On September 12, the birth anniversary of Feroze Gandhi, fearless parliamentarian, anti-fascist crusader, and incorruptible journalist, Congress leader Rahul Gandhi found himself in the crosshairs of India’s most fashionable online pastime: Trolling. Social media mobs mocked him for failing to publicly remember his grandfather, as if family memory were a Twitter trend.
The present campaign against the Gandhis reeks of selective memory. Critics accuse the family of dynastic entitlement while simultaneously lamenting that they do not invoke every ancestor on cue. Which is it — too much lineage, or too little? Political hypocrisy, like history, thrives on half-light.
Feroze Gandhi’s life was neither dynastic nor ornamental; it was dissent in its purest form. In 1930, he joined the Civil Disobedience movement after picketing alongside Kamala and Indira Nehru in Allahabad. That decision led him to Faizabad jail. He threw himself into the “No Rent” campaign among peasants in United Provinces, and was jailed again in 1932 and 1933. In London, he became a student leader against fascism, raising the Indian tricolour in student gatherings as Mussolini’s and Hitler’s shadows lengthened across Europe.
After his marriage to Indira Gandhi in 1942, he barely had time to settle into family life before being jailed again in the Quit India Movement. Later, his fierce journalism at The National Herald and fearless speeches in Parliament made him an uncompromising watchdog. It was Feroze Gandhi, not the opposition of the time, who exposed the LIC–Mundhra scandal in 1957, a turning point in India’s history of accountability.
To mock his absence from a grandson’s tweet is to trivialise a life spent between prison walls, pressrooms, and parliamentary benches. But memory cannot stop at one name. If we are to summon ancestors, then let us recall Motilal Nehru, Rahul Gandhi’s great-grandfather. A wealthy lawyer who transformed his home, Anand Bhavan, into a political ashram, Motilal chaired the committee that drafted the Nehru Report of 1928, the first serious attempt by Indians to frame a constitutional vision.
The report was born from a taunt. Lord Birkenhead, then Britain’s Secretary of State for India, dared Indian leaders to produce a constitutional plan, betting that their communal divisions would prevent agreement. Motilal proved him wrong. The Nehru Report called for a parliamentary system, equal rights, and universal suffrage. Though it did not end colonial rule, it marked a turning point in the assertion that Indians were capable of governing themselves.
This is the true genealogy of the Gandhis: Ideas, risks, and sacrifices.
The family’s power lies not only in its men but in its women, voices too often erased in today’s selective narratives.
Swarup Rani Nehru, Motilal’s wife, born with hazel eyes and chestnut hair, moved from palatial comfort to the hardships of activism. She called it a “great privilege” to send her husband and son to jail, led women in salt protests, and endured police lathi blows.
Kamala Nehru, Jawaharlal’s wife, led women’s protests in Allahabad, ran a Congress dispensary from her home, and even disguised herself as a boy to march in Jaipur at midnight. Fragile in health but unyielding in spirit, she embodied the steel of a movement clothed in simplicity.
Vijayalakshmi Pandit, Jawaharlal’s sister, was imprisoned in the Civil Disobedience campaigns of the 1930s, then rose to global stature as the first woman president of the UN General Assembly. She proved that India’s women could stride across both village squares and world forums with equal ease.
Krishna Hutheesing, another sister, spent months in prison and led youth movements with energy and courage, while Rameshwari Nehru founded Stree Darpan, one of India’s earliest women’s journals, mobilising women through the written word.
Uma Nehru marched in the Dandi campaign and went to jail, her daughter Shyam Kumari Nehru writing Our Cause in 1938, a manifesto of women’s participation in politics.
These women were not shadows of their men. They were torches in their own right.
This is what makes the present trolling so hollow. Those who contributed nothing to the freedom struggle now demand ritualised remembrance from those whose ancestors filled India’s jails. The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, which sat out the Quit India Movement of 1942, seeks to score points over dynastic amnesia. It is a parody of history: To mock someone for forgetting a grandfather, when you have none to remember in the first place.
The question, then, is not whether Rahul Gandhi remembers his grandfather in a tweet. The question is whether India remembers the texture of its own freedom struggle. History is not a festival of hashtags. It is a repository of blood, courage, and words spoken at a time when speaking meant prison.
When we summon memory selectively, we reduce history to caricature. When we demand it only of some, while ignoring the silences of others, we mock the very sacrifices that gave us the right to speak freely today.
So when someone sneers —“Why was he not remembered?”—the answer is simple: Feroze Gandhi and the Nehru women cannot be forgotten. They live in the marrow of India’s democratic experiment. The real question, which trolls never answer, is this: Whom do you remember?
The writer is a senior journalist, Ex Adjunct Professor, Haridev Joshi Journalism and Mass Communication University, Jaipur
