Men, Matters & Memories
M L Kotru
To say that the public spat between Indira Gandhi’s grand daughter and her grandson on the battlefield Amethi-Rae Bareli-Sultanpur, considered home territory by the Gandhis since the time of grandpa Feroz and granny Indira was a surprise would be wrong. Do remember that Indira’s sons, Rajiv and Sanjay, as much as the present lot of the Gandhis – Sonia, Rahul and Varun – have kept up the tradition, at least one aspect of it : owning the region as their own. The difference, though, is that Varun, a sitting MP like his mother, Maneka, has hoisted different colours in the battlefield for over 15 years; Maneka has been a BJP MP for almost two decades while Varun has shifted from Pilibhit to Sultanpur for his second term in the Lok Sabha, the shift obviously causing suspicious to arise among the Sonia branch of the Gandhis. Sultanpur is too close to Amethi and Rae Bareli and Varun’s assurances that he does not covet the neighboring constituencies.
With Rahul at the head of the Congress Party poll campaign getting almost nowhere, mother Sonia was forced to step in to retrieve some of the lost ground and in the circumstances it is only natural that Rahul’s younger sister, Priyanka Vadra, an Indira clone some say, should have pitched in albeit in a most unexpected manner.
That the Indira Bahus, Sonia and Maneka, never got along well, is an undeniable fact. That the relations between the younger Bahu and the mother-in-law took a turn for the worse after Sanjay’s death in an aircrash near the Delhi Flying Club is almost a given.
We have also witnessed the unusual roadside scene when Indira Gandhi ordered Maneka and her infant child out of her house. Maneka predictably responded by identifying with anti-Indira factions and even floated one or two of her own outfits, both dying in their infancy.
So there is a history of animosity between the Rajiv and Sanjay branches, though, their mother, who had come to rely heavily on Sanjay during the Emergency declared as a last-ditch effort to save herself from those challenging her authoritarian ways. I remember her defending Sanjay fiercely, a wounded tigress she was, at her Safdarjang Road home soon after the election loss in 1977, and challenging me to tell her “how dare you blame Sanjay for …… what did he do?……… did he perform the vasectomies himself? And why are you bringing in Bansilal (her Defence Minister) …….” This was during the first interview she had granted to me after losing the 1977 poll.
Sanjay, of ‘nasbandhi’ ill-fame, had authored many stratagems to outflank the Opposition challenge, then led by Jaya Prakash Narayan. In the poll campaign of 1977 I had spent a week in Rae Bareli and Amethi, the two constituencies from where Indira and Sanjay were contesting (Rajiv had shown little interest in politics then). Incidentally, today’s scene in the twin constituencies is somewhat similar. Janata’s Raj Narain Singh, a relentless campaigner, had out-maneuvered her seemingly well-oiled campaign with two senior party leaders laying anchor there for weeks.
That Indira lost to Raj Narain is another story, the only similarity being that AAP’s Kumar Vishwas appears to be a Raj Narain clone who, as an instant versifier, has a couplet ready for every occasion, just as Raj Narain would go door to door with his own “song” which many had said appeared to be like reciting quatrains from Tulsi’s Ramcharitmanas.
To that extent I am not sure whether it was just nervousness that prompted Priyanka to publicly accuse her cousin, Varun, contesting from neighbouring Sultanpur, which was a part of Amethi until not long ago, of having defiled the family name. She went on record asking the “elders” assembled at the Munshiganj segment of the constituency the day her mother filed her nomination papers, to bring her erring “brother” (Varun) back to the family path. A BJP supporter uncannily went on record to suggest that Priyanka was probably planning to contest from Sultanpur the next time.
The duel escalated with Vadra reminding Varun that the 2014 elections were not a family tea party but an ideological war. This prompted Varun to tell her she should not cross the limits of decency. Vadra described Varun’s taunt as a betrayal of the family (my father sacrificed his life for the unity of the country, she cried) which she wouldn’t forgive even if her own children were involved.
A signal it was for Varun to assert his own claim to the Gandhi legacy. He was the son of Sanjay Gandhi and nothing more or less. In other words he was a fighter like his father. He had not crossed the Lakshman Rakha of decency and expected the same from his cousins. I learn that Varun is on pretty strong ground to overcome the Congress challenger Amita Singh, the wife of Sanjay Singh, the former Raja of Amethi and a Congress MP.
What I do recall though is that during the 1977 campaign Sanjay Gandhi’s was a hated name in these parts. I remember being told by rural folk of how they would get off buses and bullock carts two to three miles away from their villages, to walk back to their homes through farmlands. Why? To avoid ‘nasbandi’ decreed during the emergency by Sanjay.
Vindictiveness, if you ask me, is a trait the Gandhis have picked up from Indira who in her turn had become vengeful even when her father Jawaharlal was alive. The trait was developed in childhood when she came to suspect that this was so because the aunts looked down on Kamla, her mother, who came from a less affluent Delhi-based Kashmiri Pandit background, unlike the prosperous Nehrus of Allahabad.
This wasn’t exactly a baseless impression, for Kamla did feel a bit isolated in the Nehru household and had confided her feelings to Jaya Prakash’s wife, Prabhawati Devi. I got further confirmation of the “vindictive” part a few years later when I called on an ailing Vijaylakshmi Pandit at her Dehra Dun home.
She, a chatty, elegant old lady, was wheeled into the room by her daughter Chandralekha; still very charming and blessed with beautiful voice and unbounded style. “Y’know Bhai had told me many, many years ago to have a place of my own”. “Nan (that’s how Jawaharlal addressed her), you better leave Delhi, set up home elsewhere, they won’t let you live in peace after I am gone……” Indu had ‘of course’ rarely shown any affection for her and during her Prime Ministerial years; the proclamation of Emergency distanced her even further from her niece. The upshot was that Nehru’s sister, the first chairperson of the United Nations, Ambassador to Washington and Moscow and High Commissioner in London, died almost unsung when her time was up. Indira had not forgiven her. Just as she had not forgiven many politicians, bureaucrats and soldiers who dared cross her path. So be prepared for yet another battle – that of the younger Gandhis, once the dust has settled on the outcome of the 2014 elections.
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