The bahu’s inheritance

For a woman who rejected an offer to head the Congress Party in 1991, Sonia Gandhi has come a long way in revealing her true colours. In ...

For a woman who rejected an offer to head the Congress Party in 1991, Sonia Gandhi has come a long way in revealing her true colours. In Indian politics, when a political leader from an illustrious family or a popular figure, bureaucrat or police officer dies, the custom is to cash in on popular sympathy and immediately give his widow or daughter a ticket to fight the next election if no suitable male heirs are available. Bahus are lower in the order of priority. The woman concerned might learn to be a good parliamentarian or legislator only if and after she is elected. The Italian-born head of India’s oldest political party, whose USP is apparently being the bahu of a family that has “sacrificed” for the country is now taking whatever she can get and even claiming the prime ministership before having been required to contest any election.

Photo-ops and family connections don’t make much of a bio-data for the job of presiding over the destiny of a billion people, but consider the number ofcakes Sonia Gandhi has in her possession. In the early days of her widowhood Manmohan Singh as finance minister gifted away Rs 100 crore to her newly set-up Rajiv Gandhi Foundation. An NGO has to show three years of work before the government grants it even Rs 10,000. Yet Sonia got this whopping sum without having to ask, and had to enact a hasty refusal to save the finance minister embarrassment in Parliament. Since then the RGF has received facilities and vast amounts of money from the government. This includes a cheque for Rs 50 lakh for its own charitable work, which the concerned ministry was then shocked to see being presented to the Spastics Society of Calcutta, headed by aunt-in-law Sudha Kaul. Free tickets from Air India for participants of RGF seminars and courtesy visits by foreign dignitaries were thoughtfully facilitated by the MEA. On its governing body are scam-tainted people on bail. Donors had their contributions frozen when their scam links became public. Invitations to Rashtrapati Bhavanand functions in the Central Hall of Parliament even before being installed as head of the largest opposition party also ensured photo-ops. A widows’ home in Hardwar, a project initiated and sponsored by the Ministry of Welfare this year, suddenly found Sonia Gandhi inaugurating it. A photo-op that was desperately sought by K. Karunakaran and V. George was a visit to Sonia Gandhi by disabled children who were part of a Ministry of Welfare float on Republic Day this year. The concerned agencies refused, despite repeated calls, including one from the bahu herself.

The Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts quietly changed its constitution to make Sonia Gandhi Chief Trustee for life and removed the provision stipulating that the President would be its visitor for a 10-year term, even though it is a fully government-funded institution. This convenient sleight of hand provides her with an extra private secretary who is also given government accommodation.

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The legacy of copyrights is stranger still.The government’s Publications Division holds the copyright of prime ministerial speeches, including those of Jawaharlal Nehru. But in the case of Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi, the copyright vests with the family and its heirs. Similarly, the Nehru Memorial Fund has published Letters to the Chief Ministers among the selected works of Jawaharlal Nehru. The bulk of the writings are from government files, but have been published by a private trust headed by Sonia Gandhi. The royalties go to “the family.”

Teen Murti House is a wholly government-owned property, yet it houses the Nehru Memorial Fund, the Nehru Cambridge Trust and the head office of the Kamla Nehru Hospital in Allahabad, all of which are private trusts, naturally headed by Sonia Gandhi. The Nehru Planetarium was built by the Nehru Memorial Fund on government land without formal permission. Naturally, the bahu is also the President of the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, although these are also wholly government-funded bodies.The Congress was allocated prime land by the government to build its headquarters on Akbar Road in New Delhi. The Rs 9 crore building was never occupied by the party. It is now in the possession of the RGF.

Sonia Gandhi can hardly belabour the sacrifices of the family of which she is now the prime beneficiary. Unfortunately, Indira Gandhi’s sacrifice was a result of her disastrous Punjab policy. Rajiv Gandhi’s owed to the Gandhi family legacy of first training the LTTE and then sending in the IPKF to destroy it. Disastrous policies cannot result in sacrifices, no matter how tragic the assassinations were. Neither the sacrifice of Mahatma Gandhi nor those of thousands who died in the freedom struggle have encouraged their descendants to lay claim to so much.

Apart from such material legacies, Sonia has taken over the Congress presidentship in an ugly coup and obtained the leadership of the Parliamentary Party through a hasty amendment in the party’s constitution. And in April she told Jyoti Basu that shewanted to be prime minister.

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The supporters of the “foreigners have been accepted in India” theory constantly harp on the examples of Mother Teresa and Annie Besant, as if Sonia Gandhi belongs to the same philanthropic tradition. Because the RGF is flush with government and private funds, photographs regularly appear of Sonia Gandhi giving ambulances to the sick and wheelchairs to the handicapped. However, Mother Teresa’s life was one of total self sacrifice. She did not play party politics on the side or lay claim to the prime ministership. Annie Besant’s remarkable work was done on her own strength and commitment without any country paying the astronomical costs of her upkeep. Sonia Gandhi claims the precedent of a Besant, the service of a Mother Teresa and prime ministership besides. Quite a claim from a person whose public interaction consists of 10-minute speeches consisting of trite cliches written by ghosts. She has neither demonstrated the intellectual ability of the khandaan‘s Nehru norgained the political experience of the saas, Indira. As for pati Rajiv, there is no harm in remembering that as prime minister in his only stint in politics, he earned his party a defeat in the general elections of 1989. Just being married, producing heirs and being widowed is indeed the role of most Indian bahus, but they have not yet become the criteria for any of them to claim such a vast inheritance, including the prime minister’s chair.

The writer is General Secretary, Samata Party