A visit from a daughter

Many in this generation might dismiss this as old hat, but like many other nameless Indian families, the Nehru-Gandhi family and jails have had a very special connect. Several families were separated by long sentences, prison visits being the only means of communication between young children, wives and jailed family members in pre-independence India. Letters From a Father to His Daughter, that Pandit Nehru wrote for Indira Gandhi, only epitomised the conversation between an anxious parent and his only daughter, from behind jail bars. It is that flicker of similarity between those letters and now, another daughter wanting to have a conversation with the last truth involving her father, that makes news of this meeting more poignant.

In a larger framework, as historians like Eric Hobsbawm have never tired of saying, the 20th and now the 21st century have demonstrated themselves as among the most violent periods in human history. We have had two world wars, there is a war in our own continent in Iraq and Afghanistan swallowing many lives. Not to mention the Holocaust, apartheid, the Palestinian tragedy and other instances of social violence closer home. In each of these instances, meeting victims, those who escaped by the skin of their teeth and those who were witnesses to the violence or were brought up on stories of what befell their forefathers, it is the same story of seeking “justice” and, mostly, a bitterness that is hard to let go of. The tragedies that men and women go through seem to get a new lease of life as they mould the thinking of survivors. The century gone by has been generous in handing out causes to virtually all of us, who then think we have reason to harbour grievances, and our own personal and very dark shadows.

There are, as a consequence, groups whose political mobilisation is all about nursing shadows and making them grow longer. Whether it is about “injury” to Hindu pride at temples smashed hundreds of years ago, “alienation” that some Muslims groups trumpet, or of “purification” as a desperate leader invokes soap ads to ensure that not a single Dalit family dares look out of its burrow for alternative ways of seeing.

What is also relevant in this context is the call for the hanging of a convict, Mohammed Afzal, for the attack on Parliament. The shrill calls on the street demanding that he be hanged is a contrasting perspective on how “revenge” is seen. In this case, it is all about an eye-for-an-eye and using it as a key expression of patriotism and being one of the “tough” guys — a very useful tool for political mobilisation.

It is in this context that a non-politician like Priyanka and her one act of sitting on a jail bench are a showstopper. Without perhaps intending to, the quiet meeting takes you straight back to what another much older person did when he walked out of an island prison after spending 27 years in jail for the colour of his skin. When Nelson Mandela walked out of Robben Island, he did the only thing he saw worthwhile, despite criticism from those keen on a more extreme way of settling past wrongs with whites and Afrikaners in South Africa. He ensured that a Truth and Reconciliation Commission was set up — where “revenge” was set aside as being far too uncivilised a response to decades of uncivilised apartheid inflicted on the blacks.

This is not the first time that Priyanka’s personal, and very private acts and statements, as it were, have had a political resonance. In 2004, just after the Congress Parliamentary Party meeting heard that Sonia was not going to be PM, late at night, a senior TV reporter caught Priyanka walking out and asked her if her mother’s act of renunciation was “in the finest traditions of Indian politics” of sanyas. Pat came the reply from a slightly irritated Priyanka: “Rajniti kyun? This is in the finest traditions of bharatiya sanskriti.”

seema.chishti@expressindia.com