Maneka Gandhi
- Married Sanjay Gandhi in 1974
- As editor of Surya India magazine in 1978, she allegedly targeted Suresh Ram, the son of Jagjivan Ram who had defected from the Congress to join the Janata Party-led government
- Estranged from the Nehru-Gandhi family in 1980
- Fought against Rajiv Gandhi in Amethi and was trounced in 1984
- Won her first election in 1989 as a Janata Dal candidate
- Served as minister from 1989 to 1991 in V.P. Singh’s cabinet
- Re-elected to the Lok Sabha in 1996 and 1998 from Pilibhit
- Served in the BJP-led NDA government as minister of state
- Joined the BJP in 2004 and elected from Pilibhit in the 2004 Lok Sabha elections
- Born in 1980, three months before his father's death
- Attended Rishi Valley School, the British School in New Delhi. Dropped out of School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), London
- Mother introduced him as a political campaigner in August 1999
- Published a collection of his poems, The Otherness of Self, in 2000. It was illustrated by Anjolie Ela Menon and Manjit Bawa
- Joined the BJP with his mother in February 2004
- Attacked Sonia, calling her a "foreigner" in 2004 elections
- Lobbied unsuccessfully for a BJP ticket for the Vidisha Lok Sabha byelection in 2006
- Shot into prominence with his latest anti-Muslim outburst in Pilibhit
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In doing so, he has not just sullied the dynasty’s history but also managed a great subversion and hijacking of the Hindu parivar. So devoid of values is Election 2009 that a descendant of Pandit Nehru now aspires to become the poster boy of rabid Hindutva, a movement fundamentally driven by a hatred for Nehruvian values and the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty. As an RSS old-timer puts it, "Varun Gandhi does pose a great problem for us, though some argue that there is a short-term opportunity."
Varun has certainly managed to disorient and hijack the BJP’s election campaign. Party leaders who had intended to keep the focus on governance issues have now been tempted to make capital of Varun being jailed under the National Security Act (NSA). In that too, there is a great irony. Outlook asked party general secretary Arun Jaitley (who was jailed during the Emergency for 18 months) whether he felt history had turned full circle now that the BJP was attacking the laws under which Varun has been jailed when his father Sanjay Gandhi had incarcerated an entire generation of political leaders under MISA? Jaitley replied good-naturedly: "I don’t hold sons responsible for the deeds of their fathers." But there is concern in a section of the BJP that defending Varun, as the party has been doing, may also repel the middle class and potential post-election allies. Yet again, l’affaire Varun has the BJP trapped between its basic nature and what it aspires to be.
Incidentally, Varun refers to himself as Feroz. His book of poems, The Otherness of Self, identified him as Feroz Varun Gandhi. When he has telephoned this correspondent on occasion, it was to say "Feroz here". He once gave an excellent vegetarian lunch at the home he shares with mother Maneka Gandhi. After lunch, he presented me a copy of Afghan writer Khaled Husseni’s celebrated book, A Thousand Splendid Sons. He also took me on a grand tour of the house, decorated with priceless paintings. On the few occasions I met him after he joined the BJP, in 2004, Varun came through as bright, brash, very ambitious, straining at the leash to make a mark.
He quickly came up with a collection of funny stories about BJP leaders. He looked down on most of them, and after attending his first BJP national executive in Chennai, he vividly described the actions of a famous saffron sadhvi as "jumping up and down at the meeting". His punchline: "I think she suffers from ASS—attention deficiency disorder." On another occasion, he claimed to have inside knowledge of a visit former home minister Shivraj Patil made to Atal Behari Vajpayee’s residence. Vajpayee apparently did not recognise Patil and kept referring to him as Gulzar, the poet-lyricist. It was a genuinely hilarious story.
But he also told tales that had to be taken with a pinch of salt. On one occasion, he narrated the extraordinary story of how he set up a business after "returning from LSE and SOAS". He said it did so well and made crores in such a short time that "though I’m just in my late 20s, I could buy a property in Jor Bagh". One outrageous claim made by Varun when he was in show-off mode was that one of BJP president Rajnath Singh’s aides was being given a retainership by him.
Varun would never talk about his cousins, but it was clear that he was driven by the desire to prove that, unlike Rahul and Priyanka, he could fend for himself. Some of the big talk by the young man just revealed a desperate yearning for centrality and greater importance than he was getting. It had all seemed harmless then. Now, it is clear that Feroz Varun was driven by demons that could push him to any extent.
There was perhaps a great and terrible sense of injustice in being denied a legacy that mother Maneka Gandhi appears to have believed belonged to her son, who was just three months old when father Sanjay Gandhi died in 1980. Four years later, grandmother Indira Gandhi died. Sources closes to the dynasty reveal that there is absolutely no contact between the cousins. Varun has met Rahul and Priyanka only thrice since Indira Gandhi’s funeral—once at Rajiv Gandhi’s funeral, then at Priyanka’s wedding to Robert Vadra, and on his 18th birthday, when Sonia Gandhi met him.
Varun desperately wanted a political career; Rahul and Priyanka have always appeared reluctant and tentative. Historian Ramachandra Guha has an interesting take on the newest chapter in the history of the dynasty—"We now have two sons who are vehicles for their mother’s ambitions. Rahul and Varun are both in a sense being steered by their mothers." About Maneka Gandhi’s role in not only defending her son, but going a step further in his communal game and pointing the finger at a Muslim police officer, Guha speculates: "It does appear that mother and son are one. We do get the somewhat dramatic sense of an aggrieved Maneka, thrown out by Indira Gandhi after Sanjay’s death, grooming her son in a way to reclaim what she sees as the family legacy and a desire for revenge against the other branch of the family."
Maneka must view the offspring of Rajiv Gandhi as interlopers; after all she and Sanjay were the political couple. In his racy book, The Sanjay Story, 1978, Jaico, Vinod Mehta writes about the manner in which "the Sanjay-Maneka marriage wore reasonably well." Even when Sanjay was being hounded post-Emergency, Maneka conducted a spirited defence of her husband. One nugget in the book: The Sanjay-Maneka marriage was solemnised by then registrar of civil marriages, NavinChawla, on September 29, 1974. Chawla is now in the Election Commission, where controversy continues to dog his elevation to CEC, due later this month. He and the two other ECs had a role in suggesting that the BJP should not field Varun after his communal speeches were videotaped and viewed.
B.G. Verghese, former editor of The Indian Express and a chronicler of the Indira years, says that Maneka Gandhi has now resurfaced as the mother of Varun. "We have known her in public life as Sanjay Gandhi’s wife, then as the daughter-in-law Mrs Gandhi did not get along with, after that as an activist for animal welfare, then an MP from Pilibhit. Her journey to the BJP seems to have been solely to promote the career of her son. But now she has not only acted as a mother but also justified the communal nonsense and taken it a step further." Are mother and son just plain desperate to make anything work for them? Verghese responds: "I would not know that, but this story about Varun’s bogus degrees shows a certain clutching at straws and wanting to be bigger than you are."
Will Varun now emerge as a Hindu hero? The BJP will stand by him if he does indeed do well in Pilibhit and creates a ripple effect in neighbouring seats, for the saffron forces are desperate for anything to revive them. But can Varun whip up communal hysteria from behind bars? Many residents in Pilibhit say his rhetoric has not really gone down well. Naresh Verma, who contested the assembly polls as a BJP nominee from Barkhera in Pilibhit, says: "Maneka pushed Varun to this Hindu hardline because she has not been able to provide development here and has a reputation for arrogance." The huge Sikh population that supported her has also apparently turned against Varun for referring to the community as "killers of my dadi."
So, should Varun fail in Pilibhit, then he would really crash-land. The BJP does not really think of him as one of its own and will no longer treat him with any consideration. Again, he and Maneka will have to revert to the sidelines of the party, perhaps to be produced for events when extremist ideology has to be spouted. He will then be remembered as the weird Gandhi who tried to be a Hindu hriday samrat. He would then be a nowhere man.
