatiya Janata Party’s Varun Gandhi has moved one for seeking a right to recall for voters of their representatives if not satisfied with their work.

Gandhi told an interviewer it was not his intention to undermine democracy: “I have been thinking about this for a while. I had to draft it in the right manner, with high safeguards, so that it cannot be misused. I did not want it to be hijacked by people with a vested interest. So, I took a long time thinking about it before drafting it. I wanted a system where the focal point is political resistance if you don’t like something. I did not want a mockery of democracy; my aim was the deepening of democracy.”

Gandhi is an interesting person. The MP from Sultanpur in Uttar Pradesh, he is best-known for  interventions in UP to prevent farmers on the brink of debt default and in danger of committing suicide from slipping off the edge. Using his own resources, Gandhi has set up a system of detecting indebted and impoverished farmer families, going to their aid before government agencies even wake up to the fact that they are in the dark zone. Arranging mitigation and, where that is not possible, along with local elites to intervene and drag these families back from the brink. In a place like UP, this is not easy but because of his interventions, Gandhi has understood what poverty can do. He is an independent and free spirit in the BJP. That is also not easy.

Gandhi might be viewed well in his constituency (he won by a margin of nearly 180,000 votes in the 2014 election, in a seat that was relatively new for him) but is viewed warily by his party. He became a national general secretary of the BJP during the presidentship of Rajnath Singh but when the leadership changed, found himself out of even the state party executive, though the party constitution is clear that MPs are automatically members of their state executive. He has lately been somewhat uninterested in party affairs and was hardly heard of during the 2017 assembly election campaign.

Is he a wrong man in a wrong party? It has been made clear to him that he cannot expect much of a future with a surname that identifies him with the very family that is the target of the BJP’s attack. But, Gandhi is indefatigable. Make no mistake — this Private Member’s Bill is a move of political assertion. More could follow.