MUMBAI - While Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has scotched speculation of
general elections before May 2009 as scheduled, the countdown begins on his
unprecedented partnership with Congress party president Sonia Gandhi, who acts
as a de facto prime minister.
The Manmohan-Sonia partnership will be increasingly scrutinized as six
provincial states - Delhi, Jammu and Kashmir, Mizoram, Rajasthan, Madhya
Pradesh and Chhattisgarh - go to local polls from November 14 in what is being
described as India's biggest elections before the general elections that will
decide the future of India's most curious political jugalbandi ever.
Jugalbandi in Indian usually means a harmonious fusion of two musical
forms, sometimes as diverse as a Western guitar and an
Indian sitar being performed together on stage. In expanded cultural terms, jugalbandi
can mean a fusion of food, art or cinema.
In politics, Manmohan and and Sonia have made for a remarkable match - a Sikh
economist and an Italian-born Roman Catholic housewife together leading, as
political novices, the world's largest and most complex democracy. India saw a
staggering 240 political parties contesting the last general elections four
years ago, compared to the two political parties in the world's most powerful
democracy that went to the presidential polls on Tuesday.
That the Manmohan-Sonia jugalbandi has survived nearly a full
parliamentary term without ugly discordant notes such as power squabbles
between them is noteworthy by itself. The pair has survived despite sustained
criticism of policy decisions such as the India-United States civilian nuclear
deal signed with US President George W Bush. In July, the government scraped
through a parliamentary vote of confidence over the deal.
In 2004, Sonia was poised to take over as prime minister but sensationally
handed the prime minister's post to former finance minister Manmohan.
"I would follow my inner voice," she told the Congress Parliamentary Party in
May 2004. "Today, it tells me that I must humbly decline this post. The post of
prime minister has not been my aim."
She stunned the country, as well as baffled opposition leaders such as Sushma
Swaraj, who had lined up a barrage against Sonia only to find that the enemy
had won the battle by strategically taking the moral high ground.
While Sonia renounced the post after the opposition Bharatiya Janata Party
threatened to take to the streets to protest against a "foreigner" becoming
prime minister, her "inner voice" seemed to have no objections to her retaining
actual power with key posts such as chairperson of the ruling United
Progressive Alliance in the Lok Sabha (Lower House) and the leader of the
Congress Parliamentary Party. She became the most powerful woman in India since
her mother-in-law and assassinated prime minister Indira Gandhi, and was ranked
among the seven most powerful women in the world in a Forbes magazine list.
Since then, her critics have accused her of destroying constitutional
credibility and undermining the post of prime minister by overruling cabinet
decisions and violating protocol by taking precedence over the prime minister.
A senior parliamentarian revealed to Asia Times Online, on condition of
anonymity, that protocol violations have stretched to the extent that an
unwritten directive has been sent to the governmental administration that
Manmohan cannot visit a major disaster-affected or a terrorist-hit area before
Sonia has dropped by for inspection.
"That real power should come from an extra-constitutional source has led to
setting a very bad precedent," he said, "and undermines the constitutional
authority of the prime minister."
Whether Sonia herself authored such alleged unofficial "directives" or not, the
Manmohan-Sonia alliance essentially involved India having a prime minister
sitting in the driver's seat but with the steering wheel in someone else's
hands.
Yet credit can be given, though, that both Manmohan and Sonia have spared India
the embarrassment of the kind that Maharashtra state, of which Mumbai is
capital, suffered between 1995 and 1999 when the communal and violent Shiv Sena
party was in power.
Shiv Sena chief minister Manohar Joshi was first "nominated" and then
periodically humiliated by party president and de facto chief minister Bal
Thackeray, who himself was banned from contesting elections for instigating
communal riots in Mumbai in 1992 that killed over 1,000 people.
Thackeray took pains to show the world who exactly was the boss. Serial
protocol violations included important visiting dignitaries first paying homage
to party boss Bal Thackeray at his residence, and then condescending to call on
the chief minister.
Chief minister Joshi's public outbursts protesting such indignities were meekly
followed with his contrite public declarations of loyalty to Thackeray - a
former newspaper cartoonist who openly admits being an admirer of Adolf Hitler.
India, in the past four years, has luckily been spared the circus that the
financial capital Mumbai suffered a decade ago.
The difference has been Sonia Gandhi. She has handled extraordinary power with
sufficient dignity and calm, even though the century-old Congress party appears
to be in terminal decline under her presidency, after routs in provincial
elections in key states such as Uttar Pradesh and Gujarat.
This correspondent was among the critics of Sonia during her political debut.
In a national newspaper article entitled "Campaign of the ghosts", ahead of her
first entry to parliament in 1999, I wondered whether she was merely a puppet
dangling in the hands of infamous power brokers in the Congress.
Since then, Sonia has handled such questions with surprising equanimity. In one
of her rare television interviews, she was asked to respond to communal leader
Bal Thackeray - the Hitler fan - mocking her that she would unknowingly read
out a grocery list in an election rally if it was handed to her as her written
speech. I expected Sonia to react furiously. Instead, she giggled and looked
genuinely amused.
Senior newspaper editor and leading columnist Vir Sanghvi, who had conducted
the interview, has a different take on the Manmohan-Sonia partnership. Sanghvi,
a family friend of the Gandhi family, wrote in May, "It is fashionable to
portray the prime minister as her cipher, but the truth is that she seems in
awe of him, always defers to his intellect and experience, and rarely involves
herself in administrative matters. For instance, at least three members of the
present council of ministers would never have been sworn in if it was up to
Sonia."
While family-loyalist Sanghvi's claims of the Manmohan-Sonia partnership
"working" because "she trusts his judgement" can be taken with a due pinch of
sodium chloride, the fact remains that Sonia is careful to at least publicly
show Manmohan courtesies as a prime minister. For example, she respectfully
stands in line with cabinet ministers and party leaders while seeing him return
from official visits abroad.
The downside is that Manmohan returns the compliment, raising howls of protests
at the protocol violation of the country's prime minister going to the airport
to receive a party leader. But significantly, the pair is yet to issue any
public statement contradicting or criticizing each other. They convey the
impression of respecting each other.
Similarly, the Sonia-Manmohan jugalbandi has worked because both have
allies across party lines. "I have great respect and personal regard for her,"
Suresh Prabhu, an opposition party member of parliament and a former union
minister, told Asia Times Online. "I find her a warm and wonderful human
being."
So, too, with 77-year-old Manmohan Singh. Firebrand Samajwadi Party general
secretary Amar Singh declared last week, "I have great regards for Prime
Minister Manmohan Singh, whether he remains in power or not. Yet, there are
several events in the Congress that happen without the knowledge of the PM to
the extent that his own party members do not regard his words or listen to his
writ."
That the scholarly Indian prime minister is not considered first among equals
is due to the unusual fact that a European woman rules India's oldest political
party and directs the world's largest democracy. The 61-year-old Sonia, who
grew up as Sonia Maino in the small town northern Italian town of Ovassanjo, 80
kilometers from Turin, had her life dramatically changed in 1968 when she
married Rajiv Gandhi, son of India's then-prime minister Indira Gandhi. The
couple met as fellow students in a language school at Cambridge University in
England.
"My journey from the placid backwaters of a contented domestic life to the
maelstrom of public life has not been an easy one," Sonia said while delivering
the 14th annual Nexus lecture at the Nexus Institute, The Hague, Netherlands,
on June 9, 2007. "Yet, despite its sorrows and difficulties, I have found in my
new existence both fulfillment and a larger sense of purpose. The family to
which I first pledged my fidelity was in the confines of a home. Today, my
loyalty embraces a wider family - India, my country, whose people have so
generously welcomed me to become one of them."
While Sonia calls India "my country", she applied for Indian citizenship only
15 years after her marriage to Rajiv Gandhi in 1968, and continued using her
Italian passport even after she moved into the household of her mother-in-law
and prime minister Indira Gandhi in New Delhi.
Sonia's circumstantially forced citizenship makes even more remarkable India's
nearly five-year acceptance of the jugalbandi with the prime minister.
She was still an Italian citizen when Indira Gandhi was assassinated by her own
bodyguards on October 31, 1984, and it was Sonia who cradled her head in the
car rushing to hospital in New Delhi. She applied for Indian citizenship only
after very reluctantly and tearfully letting her husband be sworn in as prime
minister after his mother's violent death. She was terrified about her husband
meeting a similar fate.
Sonia's worst fears came true in 1991 when Rajiv Gandhi was assassinated by a
female suicide bomber near Chennai, while campaigning in the general elections
he was widely expected to win by a landslide. After a reclusive seven year
period of mourning and devoting herself to taking care of her two children,
Rahul and Priyanka, Sonia formally entered politics in 1998 and was elected to
parliament in 1999.
Five years later, she withdrew her chance to become the fourth Indian prime
minister from her family - after Jawaharlal Nehru, his daughter Indira Gandhi
and her son Rajiv Gandhi. As a result, India was put in the curious position of
having a prime minister first answerable directly to his party leader, not to
the people.
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