When Murli Deora resigned as minister for corporate affairs in 2011, he gave no reason for stepping down. Weeks later, at his Lodi Estate residence, when asked why he had quit, he exclaimed, as if surprised at being asked the question: “Father and son could not both have been ministers.” Son Milind Deora was made minister soon thereafter.
Rabri Devi of the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) has made the same sacrifice. To get daughter Misa Bharti a portion of the family settlement (and get her out of the hair of her two sons, Tejaswi Yadav and Tej Pratap Yadav, both ministers in Bihar) she opted to give up her claim on a Rajya Sabha seat and sent Misa to the Upper House instead.
Sonia Gandhi is following the same route. The mantle of taking decisions is passing on to son Rahul Gandhi. Earlier, she would be the one to take all organisational decisions, impressing them with her own stamp. Now, any paper sent by Rahul Gandhi is simply countersigned by her. More and more people are being sent to the Congress vice-president for consultations. The younger Gandhi is functioning with a degree of autonomy that many, like Himanta Biswa Sarma, resent.
That was not always the case. There was a time when Sonia Gandhi would know more about the party than everyone else. Congress General Secretary B K Hariprasad was put in charge of the Bihar campaign of the party ahead of the Assembly elections in November 2010. He had a meeting with the Congress president just before the list of candidates was finalised. She asked him to read out the names. When he came to one, a Muslim woman candidate, Gandhi asked him to stop. “Be careful of that one. She’s a mole sent by the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD),” she told Hariprasad, naming a Muslim RJD leader.
Hariprasad was taken aback but made a note of this. When he had finished reading the names, Gandhi asked him how many seats he thought the Congress would win. “At least 30, madam,” Hariprasad said confidently. She laughed. “I will be happy if we can get 10,” she said. The Congress got four seats. And Hariprasad spoke to the “mole”. She confessed that she had been asked to seek a Congress ticket by her mentor in the RJD. He had told her she would never get an RJD nomination, so she should go to the Congress.
When Rahul Gandhi was elevated to become general secretary of the party, the initial checks and balances on political moves made by him came from his mother. A member of Parliament from a southern state had an interesting story to share: “At times Rahul, too, would take the help of others to persuade his mother (to take a certain decision). There were quite a few occasions where Rahul Gandhi would send an emissary like me to Soniaji with some suggestions. We would go and tell her that such a decision could be very useful. Soniaji would listen but then her reply to us used to be: ‘go and tell Rahul that he is wrong’.” The sheepish Congressmen would then troop back to Rahul Gandhi to report that it hadn’t worked. It was suggested to her that Sonia Gandhi favoured a Japanese management style: wide consultations, respect for tradition, accommodation of contrary views... “That’s another way of saying I do this because I don’t know what I want to do and want others to tell me what I should do,” she observed.
The Nehru-Gandhi family used to consider the prime ministership in New Delhi as its family seat, having provided the head of government for 38 of the first 42 years of free India. But no member of India’s most well-known political family was prime minister for the next 19 years. Instead, it is the Congress presidency that has become the family seat. As the country has moved from a virtual single-party rule in a multi-party democracy to frequent changes of (usually coalition) government and now an oppressive single-party majority again, the Gandhi family mission now is to buttress and build the Congress as a cohesive political force, while prime ministers come and go.
As Sonia Gandhi prepares to hand the baton over to Rahul Gandhi, he seems to be presiding over a party with dwindling fortunes. The clamour for Priyanka Gandhi Vadra is rising — and along with that, attacks on the family so that her future in formal election politics is demolished before it even begins. For Sonia’s style of management, Rahul’s leadership and Priyanka’s endurance, this is a new test. What happens next? That will decide if the Congress legacy is to survive.
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