The Man Behind Sonia Gandhis Hindi

It is said that there is a woman behind every successful man, but the credit for the surprising ease with which Sonia Gandhi is addressing poll rallies in Hindi goes to a man.

Although he is reluctant to admit it, Ratnakar Pandey, the Congress candidate from Varanasi, is widely known as the Hindi tutor of Sonia Gandhi.

Sixty one-year-old Pandey, who recently quit his job as principal of Moti Lal Nehru College in Delhi University to contest the elections, declines to talk about the subject.

I know this is a common query from several mediapersons and my reply to everyone is : no comment, he responds.

 

She is my leader; she is the leader of the party; and tomorrow she will be the leader of the country, is all he is willing to say.

Many here think that Pandey is being cagey because he does not want to give the impression that he was given the party nomination on the strength of his proximity to the Gandhi family.

Persistent requests to reveal more: Well, language is not a problem for Sonia ji. But when his attention was drawn to a recent photograph in a popular English weekly showing the Congress partys star campaigner reading out of a boldly printed text in both Devanagiri and Roman, Pandey shot back: So what, her thoughts are not bought; they are of her own and that is what matters.

And taking strong exception to her being referred as a foreigner, he says: What do you mean? You must realise that she is emotionally even more Indian than anybody else, after all when she fell in love with the son of the prime minister of the worlds largest democracy, she was only 20 and now for more than two and a half decades she has been living every minute like a true Indian wife.

He said, Soniajis biggest contribution is that she has united the Congress party that was otherwise on the verge of fragmentation; so you see when she can bridge the gorges within the party, she can transcend the ordinary barriers of language with ease.

Dating his association with the Indira Gandhi household back in 1966, he recalled how the relationship continued during Rajiv Gandhis time and was continuing even now with Sonia at the helm of affairs.

You see India is a country which looks for its leader only in the Nehru-Gandhi family, and today after a long interval, we have found one, he points out.

while adding somewhat triumphantly, Havent you observed the confidence that has grown manifold since she took on the mantle of the partys key campaigner - and much of it is attributable to the increasing command she has acquired over Hindi.

Pandey, who has been a member of the Rajya Sabha in the past, is contesting the general election for the first time. For long his family and that family of former Congress Working President Kamalapati Tripathi were rivals for political supremacy in Varanasi. More often than not, the Tripathi family left him lagging far behind.

But thanks to his proximity to the Gandhi household, essentially on account of his teaching skills, as one of his opponents grudgingly describes it, it was Pandeys turn now to take the lead in the race for the party ticket.