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 Sonia
Gandhi
Heir to a political
dynasty
No one can say Jitendra Prasada doesn't have
chutzpah. In the week since he became the first person
ever to challenge a member of the longtime Nehru-Gandhi
dynasty for the presidency of the 115-year-old Congress
Party, he has staked his own sentimental claim to the
family's tragic story.
On Tuesday, the 16th anniversary of Prime Minister
Indira Gandhi's assassination, he sprinkled flower petals
at the site here where she was cremated. He departed just
minutes before her daughter-in-law, Sonia, the Congress
Party president and his opponent, arrived.
Two days later, Mr. Prasada kicked off his campaign to
replace Sonia Gandhi at the memorial to her slain husband,
Rajiv, in the small town in southern India where Mr.
Gandhi was assassinated in 1991 as he campaigned for prime
minister.
"Every Congressman has a claim on the Nehru-Gandhi
legacy, not just the family," Mr. Prasada said Friday
as he sat in his home here in New Delhi, framed by
portraits of Indira and Rajiv Gandhi. "She's the wife
of Rajiv Gandhi. I'm his follower."
Mr. Prasada's candidacy is deeply resented by those close
to Mrs. Gandhi precisely because he is a consummate party
insider. They say he is disloyal to run when the party's
fortunes are at such a low ebb. And though no one expects
Mr. Prasada to beat Mrs. Gandhi, his willingness to take
her on and to thrash out the party's failings in public
has come as yet another blow to her image.
Her loyalists would like her to be seen as the
self-sacrificing savior of India's grand old party who has
no personal ambition, but wants only to unite all Congress
workers and restore the party's tattered glory. But that
image has proved harder to maintain.
It began to fade a year-and-a-half ago when she claimed
she had the votes to form a new government after the
ruling coalition collapsed — many believe with a
self-serving shove from her. But she failed to deliver,
bringing on early elections. Then, 13 months ago, she led
the party to its worst-ever national showing in
parliamentary elections.
The shy, reclusive Mrs. Gandhi did get herself elected
to Parliament for the first time and became leader of the
opposition. But she has been overshadowed by the popular
prime minister, Atal Behari Vajpayee, who leads the Hindu
nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party. Both she and the
Congress Party, which has strong regional leaders and
controls more states than the Hindu party, are routinely
mocked in the press as a pitiful excuse for an opposition.
In some ways, the criticism is unfair. The ruling
coalition has co-opted much of the political territory
that the Congress Party had staked out, making it very
tricky for Mrs. Gandhi to attack the government for doing
things her party supports.
As the Bhartiya Janata Party moved to the center to
gain power, it set aside its Hindu-first platform and
appropriated the secularism that has been the hallmark of
the Congress Party, which led India to independence from
the British in 1947 and ruled the country for decades. It
jettisoned protectionism to continue what the Congress
Party started in opening the economy to foreign investment
and free market forces. Mrs. Gandhi has not managed to
chalk out major issues that clearly distinguish Congress.
And she has not made herself a plausible alternative to
Mr. Vajpayee.
Party membership has also declined since Mrs. Gandhi
first emerged to campaign in 1997, when Congress had 37.5
million members. That has fallen to 27.5 million plus,
party officials said.
Mrs. Gandhi herself has remained an aloof, reserved
figure, who rarely rises to speak in parliamentary debate,
grants an interview or holds forth like other politicians
on the steps of Parliament. She meets privately with party
leaders and workers, but in public, she mainly reads
speeches written for her by others.
No Congress leader ever publicly criticizes Mrs.
Gandhi's style, not even Mr. Prasada. Instead, in the
careful, sedate manner of a man accustomed to the courtly
politics of a dynastic political party, he said in an
interview that the party's "leadership" is too
heavily influenced by a small clique of advisers, who
encircle her and exclude the rank and file. "The days
of charismatic leadership are over," he said.
"What you need now is collective leadership."
Mr. Prasada, dressed in the Congressman's unofficial
uniform of white cotton shirt and pants, is an unlikely
champion of rebellion. He was part of the coterie around
earlier Congress leaders, including Rajiv Gandhi. In the
1990's, he served in top party posts. The scion of a
landed, upper-caste Brahmin family in the northern state
of Uttar Pradesh, he has been a member of Parliament for
more than 20 years.
He says he will travel across the country, campaigning
for the votes of the 8,000 Congress delegates who will
pick the party's president on Nov. 12. Every vote cast for
him will send a message to Mrs. Gandhi, said The Indian
Express, a daily newspaper, that party members want her to
give them "much more than a smile and a wave."
In contrast, Mrs. Gandhi has no plans to campaign.
Instead, party leaders say, surrogates will do the
nitty-gritty political work for her.
Privately, many party members concede that her
unwillingness to thrust herself into the hurly-burly of
politics is a real problem — as is the fact that she is
a politically inexperienced Italian woman who became an
Indian citizen after marriage.
"The messenger is as important as the message, and
the messenger has no credibility," said one Congress
official. "People know she's reading out speeches
written for her. They don't know what she really thinks.
And when all is said and done, she's not Indian."
Such remarks are heresy to her loyalists who still
believe she is the only person with the magnetism and
dynastic aura to galvanize mass support. One of her
leading boosters, Salman Khurshid, who heads the party's
policy planning and coordination department, insisted,
"Mrs. Gandhi is above elections."
He compared her to the press-shy Princess Diana and
insisted that Mrs. Gandhi's reticence was just a problem
of packaging, not of substance. "Somebody else has to
do it for her if she doesn't do it for herself," he
said.
Ambika Soni, a close adviser of Mrs. Gandhi and a
general secretary in the party, resigned Friday so she can
work full time on getting Mrs. Gandhi re-elected
president. When asked if Mrs. Gandhi would campaign
herself, Ms. Soni replied, "Why should she?"
Courtesy: New York Times
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