Priyanka Gandhi is tasked with demolishing the BJP in its stronghold, but there is no question of her upstaging her brother.
The mother of all elections that will take place in a few months just got more interesting with Priyanka Gandhi’s entry throwing a spanner in Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s works.
Twenty years is a really long time in politics. But all those who want to understand why both the sycophant and the opponent sit up and listen to Priyanka Gandhi should quickly Google “Arun Nehru”, “Rae Bareli” and “1999”.
In that election for the Gandhi family pocketborough in Uttar Pradesh, a mini-Mahabharata was unfolding as friends – nay, brothers-in-arms – faced each other across the political aisle. For the Congress there was Satish Sharma, a friend and loyalist of Rajiv Gandhi. And for the BJP, there was Arun Nehru, not only Rajiv’s closest aide and confidante when he was Prime Minister from 1984-1989, but also a first cousin.
By the time the Rae Bareli election took place in 1999, Rajiv had been assassinated eight years ago in 1991, the Babri Masjid demolished a year after that, in 1992 – which served to banish the Congress from UP – and Sonia Gandhi had emerged from her widow’s weeds barely a year before, in 1998, when Sitaram Kesri was ousted and she was crowned Congress president.
Into this politically vitiated Rae Bareli, Priyanka Gandhi, all of 27 years old, unleashed her campaign. And with one, single speech, delivered in chaste and emotionally charged Hindi, turned the high stakes election around.
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“I have a complaint against you,” Priyanka told the crowds, “a man who committed treachery while he was in my father’s ministry, who stabbed a brother in the back – answer me – how did you let such a man in here? How did he dare to come here?”
My mother, she added, told me not to speak ill of anyone. “But I am young. Who shall I speak my mind to if not to you?”
The people of Rae Bareli responded to their “Priyanka bitiya”’s entreaty like it was a family crisis which they were entitled to fix. Arun Nehru, the BJP candidate, was supposed to win the constituency hands down. He lost badly.
Fast forward 10 years, to 2009. Married by now, Priyanka Gandhi Vadra restricted her campaigning to Rae Bareli and Amethi, her mother and brother’s constituencies, respectively.
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In an interview with me at the time, she had said she “will never join politics,” but was campaigning in Amethi and Rae Bareli only to strengthen the organisation.
What’s your idea of India, I asked.
Priyanka Gandhi: That is a complicated question. India symbolises a lot of things for me. It is about the diversity of religions and ideologies – everybody can follow whatever they want. But there is a certain unity as well.
It is an answer reminiscent of Jawaharlal Nehru in The Discovery of India, but in pre-Narendra Modi’s Bharat her words had seemed bordering on hyperbole than reality.
In Amethi-Rae Bareli, it was clear she was utterly at home with the women’s self-help groups (“samooh”) she had helped create, where with little fuss she plonked herself down with several women under the nearest banyan tree.
The women were not awed, not for one second. Some complained about drinking water, school and health facilities under Kalyan Singh’s BJP government (in power at the time), others grumbled about errant sons and marriageable daughters. But there was no folding of hands in front of the Gandhi dynast, none of the “mai-baap” culture otherwise so common in hyper-male constituencies.
Those sitting next to her cross-legged or on their haunches pulled her cheeks as if she was their daughter next door. She responded in kind, listening, smiling, laughing, taking their affection for granted.
Journalists gathered around like flies, but she pushed TV microphones out of the way and kept her focus on the small crowds waiting for her cavalcade to stop in UP’s terrible summer heat. The security guys hung around, but kept back, never in your face; evidently those were her orders. The thing about her, that one noticed, was that she was totally unafraid.
This determination that women must march, as the cliché goes, “shoulder to shoulder” with men in the making of India and that they cannot be marginalised was as clear much later in March 2015, when the BBC film on the men who raped Jyoti Singh, or ‘Nirbhaya,’ was banned by the Narendra Modi government.
In a conversation with me, Priyanka Gandhi said:
“I believe it is an outrage to ban the film. We should all watch it and understand the grave consequences of the mindsets we create when we deny even the smallest measure of equality to women.”
As for the often-asked question, as to whether she is like her tough-as-nails grandmother Indira Gandhi, Priyanka had insisted in an interview with CNN-IBN back in 2009 that it was actually her brother Rahul who was “much more like her grandmother”, while she was like her (by implication, softer and charming) father.
Priyanka, who dealt with Rajiv Gandhi’s funeral arrangements with a dry eye in public, is keenly aware what such questions signify, including in the present. There was, and is, no question of undermining her brother, Rahul. That sentiment was at the forefront in 2016, when she, allegedly, went back on her promise to political analyst Prashant Kishor that she would lead the Congress in the Uttar Pradesh assembly polls in 2017.
That sentiment remains at the forefront in 2019, as Rahul Gandhi sends her to lead Mission Eastern UP, where she is tasked with demolishing the BJP in its stronghold. Priyanka has made it clear that she is not only Rahul’s sister, but also an obedient foot-soldier to the Congress president, and she won’t let anybody play divide and rule.
Certainly, no one in the Congress is complaining. A sizzle has just been added to the mother of all general elections.