T
hink back if you can to that week in 1995 when the first issue of Outlook appeared. The big story of the day—an Outlook exclusive—was that India's prime minister, Narasimha Rao, wrote dirty books in his spare time. The magazine had procured a manuscript of Narasimha Rao's novel and proceeded to carry the more salacious bits.Narasimha Rao was embarrassed, the nation amused, and when the book finally did appear (as The Insider), the naughty passages had been excised. But even as Delhi's political circles giggled at the thought of the apparently erudite prime minister hitching up his dhoti and proceeding to churn out porn, nobody thought of the woman who had installed Rao at Race Course Road.
By 1995, Sonia Gandhi was something of a political non-entity. In just four years, she had gone from being kingmaker to being regarded as a holdover from another era.
It could have been different, of course. In 1991, when Rajiv Gandhi was assassinated, the Congress party's Pavlovian reflex was to offer the leadership to his widow. But Sonia was in no mood for politics. She had been opposed to Indira Gandhi's decision to induct Rajiv into the Congress and when in 1984, he told her that he was going to accept the prime ministership, she begged him to refuse. "They will kill you," she said. "They will kill me anyway," he responded.
Now, her worst fears had come true. There was no way she was going to follow her husband into the world that had taken his life, just as it had taken his mother's. As Congressmen begged and pleaded, she first suggested vice-president Shankar Dayal Sharma as prime minister and then, when he turned the job down, advised the party to select the elderly Narasimha Rao, a man so evidently frail that he had refused to contest the election on grounds of ill-health.
As Rao settled into Race Course Road, Sonia withdrew from the political world. "I went through a very bad patch emotionally after my husband's death," she told me in an interview in 1998. She concentrated on producing a picture book about Rajiv and worked hard for the Rajiv Gandhi Foundation.
This suited Rao just fine. He had, it soon emerged, never liked Rajiv much anyway. He preferred to see himself as successor to Indira Gandhi, airbrushing the last seven years out of history. His aides made it clear that even if Sonia had played some role in his selection, Rao was now his own man, content to live by his wits and free of the shadow of dynasty.
Oddly enough, Sonia didn't seem to mind. She had no interest in politics, still saw it as the cause of the two greatest tragedies in her life, and didn't really care that, by 1995, she had become a political irrelevance, content to stick to a small circle of very close friends and to make virtually no public appearances.
My guess is that things would have remained that way had Sonia and Rao not clashed over the only thing that mattered to her. After Rajiv's assassination, Sonia became increasingly bitter about the government's cold-blooded decision to scale down his security. When the report of the Verma Commission concluded that Rajiv could have been saved had adequate security been provided, she framed the pages of the report, highlighted the significant bits and put them up on the walls of the Rajiv Gandhi Foundation.
The next step was to find out who was behind the assassination and why. She took an almost obsessive interest in the investigation and was familiar with the minute details of the case. It was not, she said, that she necessarily suspected a conspiracy; more that she felt that India had a duty to posterity to discover the complete truth about the assassination of a former prime minister.
Rao didn't see it that way. His government went out of its way to frustrate the workings of the Jain Commission and argued that further inquiry was pointless; everyone knew the LTTE had done it. Curiously, it then held back files about the LTTE for reasons nobody has ever satisfactorily explained.
Why did Rao do it? Why did he pick on the one issue that mattered to Sonia and refuse to cooperate? If you discount the usual conspiracy theories about the assassination, then only one explanation makes sense: it was his way of belittling Sonia, of telling her that her concerns didn't matter any more.
When Rao's popularity dipped, and both his secular credentials and his personal integrity began to be questioned, Congressmen looked around desperately for an alternative. Because there were no obvious candidates to take Rao's place, Sonia became a rallying point. It was not that she had any interest in politics. But her sense of betrayal made her sympathetic to the anti-Rao forces.
If Sonia had been a political non-entity in 1995, then that situation was to quickly alter. After Rao led the Congress to defeat in 1996, the party installed the sleazy Sitaram Kesri as his successor. And Kesri, in turn, begged Sonia to either join politics or to campaign for the Congress.
By 1997, Congressmen believed Sonia was the ace up their sleeve. All she had to do was to join politics and voters would flock to the Congress. This view greatly overestimated her political appeal. When she did campaign for the Congress in 1997, she drew crowds, but no votes. Nevertheless, as the Congress seemed ready to disintegrate, she was persuaded to join the party.
Why did she change her mind?
The cynical view has always been that she saw the family fiefdom slipping away. Her own version, in the same interview to me, was that she did not want it said that the party that had been served by four generations of her family went down the tube because Sonia Gandhi thought she was too refined for the hustle and bustle of Indian politics.
But Sonia didn't have it easy. Shortly after she took over as Congress president, she allowed herself to be persuaded that A.B. Vajpayee had to be brought down as prime minister even if the instrument of his downfall was a joint initiative by Jayalalitha and the Congress. The government duly fell. But the Congress was unable to provide an alternative, largely due to Mulayam Singh. Whatever chance the party stood in the election that resulted was destroyed by the Kargil conflict. Vajpayee went into the election posing as the victor of Kargil and a grateful electorate returned his alliance to office.
After that, the problems mounted. The great Indian middle class decided India could not be ruled by a white woman. The intelligentsia concluded she lacked political instincts. ('Ms Clueless,' Outlook sneered on its cover, describing Sonia's record.) And the conventional wisdom was that Vajpayee would go on forever while the Congress would drive to oblivion, with Sonia at the wheel.
A
t the Hindustan Times Leadership Summit two years ago, Sonia Gandhi began her speech by referring to her appearance the previous year. "And I bet," she said, departing from her prepared text, "none of you thought I would be standing here this year." The audience laughed delightedly. But her point was valid.It would be an exaggeration to say that the electorate gave the Congress a mandate at the last general election. It would also be overstating the case to argue that there was any special vote for Sonia. The results reflected a disillusionment with the BJP and a sense of exhaustion with the smug tentwallahs who ran the NDA campaign and believed that India was shining, even as farmers committed suicide and the countryside groaned under the weight of debt.
That the Congress was in a position to form the government on its own (with Left support but without the pimps and sleazeballs of the Samajwadi party) came as a surprise to nearly all including, I suspect, Sonia herself. But she may have been less astonished than the rest of us. Near the end of the campaign, I asked her how the Congress was doing. "Not as badly as the BJP thinks we are," she said. Her point was, India wasn't shining and any party that addressed the imbalances liberalisation had brought about would appeal to an important constituency.
After the results came in, most people were astonished that she refused to accept the prime ministership. They should not have been. She had turned it down in 1991. And in 1998, had the Congress formed the government after the Vajpayee ministry fell, Manmohan Singh would have been the prime minister. Nothing in Sonia's record suggested she ever wanted power for herself. Partly, it was because she had seen too much power too close for too long for it to have any appeal. And partly, it may have been because she destroyed the videshi bahu opposition to her at a stroke.
Ever since the government has been sworn in, she has adopted a role that is without precedent in Indian politics. She has taken on the difficult job of running the coalition and managing the complex relationship with the Left. She handles the party. And each time there is a byelection, it is her neck that is on the line.
But she is less interested in government than most people realise. Manmohan Singh does pretty much what he wants when it comes to matters of policy. For instance, nobody cleared India's controversial vote against Iran on the nuclear issue with her. Before Manmohan Singh went into his crucial meeting with General Musharraf at Havana, there was no attempt to get a brief from her. In every significant sense of the term, Manmohan Singh is a full-fledged prime minister, responsible only to his cabinet and his Parliament.
Because people don't always understand the division of responsibilities, eyebrows are raised when she seems uncomfortable with a governmental initiative. Nobody cleared the exact quantum of the last petrol price hike with her. Yet, when the Congress protested, cynics thought it was a drama. Kamal Nath didn't ask her opinion before formulating government policy on sezs. So, when she told the press at Nainital she had reservations about the acquisition of farm land, the government reacted with shock. Once again, cynics wondered if this was all being played out to a pre-ordained script.
Despite the momentary miscommunications and the temporary disconnects, the division of responsibility is working well. Manmohan is the reform-oriented prime minister with a sharp understanding of how the government machine functions. Sonia, who has never held ministerial office, is the grassroots person, convinced that government must do more for those at the bottom of the economic pyramid, those citizens for whom India never shines.
That the arrangement is working seems borne out by the opinion polls. If an election were held today, the pollsters say that the Congress would actually do much better than it did at the last general election. Some polls even give the upa an overall majority, without the support of the Left.
Not only has the regime defied anti-incumbency, Sonia seems finally to have overcome middle-class objections to her white skin. The foreign birth issue no longer resonates through the cities. Mostly, this is because Sonia has demonstrated she has no desire for office, first by turning down the prime ministership, and then, by resigning on the office-of-profit issue.
None of this is to say the government's popularity will endure in the long run—India's too fickle for any such prediction—or that Sonia's current stature will stay unaffected. Public opinion has a way of changing quicker than one expects.
But what's clear is this: in the week Outlook was launched, we didn't even notice Sonia Gandhi As time went on, and Outlook grew in circulation, we wrote her off as the dynastic mascot of a doomed, desperate party. But we were wrong. And we should admit it.
Against the odds, Sonia Gandhi has confounded our expectations and trounced her critics. Despite her own reluctance, the hard realities of Indian politics have ensured that she will never be able to escape her destiny: as part of the dynasty she married into.