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Nehru-Gandhi legacy on the
line
By Sudha Ramachandran
BANGALORE - With Varun Gandhi
joining the Bharatiya Janata Party recently, the BJP has
got itself a true-blue Nehru-Gandhi to counter the
Congress' immensely popular Nehru-Gandhi siblings, Rahul
and Priyanka Gandhi. While Varun or his mother Maneka is
unlikely to match Rahul's and Priyanka's ability to woo
the voters, the battle between the Gandhis is sure to
evoke considerable media attention in the weeks leading
up to the elections due in the next few months.
Like Rahul and Priyanka, Varun Gandhi is a
great-grandson of India's first prime minister, Jawaharlal
Nehru, and a grandson of former premier Indira Gandhi.
Rahul and Priyanka are the children of Indira Gandhi's
elder son Rajiv Gandhi, who became prime minister in
1984 after Indira's assassination. Varun is the only son
of Indira's younger son, Sanjay Gandhi.
Varun's
decision to join the BJP means that Indira Gandhi's
grandchildren will be campaigning for rival political
parties - Varun for the BJP and Rahul and Priyanka for
the Congress, which their mother Sonia now leads. This
formalizes the split in the Nehru-Gandhi family that
occurred in the early 1980s. After Sanjay's death in
June 1980, Maneka believed that as his widow she was his
rightful heir and expected the family to promote her
political ambitions. That did not happen, as Indira saw
Rajiv as her successor. Relations between Maneka and the
rest of the family deteriorated seriously and she was
eventually thrown out of the Nehru-Gandhi household.
Thereafter, Maneka joined hands with opposition parties
and campaigned against the Congress.
By joining
the BJP now, Maneka and Varun have taken their
estrangement with the Nehru-Gandhi family and their
distancing from the Congress to its logical conclusion.
The Congress, the party that led India to
independence from British colonial rule and which has
been in power for most years since independence in 1947,
is often treated as synonymous with the Nehru-Gandhis.
Like the Kennedy clan in the United States, the
Nehru-Gandhi family has provided many leaders - three of
India's 12 prime ministers have come from this family
and its members are charismatic. What is more, at least
three of them - Indira, Sanjay and Rajiv - have died
violent deaths. Indira and Rajiv were assassinated and
Sanjay was killed in an air crash.
The
Nehru-Gandhis are often described as India's leading
political dynasty. The family has been accused of
perpetuating dynastic succession - an allegation that
Nehru-Gandhi supporters dismiss as untrue given the fact
that Nehru-Gandhi succession has received massive
electoral endorsement.
Varun's decision to join
the BJP was not unexpected. His mother Maneka, an
independent member of parliament, held ministerial posts
in the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA)
government until last year.
It is ironic that
while the BJP has attacked the Nehru-Gandhis and the
Congress for their perpetuation of dynastic rule, it
doesn't seem to have a problem holding hands with Maneka
and her son, both very much a part of the dynastic
tradition the BJP verbally derides.
What is even
harder to ignore is that Maneka and the BJP top brass
are strange bedfellows. Many of the excesses that took
place 30 years ago when prime minister Indira Gandhi
declared a state of emergency in the country have been
blamed on Sanjay and his coterie of goons. Scores of
opposition leaders were thrown into jails, including
many from the Jan Sangh, the forerunner of the BJP,
including present Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee
and his current deputy Lal Krishna Advani. It is ironic
that the BJP top brass, who actively campaigned against
the authoritarianism unleashed during the emergency, are
today holding hands with Maneka, an active participant
and proponent of her husband's brand of lumpen politics.
What unites Maneka and the BJP is their anti-Sonia
sentiment. Maneka and Italian-born Sonia never got
along. Their mutual hatred, it is said, goes back to the
day Maneka entered the Gandhi household as a bride.
Rajiv and Sonia were a study in contrast to Sanjay and
Maneka. Rajiv and Sonia stayed aloof from politics until
after Sanjay's death, when under pressure from his
mother Rajiv moved into active politics. It is said they
had contempt for the "riff-raff" that surrounded Sanjay
and Maneka. Maneka has always resented Sonia's meteoric
rise in status from one of the wife of a pilot to that
of the wife of India's prime minister and subsequently
to that of the president of the Congress party.
It is this resentment that Maneka nurses
against her sister-in-law that the BJP has been cultivating.
And with the "official" successors of the
Nehru-Gandhi legacy - Rahul and Priyanka Gandhi - likely to draw
the votes of young Indians, a rattled BJP decided to woo
the "other Nehru-Gandhi" - 24-year-old Varun.
In
the coming years, Varun is expected to project himself
as the real heir to the Nehru-Gandhi legacy. Observers
have commented that he is practicing pacing up and down
with his hands held behind his back, like his
great-grandfather Nehru. He has said that Sonia Gandhi's
foreign origin is an issue but not the main issue. Many
believe that he and the BJP will highlight the fact that
he, unlike his cousins, is "fully Indian". Priyanka is
only half-Indian and one-fourth Hindu, given her
mother's lineage and husband's religion.
Varun cannot contest the upcoming elections as he
is under-age. But he will play an active role not only in
his mother's election campaign in her constituency, but
in rooting for the BJP at the national level. Barely
24 hours after his entry into the BJP, the party's
Mumbai chief announced that Varun would be the main
attraction at a fundraiser in Mumbai. But few believe that Varun
can effectively counter his charismatic cousins.
(Copyright 2004 Asia Times Online Ltd. All
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