Implosion (35 page)

Reports on the private lives and personal liaisons of politicians are rare, but that is surely different from failing to explore why the country’s top leader had gone abroad for a possibly life-threatening operation. Presidents in the US are accustomed to public exposure and even the illnesses of Cuba’s former ruler, Fidel Castro, have been publicly discussed. In India, a heart bypass operation on Manmohan Singh in 2009 was announced, though the illnesses of former prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, 87, have been largely kept private.

The family’s wish for secrecy has also blocked information on frequent private visits abroad by Rahul Gandhi. A right to information request in 2012 failed to produce any answers.
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Rahul’s private life has been a mystery. Everyone, of course, has a right to privacy, but that surely reduces with increased public importance and responsibility. So little is known that Delhi buzzes with gossip about where he regularly vanishes – is it abroad as is often rumoured (Dubai, Bangkok, London?), or just to the homes of friends near his central Delhi home? Does he have a girlfriend?
¹⁵
The only one ever seen publicly was Colombian (or Spanish, as he reportedly said in 2004), but she is rumoured to have married in Colombia and he was said to have moved on to an Afghan girlfriend or someone in a south Delhi colony, among others. The most visible side of his private life has been regular evening exercise sessions at the gym in central Delhi’s Lodhi Hotel (previously the Aman), which is owned by DLF.

The illness saga also underlined how the Gandhis expect favourable treatment in the media without briefing journalists and editors, and without making many public appearances or any effort to generate good reporting. In October 2005, I wrote a piece in
The Economist
¹⁶
which, I discovered later, the family did not like. I had asked for an interview with Rahul Gandhi and, if not with him, with someone he nominated, but nothing had been forthcoming. In the piece I wrote that ‘Rahul Gandhi, whose weekend hobby is racing motorbikes with friends on a private dirt track near Delhi, has refused to emerge as an iconic figure’. He had ‘not made much of a mark as an MP, having spoken only once in parliament’ since he was elected in 2004. And he was ‘prone to political gaffes’.

The previous month, I wrote, he had reportedly told
Tehelka
,
¹⁷
a weekly newspaper, that there was ‘no governance’ in the state of Bihar, which was embarrassing since the state had been under direct rule by the Congress-led central government since earlier in the year. He had also said that he did what he liked, despite his mother’s views, and appeared to boast (probably flippantly) that he could have been prime minister when he was 25. The
Tehelka
story revealed, I wrote, ‘a straight-talking, sometimes naive, young man, with firm views and ambitions’. He had said his idea of politics was ‘very different from what is being done now’. In the 2004 election campaign his advisers had kept him as quiet and out of the public eye as possible, fearing, as he put it, that ‘every time I want to do something... it may go wrong’. The Congress insisted the Tehelka story was based on an un-taped ‘background chat’.

A few weeks later, I was introduced to Sonia Gandhi at a
Hindustan Times
conference dinner and mentioned I had written an
Economist
piece on Rahul Gandhi, and that I wished I had been able to talk to him. ‘Not a very good piece,’ came her instant reply, which was remarkable because she’d had no idea that she would meet the (anonymous) author. She said she was unhappy that I had failed to state that the
Tehelka
article was not based on an interview (which I had in fact indicated). She showed more interest in that negative point than in taking the conversation further or suggesting a meeting.

What the family does encourage – or at least makes no effort to stop – are vast spreads of large advertisements placed in newspapers by government ministries at taxpayers’ expense to mark various family anniversaries. On Rajiv Gandhi’s 69th birth anniversary on 20 August 2013, there were nine half-page advertisements and three full pages just in the Delhi edition of
The Indian Express
celebrating his birth, two of them also marking the launch for a Sonia Gandhi promoted food security programme that day. The previous year, on 21 May, named Anti Terrorism Day to mark Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination in 1991, advertisements remembering and praising him included 5 3/4pages in the
Hindustan Times
, 5 in
The Times of India
, 4 in
The Hindu
and 3 1/2 in
The Indian Express
. Analysis on a media blog,
Sans Serif,
showed that Jawaharlal Nehru’s birth anniversary in November 2011 was marked by 58 government advertisements covering 26 1/4 pages in 12 English newspapers.
¹⁸

Reluctant Rahul

Sonia Gandhi’s central political importance was demonstrated by the UPA government’s erratic behaviour while she was away ill, especially on two key issues – the Anna Hazare anti-corruption movement and an on-going telecom scandal. Manmohan Singh failed to seize the opportunity to exert the authority that should have gone with his job, and Rahul Gandhi equally failed to rise to the challenge as heir apparent. Other key politicians such as home minister P. Chidambaram and telecom minister Kapil Sibal fumbled their briefs, while the four leading Congress party figures Sonia Gandhi named as being in charge (including Rahul) made no public impression. She was clearly missed and it gradually began to be apparent that this Italian-born non-political mother and housewife had developed what some would see as her psychic chakra so that it not only protected her but also gave her a position of command.

That, of course, begs some questions. Did the disarray while she was away develop because the government was missing her and her advisers’ sure touch, and had she developed a little-known sense of what needed to be done politically? Or were ministers and officials scared to make decisions that might arouse her (or Rahul’s) wrath later? Or was it because the Gandhi dynasty dominated government channels of authority and decision-making to such an extent that the cabinet and administration could not function without her? Whatever the answer – and maybe it was a mixture of all three – it certainly demonstrated how lost the government was without her.

Rahul played little part in this dynastic dominance. In the previous couple of years, he’d had flashes of success – for example, in February 2010, when he made a dramatic foray into Mumbai and challenged the street power of Maharashtra’s chauvinist political party, the Shiv Sena. I wrote on my blog – over-optimistically, as it turned out later – that this ‘was a significant step forward in his emergence as a national figure’. By using local trains instead of a planned helicopter to cross the city, he had showed ‘more courage than most of India’s prestige-oriented politicians would contemplate’.
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He spent some years laboriously touring the poorest parts of India, meeting people and hearing their problems, and trying to regenerate the Congress party’s youth organization – preparing himself, he often said, for his political future. He garnered widespread though not always favourable publicity for visiting and chatting with poor villagers, and staying with them – even taking David Miliband, then Britain’s foreign secretary, to a high-profile village sleepover early in 2009.
²⁰
These were the sort of flying visits that might be made by a paternalistic monarch, and were easily mocked by his critics, especially when it emerged that there was none of the follow-through action expected from a practising politician.

His appearances in parliament were rare, and he made only three important speeches and interventions in his ten years as an MP. The first was in July 2007 on energy security and the benefits of nuclear power, soon after he had been appointed a general secretary of the Congress. The second was in August 2011, on anti-corruption measures in a Lok Pal Bill – that was the only time he took part in a debate in the first four years of the 2009 government, when the average count for other MPs was 33 times.
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(Sonia Gandhi’s record was no better). The third came in December 2013, again on the Lok Pal Bill.

Marketing experts were commenting late in 2011 that Rahul needed to develop himself as a brand because not enough was known about him and what he stood for.
²²
As general secretary in charge of the Youth Congress, he had reorganized structures and local party elections, and contributed to other organizational matters. But he had shown absolutely no grip or interest in policy. More importantly, he had shown no continuity of purpose, often vanishing without trace from the public scene.
²³
He rarely spoke out on major issues or crises, such as the country-wide mass protests about corruption, gang rape and the treatment of women in 2011 and 2012. He made adequate election-style speeches to crowds of thousands but rarely engaged in public debate or gave media interviews. This matched his mother’s reclusive approach, but he seemed far more detached than her.

Rahul continually resisted public invitations from Manmohan Singh to join the government as a minister, and also resisted suggestions that he should play a larger role in the party. Eventually, however, he put his political reputation on the line when he energetically led the Congress party’s campaign in Uttar Pradesh’s 2012 state assembly elections, and developed during 200 meetings as a powerful (though inconsequential) speaker.
²⁴
The Congress, however, was routed in what in effect was a rejection of him and his election campaign.
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The party won only 27 seats in the 403-seat assembly, up from 22 in 2007, and its share of the votes went from 8.61 per cent to just 11.63 per cent. It even lost heavily in three parliamentary constituencies (Amethi, Rae Bareli and Sultanpur) that were regarded as the family’s fiefdoms where Rahul and Sonia Gandhi and another loyalist had been MPs.

The results showed that Gandhi had little impact in many constituencies that he had visited during the campaign (and in places where he had gone in the previous couple of years). The family had projected their dynastic credentials with aplomb – some reports suggested arrogance – but Rahul was not identified personally with the state’s future. He was not standing as the potential Uttar Pradesh chief minister (that would have been an extraordinarily difficult job, which he scarcely needed to tackle when the prime minister’s post was within his grasp), and he had not developed any brand image. He spent most of his election speeches telling his poor audiences about what they did not have and how awful the incumbent government had been, instead of producing concrete proposals about how he would boost their livelihoods. The result was a serious blow because it underlined his failure to emerge as a capable politician in the years since he became a member of parliament in 2004.

I noticed his lack of presence in an informal atmosphere one afternoon in August 2012 at Delhi’s Visual Arts gallery where he and Sonia Gandhi had gone (with impressively minimal security) to see works by Devangana Kumar, daughter of the Lok Sabha Speaker, Meira Kumar. Although she looked tired and unwell, Sonia had a presence, but what struck me most was how unimpressive Rahul looked on an occasion when he was not performing publicly. He dutifully followed his mother around the exhibition but he showed scant curiosity while she asked questions about the socially significant works (photographs of servants of the British Raj reproduced as large prints on velvet). He did not have any of the presence and charisma that one would expect from a 42-year-old leader.

This reticence made me wonder whether he could ever grow into the top role. A friend suggested that maybe we should genuinely sympathize with his plight. He has a family legacy that he is unable to escape – an assassinated grandmother and father, both revered leaders, a mother who had defied conventions to be similarly recognized, and a country that put him on a pedestal he would rather avoid. All his adult life he has been in the shadow of his mother, as he was that afternoon. He has a sense of duty and genuinely wants to bring real democracy to the Congress, but he knows he is not a natural heir to his larger-than-life family. It is a strange mix, and begs the question whether he would change if and when he took the top role. Would he then grow into his destiny? That Saturday afternoon, he looked as if he just wanted to fade away.

Priyanka, his sister, would have been so much more personable in the art gallery, as she always shows when appearing in public. She has an easy, approachable style and is able and willing to talk informally with people she meets (including foreign journalists). That is something that Rahul shies away from. There has been speculation about whether she will – and should – take over the lead role from her brother, but Sonia has decided that her son should be her heir. Priyanka has always said she does not want to enter politics, though she has been playing an increasingly supportive role in Amethi, her mother’s constituency, which might lead to her becoming its member of parliament.

Rahul Emerges

Eventually, in January 2013, Rahul took the big step that he had shirked for so long and was made the party’s vice president, which confirmed him as his mother’s number two and heir apparent to the party leadership. It was an ‘inevitable and incredible appointment’.
²⁶
It was inevitable because, despite his reluctance, he had been seen for years as having the dynastic right to rule India. Yet, it was incredible that a person who had shown little ability or interest in fulfi lling that destiny should be chosen in a vibrant democracy of over a billion people – and that this should be accepted without question by senior and able Congress ministers and other party leaders. Some of those leaders would have made a better job in the future of being the party president and prime minister, but they and others saw a Gandhi – and Rahul was the one to hand – as the best bet to hold the party together and provide the sort of iconic image for it to win elections and keep them in their posts of power and patronage.