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Priyanka Gandhi: A matrix
untold
By Siddharth Srivastava
NEW DELHI - The continuing
political emergence of Priyanka Gandhi is the talk of
India. Priyanka's pedigree is without equal in the
country. Her grandfather was Jawaharlal Nehru, India's
prime minister on independence in 1947, her grandmother
was Indira 
Gandhi, her father Rajiv Gandhi, each a prime minister
of India, and her mother is Sonia Gandhi, leader of the
opposition Congress party.
Priyanka, 32, a
graduate in psychology from Delhi University, is a
mother of two children, which occupy most of her time,
including such media opportunities as an evening out at
the visiting Russian circus recently. Nevertheless, she
still finds time to be active in the Delhi social
circuit as her husband likes dancing, and she helps him
in his jewelry business.
Hereditary alone,
though, should not qualify Priyanka as a future prime
ministerial candidate of the world's largest democracy,
but it certainly helps.
The media frenzy
surrounding Priyanka was set off by the Chief Minister
of the state of Madhya Pradesh, Digvijay Singh, who
belongs to the Congress party, who called on her to
campaign for the party in the state's upcoming
elections. The four states of Delhi, Chattisgarh, Madhya
Pradesh and Rajasthan go to the polls on December 1 in
what is widely seen as a precursor to the main battle
between Congress and the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party
(BJP) in general elections due in a year's time. Singh's
call to Priyanka came amid reports suggesting that he
could be defeated.
Such is Priyanka's stature
and influence that any political action of hers attracts
attention, albeit often negative. In a recent episode,
Priyanka helped a dalit (a person of a lower
caste), which had Mayawati, who goes by one name,
India's dalit leader and then chief minister of
the biggest Indian state, Uttar Pradesh, take very
public umbrage.
And the media can't get enough
of it. A few months ago, the political firmament was
engaged by weighty issues such as possible Indian troop
deployment in Iraq, when came a snippet about Priyanka.
She was supposed to be meeting some inconsequential
party functionaries at an undecided venue, in her spare
time. It was enough to set the TV cameras, with heavy
equipment to allow live updates, preying in the capital
heat, as nobody knew where exactly the gathering was to
take place.
Heavyweight political commentators -
torn from topics of more substance - were quickly
wheeled out to pontificate on Priyanka. Will she take
the plunge into fully active politics? And if she does,
then what? What about her relations with her brother,
Rahul, her husband, her in-laws, her actual age, her two
kids, who looks after them, the maid or Sonia? ... ad
nauseam. And of course, never far from any
discussion of Priyanka is that fact that her mother is
Italian born. So what does that make her?
Strangely, Rahul, who is older, and who comes
from exactly the same lineage, is rarely talked about in
political terms, and this in a society where sons are
generally preferred to daughters.
To some,
Priyanka's predicament is a question of ordained gender
rotation. First there was Nehru, then Indira, then
Rajiv. Priyanka logically follows next as per a matrix
(maya in Indian terms) that we humans cannot
decipher. Critics describe it as a dynastic rule,
blaming the Gandhis for perpetuating it, though each
time it is the people who vote them in or out. Others
aver to it as a national obsession, like cricket, that
drives the country to bouts of irrationality that grinds
all work to a halt when a match is on.
As
veteran journalist Inder Malhotra points out in his
recent book Dynasties of India and Beyond, there
are political dynasties all over the world. The new
governor of California, Arnold Schwarzenegger, gained
from his association with the Kennedy name - his wife
Maria Shriver is the daughter of Sargent Shriver,
brother-in-law of John F Kennedy and George McGovern's
running mate in the 1972 presidential election. George W
Bush is, of course, the son of Bill Clinton's
predecessor. And even Al Gore comes from a famous
American political dynasty.
Coming back to the
Priyanka phenomenon, though, there are those who aver to
the weakness in Sonia armory. Sonia carries all of the
the Gandhi appendage, being the wife of the late Rajiv
Gandhi, but her opponents never fail to remind the
population of her foreign origin, as well as the law in
even such an advanced country as the US that disallows a
person not born in the country from becoming president.
Sonia's supporters undergo a seasonal change of
color on the foreigner issue. Last season, the powerful
backward caste leader from Uttar Pradesh, Mulayam Singh
Yadav, said that she is Indian as she is married to one
(earlier Yadav said that she is foreign despite marrying
an Indian). This season, Yadav is back to his anti-Sonia
talk. Similar is the case with the powerful breakaway
Congress leader Sharad Pawar, who fancies himself as a
future prime minister.
Thus, the foreigner issue
is raised by friends and foes when it suits them. The
tag is like a shadow, although Sonia does try her best
and appears in the likeness of her famous mother-in-law
Indira - in gait, in imperious style, in the clothes
that she wears and even in her hairstyle that now sports
a wisp of white, so distinctive of Indira.
Analysts
say that Priyanka, on the other hand, is a natural - she
doesn't need to be like Indira or Rajiv, she is bits of
them, making women in the country who grew up idolizing
Indira for the way she ran the country and tossed the
fawning men around her, remark, "Oh God, she is just
like Indira."
These arguments are still not
enough to qualify her as potential prime minister of
India. The strongest argument is the dynamics within the
Congress party, with the Gandhi name the only unifying
umbrella. It also explains Sonia's ascent after the
assassination of her husband Rajiv. Congress leaders are
a conglomerate of hugely fragile egos and ordinarily
think very low of each other, except anything
phonetically Gandhi, which has the effect of collective
subjugation. A similar assertion is now made about the
BJP, which is in power, led by Prime Minister Atal
Bihari Vajpayee.
Sonia's Indira garb is going to
be tested, in the general elections scheduled for the
near future. If she fails, one Gandhi may replace
another. In the sub-continent, daughters have a history
of inheriting the political mantle, if not property, of
their fathers - Pakistan's Benazir Bhutto, India's
Indira Gandhi, Bangladesh's Hasina Wajed and Myanmar's
Aung Sang Suu Kyi.
Will Priyanka do so too? It
is a billion-people question.
Siddharth
Srivastava is a New Delhi-based journalist.
(Copyright 2003 Asia Times Online Co, Ltd. All
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