Growing pains for Rahul

on the spot
Tavleen Singh
Rahul Gandhi’s speech at the Congress Party’s ‘Chintan Shivir’ last Sunday was so naïve, so filled with childlike observations, that I feel almost bad having to analyze it. But, as a political columnist I would be letting you down dear readers if I did not since this is the man who the Congress Party has now officially confirmed will be India’s next prime minister if all goes well for them in 2014. He has been the second most important leader of Congress ever since he won his first election nine years ago but at the Jaipur meeting his position was made official and as a result had to give his first real speech as a grownup. So far although he is over forty there has been an aura of youth built around him with the youth wing of India’s oldest political party being his main responsibility.
As he explained in his speech the new responsibilities gave him a sleepless night and he woke before dawn and stepped on to his balcony to ruminate on his changed duties. It was ‘cold and dark’ and he felt alone but not that alone because he knew that ‘the people were standing with him’ and that he now had charge of a political party that was not so much a political party but ‘the biggest family in the world’. But, then he went on to talk a great deal about his real family. About how his grandmother was assassinated by two policemen with whom he played badminton as a child and whom he thought of as his friends. About his father who was ‘the bravest man in the world’ but whom he saw crying for the first time after his grandmother was killed. And, about his Mummy who came to his room, on the evening of the balcony ruminations, to shed tears of concern for him because she understood that power was not a gift but ‘a poison’ and that the only antidote was to never be attached to it. What Rahul appears not to have thought about carefully enough was why she decided to opt for political power instead of for a quiet life of safety and privacy in the first place.
There were other more important things that Rahul appears not to have thought carefully enough about before making his speech. When he was not speaking about his family he spoke at considerable length about the flaws in the Congress Party. He talked of the absence of rules by which it operated and about how power had been centralized at the top and how this had caused good people, young people in particular, to feel excluded from the game of power. What he seemed not to notice was that although he had accurately identified the Congress Party’s flaws what he had failed to observe was that at the core of these flaws was his own family.
Do you begin to see that I was sincere when in the first paragraph of this piece I admitted that I felt bad about having to analyze Rahul’s speech? Unless he did not read it properly before making it surely he should have noticed that the Congress Party in its current form was a creation of one member or other of his immediate family. From 1947 till his death in 1964 Jawaharlal Nehru cast so long a shadow over not just Congress but India that for years people asked: after Nehru who? The question answered itself after the shortest interlude when Indira Gandhi became prime minister in 1967.
Rahul’s late grandmother was so ruthless when it came to dissensions in Congress that she broke the party rather than allow dissent to raise its noisy head. So an (I) for Indira got appended to that half of the party that she inherited and that she turned into a family firm when she used the Emergency to bring her younger son, Sanjay, into politics as her heir. After his tragic death in that plane crash in 1980 she replaced him with Rahul’s Daddy, Rajiv, who until that point had not shown the smallest interest in politics or public service. And, after Rajiv’s tragic assassination in 1991 the tallest leaders in Congress, former chief ministers and cabinet ministers, decided that the only person worthy of leading them was Rahul’s Italian mother, Sonia, who till that point barely even spoke Hindi.
She refused their offer at the time and appointed P.V. Narasimha Rao as her proxy prime minister. It was under his leadership that the liberalization of the Indian economy began but when he failed to win re-election in 1996 Sonia quickly realized that she would need to start playing a more active role to save the family firm. So there was that interlude in which the Congress Party supported governments led by Deve Gowda and I.K. Gujral but that were totally reliant on Congress support and finally it was because of Sonia’s grief that support was withdrawn. She expressed this grief publicly by traveling to Amethi, then the constituency of her late husband, and making a speech in which she accused the government of not being serious about the investigation into Rajiv’s assassination because one of the components of the coalition was the DMK. She later allied with them herself but that is another story.
Her next political step came when the general election was held in early1998 and she took charge of the Congress Party’s campaign by making her first election speech in Sriperumbudur. After that there has not been a moment or a day that has gone by in which the responsibility of the Congress Party has slipped out of Sonia’s hands. After 2004 when a coalition led by Congress unexpectedly defeated the coalition led by Atal Bihari Vajpayee Sonia’s control over the party that she inherited from her husband has grown and grown and grown.
So if Rahul has complaints about the way it has been run and about the centralized nature of power in the party then he should have made them to his Mummy when she came to his room to shed tears over the nature of power. From the point of view of India it would have been much more interesting if instead of ruminating on the hazards of ‘power’ and his party’s internal flaws Rahul had outlined a broader vision for the country and explained what he planned to make this vision come true. Now that would have been a really grownup speech.

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