Sonia Gandhi
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Image: indiatodayimages.com
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THE LEGACY: Contrary to what people say, Sonia Gandhi never ever wanted to be Prime Minister
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AME: Sonia Gandhi
BORN: Dec. 9, 1946 at Lusiana, Italy
MARRIED: Rajiv Gandhi in 1968
LOST: Mother-in-law Indira Gandhi and husband Rajiv to assassinations
GAINED: The post of president of a rudder-less Congress
ACHIEVED: Return of the party to power after a full term, a feat last seen in 1984.
ADOPTED: A refreshing style of politics that avoids personal attacks, jingoism and divisive talk
Should a politician rate higher on the Forbes List at the start of her party’s second term in office than she did near the end of its first? Well, if you go by the usual pattern of political careers, then probably not.
Experience shows us that politicians — especially in India — are usually swept in on a wave of expectations. Invariably, they fail to deliver on these expectations. They fall out with their colleagues. The press turns against them. And at the very next election, the voters turn them out.
Nothing like that has happened to Sonia Gandhi. Her career is living proof that sometimes history is no guide when it comes to predicting the trajectory of political careers.
For a start, Sonia Gandhi was never swept into power on the back of a wave. Few people expected the Congress to win the 2004 election. When it did emerge as the leading party in a hung Parliament, the general reaction throughout the country was less one of jubilation and more one of consternation.
So, there were no expectations. The editorial writers all declared that it was not that the Congress had won the election, more that the BJP had lost.
More important: Nobody really understood Sonia Gandhi. Nobody knew what she believed in. And nobody knew what a Congress government would be like.
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That she should be perceived as being so powerful today demonstrates that behind the enigma was a woman with strong views and a deep understanding of what needed to be done to safeguard the interests of those whom she saw as her primary concern: The poor, the disadvantaged and those at the margins of Indian society.
When she was elected, few people guessed that these were her real concerns. Instead, they made the mistake of thinking of her as just another dynastic politician with few real core beliefs.
Reluctant Politician
You cannot really understand Sonia Gandhi unless you understand why she joined politics. It is no secret that she was bitterly opposed to her husband Rajiv’s entry into the political arena.
Her basic fear was that her husband would be killed, just as his mother had been. Eleven years ago, in the first TV interview she ever did, I told her how we saw her in the days of Rajiv’s prime-ministership. She always seemed tense, distant and unsmiling.
“You saw me when we were in public,” she explained. “And every moment when we were in public, I thought Rajiv would be killed.”
When what she feared most did happen, she made a conscious effort to move away from politics. She wrote and compiled two books on Rajiv and intended to write books about her real interests (she was very keen to do a book on trees of India, for instance) when a steady stream of visitors and old colleagues of her husband told her that the Congress, under Sitaram Kesri, was on the verge of annihilation.
In that same interview, she had offered the explanation for her entry into politics that would widely be quoted in the years to come: “I could not walk past the portraits of my husband, my mother-in-law and her father and not feel that I had some responsibility to try and save the party they had given their lives to.”
It sounds almost a little too pat now but even then I had no doubt that she meant it. Most assessments of Sonia Gandhi ignore how close she was to Indira Gandhi and how she still worships — there is no other word for it — her late husband. She could not bear that their deaths had been in vain. She felt that, in whatever way she could, she had some obligation to try and save the Congress.
Despite the doubters, the sceptics and the hecklers, she has never diverted from that aim. Contrary to what people say, she never ever wanted to be Prime Minister. When the Vajpayee government fell in the no-confidence motion and it seemed probable that the Congress would form the next government, she told the President to swear in Manmohan Singh.
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