Rahul (4 page)

P.C. Alexander, former principal secretary to Rajiv Gandhi, later wrote that he had accidentally walked into a room at AIIMS and found Rajiv hugging Sonia. He heard him telling Sonia that he had to take the job and Sonia begging him not to. ‘I did not want my husband to become prime minister,’ Sonia said in subsequent interviews. ‘I was literally begging him not to. I told him that I didn’t want him to do it because he would be killed. And my husband answered, “I would be killed in any case.”’

Rahul’s father, the man who wanted to have nothing to do with politics, went on to become the seventh prime minister of India. At the age of forty, with only about three and a half years of political experience, he was also the youngest to hold the post. By the age of forty, Rahul would have double that experience in active politics and would be firmly evading questions about the possibility of his becoming prime minister of the country. But for Rajiv, everything happened as though in fast-track mode. Soon after taking over as prime minister, he led the Congress Party to an astounding victory, riding on the sympathy wave that swept the nation after Indira’s death. The Congress won 411 out of 542 seats—the largest majority ever in Indian Parliament.

Veteran Congressmen who had feared that the Party would be left leaderless after Indira, found the perfect candidate in Rajiv. He had a future-oriented approach and, with the kind of numbers he had on his side, it was just all that easier for him to try and bring about the changes he desired and to make serious mistakes. One of the changes he brought about was to modernize the telecommunications industry and connect every part of the country through telephones. In a way, he set the stage for the cell phone revolution which transformed the way India connected with itself and the outside world. India was still a very young democracy when Rajiv became prime minister. It was only thirty-seven years since the country achieved independence after nearly two centuries of British rule. There was an immense amount of work to be done. And the young prime minister, who was brimming with ideas, wanted nothing short of a transformation. He wanted to overhaul the way things had been functioning for decades under the Licence Raj. As he became more and more involved with work, his time with Rahul and Priyanka became limited and this bothered him. ‘If anybody has really had to sacrifice, it’s been the children,’ he once said.

Sonia’s constant fear that something terrible might happen to her husband was also shared by her children. Rahul who, in later years, would occasionally accompany his father during campaigning, said, ‘In those days I also felt it was dangerous for him, but that was my personal view.’ In public, Rahul’s mother tried to conceal her anxiety but wasn’t quite successful. She would be seen standing beside Rajiv, beautiful but aloof. On a particularly cold winter morning of January 1988, when she arrived with Rajiv to attend a Republic Day event in Delhi, her long hair neatly tied back, people remarked how rarely she smiled. Some ten years later, when journalist Vir Sanghvi asked her about this impression people had of her, Sonia reasoned that was probably because ‘she was very often tense’. She said she was traumatized for a long time by Indira’s assassination, and ‘was always worried that something may happen to my husband’. Together, Rajiv and Sonia prepared their children for any such eventuality and also drafted identical funeral instructions for themselves. Rajiv wrote:

In the event of my death as well as that of my wife, Sonia, at or about the same time, at the same place or at different places, within or outside India, our bodies should be brought to Delhi and cremated together, in accordance with Hindu rites, in an open ground. In no circumstances should our bodies be burnt in a crematorium. According to our custom, our eldest child Rahul should light the pyre. It is my wish that our ashes should be immersed in the Ganga at Triveni, Allahabad, where my ancestors’ ashes have been immersed.

As time passed, the sympathy wave which had elevated Rajiv to the prime minister’s position began to ebb and he faced reality checks on various issues. One of them was the Indo-Sri Lanka Peace Accord which he signed with Sri Lankan President J.R. Jayawardene on 29 July 1987, to help resolve the ethnic conflict in the island nation south of India. Years of conflict between the Sinhalas and the Tamils of Sri Lanka had snowballed into a bloody civil war. The Tamil separatists, predominantly the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), had found a safe haven in the south Indian state of Tamil Nadu. The peace accord between India and Sri Lanka spelt trouble for them. Under the agreement, India would send troops—the Indian Peace Keeping Force—into the country to get the LTTE to give up arms. The move antagonized both the Sinhalas, who did not want another country intervening in what they considered to be their internal matter, and the Tamil separatists, who had always believed that India was on their side. On 30 July 1987, the day after the accord was signed, Rajiv was assaulted on the head with a rifle butt while receiving the guard of honour. The assailant was a young Sinhala cadet called Vijayamunige Rohana de Silva. Rajiv ducked in time and escaped unhurt. But this open assault had driven the message home. Two years after the agreement was signed, India started withdrawing the peacekeeping force from Sri Lanka. More than a thousand Indian soldiers had died in a conflict that was not theirs and in an alien country. India had lost more than it had achieved. The bitter civil war in Sri Lanka continued.

These events did not help Rajiv’s reputation. The controversial Bofors gun deal—a major corruption scandal in which several top politicians and defence officials were suspected to have received kickbacks from the Swedish armaments company—further damaged Rajiv’s corruption-free ‘Mr Clean’ image. At the time the Bofors deal was sealed, Rajiv was handling the defence portfolio. The government went into an overdrive in its attempt to control the damage, from raiding the offices of the
Indian Express
, where the news story had first appeared, to issuing denials that only added to the suspicion. Pushed for answers, an otherwise-genial Rajiv exhibited bursts of temper.
India Today
reported in its issue of 15 November 1989 that, on one occasion, when Rajiv was asked why he hadn’t responded to the Opposition’s charges, he shot back, ‘Am I expected to reply to every dog that barks?’ As the government’s credibility took a blow, the Congress found itself staring at disaster in the elections held in November that year. The Party, which had come home with a thumping majority in 1984 under Rajiv, got only 197 seats this time around. The Congress lost the elections and Rajiv, his prime ministership.

As Rajiv struggled to regain his space in power, Rahul, who was now nineteen years old, joined him on the campaign trail. He toured the country with him, going from town to town, village to village. Sonia, along with Priyanka, focussed on Amethi. Though nine years had passed since he first stepped into politics, she still worried about her husband’s safety. A retired colonel of the Indian Army recalled an incident that took place in early 1991 when Rajiv was visiting the Counter Insurgency and Jungle Warfare School at Warangte in Mizoram. From there, he was to fly to Manipur. ‘Rajiv had just left after meeting the officers at Warangte when there was a call from Delhi,’ recollected the officer who took that call. ‘Seconds after the operator put me on hold, I heard the anxious voice of a lady ask, “Where is my husband?”’ It didn’t take the officer long to realize that ‘it was Mrs Gandhi’. He told her that Rajiv had just taken off for Manipur and then heard the click of the receiver being put down. ‘That’s all she wanted to know, that he was fine,’ said the officer.

From the time Rajiv stepped into politics, Sonia lived in fear. It was visible on her face and evident in her voice. On 21 May 1991, her worst fears came true. Rajiv Gandhi was assassinated during a public meeting at Sriperumbudur, a village about 40 kilometres from the city of Chennai. The LTTE had taken its revenge. The dynamic young leader, the reluctant politician, was dead. It was only a matter of time before the baton would be passed on to yet another reluctant candidate, his wife Sonia, and later, to their son, Rahul.

Sonia’s residence was abuzz with activity. Every face wore a smile, every eye twinkled with joy. 24 September 2007 found 10 Janpath in the grip of frenzied excitement. Jubilant Congressmen and Congresswomen made a beeline for the rectangular lawn concealed from the busy party office by a high wall. Among the first leaders from outside Delhi to reach the most powerful address in the country was the chief minister of neighbouring Haryana, Bhupinder Singh Hooda. He came with a bouquet of flowers and a bunch of ministers and MLAs in tow. By then, scores of party workers were already standing behind the railing which ran along three sides of the lawn, eagerly waiting for Sonia, and Rahul, the man of the moment, to make an appearance. It was late in the afternoon and the day was warm, but nobody seemed to mind the heat. Finally, a beaming Sonia appeared from inside the house, Rahul by her side. A thrill went through the crowd. Practically holding Rahul by the arm, Sonia walked briskly into the waiting crowd, the smile not leaving her face even for a second. Dressed in a simple black salwar suit and white dupatta, Sonia stood next to Rahul as supporters from all ranks greeted him. At times, she placed her hand on his shoulder. At other times, she guided him across to meet those on the other side of the lawn. That September afternoon, Congress president Sonia Gandhi was like a mother whose son had passed a prestigious exam or won a coveted award. The big event was Rahul’s appointment as general secretary of the Congress. And Sonia, the woman who had ‘fought like a tigress’ to keep her husband Rajiv out of politics, was thrilled to see her son in the position his father had occupied in the early 1980s. A mother’s pride had replaced the wife’s fears.

Rahul was given charge of the Party’s youth wing, the Indian Youth Congress, and the student wing, the National Students’ Union of India. He was thirty-seven years old and had been in politics for three years as an MP from Amethi—the constituency which his father and, later, his mother had occupied. In the initial years after Rajiv’s death, not many had expected Rahul to take the plunge. His decision to leave the country for higher studies, and then to stay abroad to work, added to the impression that the older Gandhi sibling was not keen on politics. Many Congressmen had viewed Priyanka, and not Rahul, as the natural successor who would one day lead the Party, following in the footsteps of Indira. Right from her childhood, Priyanka had appeared cut out for politics. Though she was only twelve when her grandmother was assassinated, those who saw her at the funeral soon began calling her the future Indira. There was something about her that made her stand out—a visible strength, a personality that immediately inspired confidence—and heightened the resemblance to Indira. Priyanka, the younger sibling, appeared older than Rahul. And it wasn’t just because she stood a head taller than him. As time would show, she was a natural when it came to interacting with people. When she finally did descend on the political arena, albeit as a campaigner and not a candidate, she appeared more accessible than Rahul. She was clearly in her element campaigning in the hot and dusty lanes of Amethi and Rae Bareli, constituencies which have become synonymous with the Gandhi family. Compared to her, Rahul was seen as inexperienced. That perception was not without reason. Priyanka was a familiar face in politics long before Rahul made his first foray. Even in the most trying of times, she had shown the kind of mettle which is rare in someone so young.

When Rajiv was killed in 1991, Rahul was in the United States where he was studying. Sonia was too distraught to deal with anything. The responsibility of taking care of her mother and overseeing the funeral arrangements till her brother arrived from the US fell upon Priyanka. She took charge of the situation. She stood as a wall between her mother and everybody else, refusing access to Sonia’s room. It was she who asked her father’s friend, Satish Sharma, to arrange for her and Sonia to fly to Madras to bring Rajiv’s body back to Delhi. And, it was she who went to receive Rahul when he returned to India on being informed of his father’s death.

Within the Party, Rajiv’s death had raised a leadership crisis. But it didn’t take the Congress long to decide whom it wanted as his successor. By the afternoon of 22 May, within twenty-four hours of the assassination, the CWC decided it would call upon Sonia to become party president. Though Sonia issued a letter saying that, while she was deeply touched by the offer, she could not accept the position, the clamour for her to take charge refused to die. On 11 September, when the Election Commission announced the by-election to the Amethi seat left vacant by Rajiv’s death, the ‘Sonia
lao
’ campaigners brought up her name again. While Rahul and Priyanka both backed Sonia’s decision to stay out of politics, Priyanka was more vocal and critical of those trying to drag her mother into it. ‘We have had enough of politics,’ she lashed out. But politics, and the Congress, hadn’t had enough of them.

After Rajiv’s death, the family pulled back from politics but didn’t really pull out. Though Sonia might have wanted to stay away from active politics then, she was also determined to keep Rajiv’s legacy alive. Initially, she thought she could do so through the Rajiv Gandhi Foundation which was set up on 21 June 1991—exactly a month after Rajiv’s death—to work in areas like science and technology, as well as literacy and health, aimed particularly at women and children. Priyanka became the force behind the foundation’s projects. The government, now led by Prime Minister P.V. Narasimha Rao, helped by treating every project under the Rajiv Gandhi Foundation as a priority. But Sonia’s relationship with Rao didn’t stay smooth for long. After a comfortable beginning, a niggling sense of distrust took root, and the feeling was nurtured by the people around them. Within the Congress, there were leaders loyal to Rao and there were leaders loyal to Sonia. And then there were those waiting and watching to see on which side the scales would tilt. In a sense, the Congress now had two camps. One of them functioned from outside the Party, from 10 Janpath, the house to which the family had moved in February 1990 after Rajiv was ousted as prime minister. It was here that disgruntled members of the Party went to air their grievances against the Rao government. Here, they were always given a patient hearing. It wasn’t long before Sonia’s residence turned into a parallel power centre. Perhaps, the more powerful of the two.

After Rajiv’s death, Sonia, who had always been wary of politics, chose not to shut it out of 10 Janpath. But she stayed away from what was once her husband’s constituency, Amethi, till four years after his death. In those four years, things went from bad to worse in the Congress. Factionalism and discontent among party leaders and party workers grew. And so did Sonia’s impatience with the investigation into her husband’s death. It was widely believed that the LTTE was behind Rajiv’s killing. But there were several other theories also floating around. Nothing much seemed to be coming out of the investigation even though two commissions had been set up to probe the killing.

The Justice J.S. Verma Commission looked into the lapses that had led to Rajiv’s assassination. And the Justice M.C. Jain Commission probed the conspiracy angle. Both Rahul and Priyanka attended the hearings of the commissions. Priyanka, who had stayed back in India while Rahul left the country to study, was a more frequent visitor than her brother at Vigyan Bhavan where the hearings were held. She was the one who accompanied her mother to Amethi on 24 August 1995, when Sonia openly took on the Narasimha Rao government for the tardy pace of the investigation into Rajiv’s assassination. Sonia was a bit nervous as she spoke to the people of Amethi for the first time after her husband’s death. But Priyanka was in her element, smiling brightly and waving cheerfully to the crowd, clearly delighted by the attention her mother was getting. That day at Amethi, Sonia also spoke about the division within the Party. A year later, the friction cost the Congress an election.

The Congress Party’s defeat in the 1996 general elections saw an OBC (Other Backward Classes) leader from Karnataka, H.D. Deve Gowda, emerge as prime minister, and a newly created United Front government come into power. But Deve Gowda’s term as prime minister didn’t last long. The Congress, which was supporting the United Front from outside, withdrew support less than a year after the government was formed. Soon after, on 21 April 1997, another United Front government, now with Janata Dal leader I.K. Gujral as prime minister, came into power. Again, the Congress lent support from outside. And again, in less than a year, the Congress pulled the plug. This time, it did so after it was found that the Jain Commission, which had been investigating the conspiracy behind Rajiv’s assassination, had indicted the DMK and named it an LTTE supporter. The Congress wanted ministers from the DMK, which was part of the United Front government, dropped. Gujral refused their demand and the Congress withdrew support.

Those were years of political instability for the country. Rao’s was the last regime that survived a full term. The era of coalitions was dawning on the Indian political scene. It had to go through a phase of volatility, though, before another government would run a full term. But a greater instability existed within the Congress. The grand old party that had been credited with winning one battle after the other since 1885 was now at war with itself. Leaders big and small—including those who were products of the chaos—were pulling the Party in different directions. It was in the midst of, and perhaps because of, these mutinies within the Party that Sonia entered the scene. She decided to campaign for the Party. Her arrival was formally announced on 28 December 1997—the 112th anniversary of the Indian National Congress. As always, Sonia took the decision only after consulting her children, Rahul and Priyanka. ‘She felt it was her duty to do so,’ Priyanka said many years later, speaking of her mother’s plunge into politics. Sonia also said that she felt she was being ‘very cowardly to sit there and watch the Party go in such a bad way’. She said in a television interview that she owed it to the family ‘which had lived, and died practically, for the Congress Party’.

As enthused Congressmen got down to planning Sonia’s first public meeting, it was Priyanka who was constantly by her side, lending her the much-needed moral and emotional support. On 11 January 1998, when Sonia made her debut as a Congress campaigner at Sriperumbudur—the town where a suicide bomber had killed Rajiv seven years earlier—Priyanka accompanied her. It was a poignant moment for mother and daughter. The crowd was mesmerized by Priyanka whose presence was as electrifying as the vibrant red and saffron sari she wore. She spoke just one sentence in Tamil, asking the people to vote for the Congress, and it sent the crowd into raptures. The Congress instantly knew it had found its star campaigner. The Party was thrilled. Wherever she went, the impact of Priyanka’s presence was the same. Some weeks later in Ranchi, now the capital of the new state of Jharkhand but then a district in the southern part of Bihar, her hand-waving eclipsed Sonia’s eight-minute speech in Hindi. About 20,000 people had turned up for the rally, mostly for a glimpse of the mother and the daughter.

Sonia–Priyanka rallies were big crowd-pullers but did not prove good enough to counter the saffron wave triggered by the Ram Janmabhoomi temple movement. The Gandhi–Nehru clan’s re-emergence in active politics couldn’t quite get the Party the numbers that the Congress needed for its fortunes to turn. Instead, the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) came to power. Atal Bihari Vajpayee became prime minister of India and Sonia took over the reins of the Congress. She had been made Congress president in March 1998. The NDA, however, had a wafer-thin majority which it lost in the fourteenth month when Tamil actor-turned-politician J. Jayalalithaa’s party, All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (AIADMK), withdrew support. The country faced another general election, and Sonia, another litmus test.

The losses of the last elections had been blamed on the earlier Congress president, Sitaram Kesri. But the 1999 elections would be different. Victory or defeat, this time, it would be Sonia who would wear the crown or shoulder the blame. Again, it was Priyanka who went all out to help Sonia as she took on this formidable challenge. Priyanka, who had written all her mother’s speeches during her first campaign, accompanied her once again on the campaign trail. Rahul also took leave from his job abroad to be by his mother’s side at this critical time. The spotlight, though, was clearly on Priyanka who campaigned aggressively for Sonia while Rahul lent his mother moral support.

Priyanka’s charisma rattled even the senior leaders in the BJP. Her first speech of the season was at Siruguppa, a town in the Bellary district of Karnataka. The person pitched against her mother was BJP stalwart Sushma Swaraj, a strong and formidable orator. The BJP had decided to go hammer and tongs, at Sonia’s Italian roots. As planned, Sushma, too, played Sonia’s ‘foreign origin’ card during her election rally at Bellary. Her appeal in Kannada to the people was, ‘
Swadeshi naarige puraskara, videshi naarige tiraskara
(Reward the Indian woman, reject the foreigner).’ The result at Bellary could have been different had Priyanka not arrived on the scene. Days before the campaigning ended, Priyanka landed in Bellary, and Sushma knew she had lost the seat to Sonia. Priyanka chose not to target the BJP or counter its target-Sonia’s-foreign-origin campaign. Instead, she made a brief appeal for her mother in Kannada that hit a chord: ‘
Bellariya nanna preethiya akka thangiyare, ivattu nanna thayiyannu nimmalige kare thandiruve. Ivaru nimmavaru. Ivarannu neevu yella reethiyalli rakshishi gellisi kodobeku
(Dear sisters of Bellary, I have brought my mother to you today. You must take care of her and ensure her victory).’ Later in the evening, she accompanied Sonia in an open-top vehicle through the streets of Bellary, waving and smiling. By the end of the day, the mood at Bellary said it all. Victory was already Sonia’s.

Even when he accompanied Sonia during campaigning, Rahul preferred to stay in the background. At a rally in Andhra Pradesh, unlike Priyanka who would always stand beside Sonia, smiling, waving and acknowledging greetings, he stood behind his mother on the dais and hardly spoke. But the crowd which had spotted him wanted more of him, and he was persuaded to move to the front row and sit next to Sonia. Gauging the mood, Sonia too gently nudged him forward so that people could get a better look at him. Throughout the campaign, Rahul’s presence remained understated. He kept a low profile and rarely spoke to the media. So much so, that at one point of time it was rumoured that he had a speech impediment. In 1999, it was evident that many within and outside the Party saw Priyanka as the natural heir. In early 1999, Congressmen even hoped to persuade Priyanka to contest from Amethi, Rae Bareli or Sultanpur. But she chose to campaign rather than contest.