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Money, jewellery gone from palace — Madhavrao Scindia didn’t like Rajmata funding Jana Sangh

In ‘The House of Scindias’, Rasheed Kidwai writes about the rift between Vijaya Raje Scindia and her son Madhavrao over politics and Sardar Angre.

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So, when did the mother and son split? There are many dates and versions. N.K. Singh remembers Madhavrao telling him in 1991 that his rift with the Rajmata Vijaya Raje Scindia could be traced back to 1972, the year he wanted to opt out of his mother’s party, the Jana Sangh, and join the Congress instead. In fact, joining the Jana Sangh after returning from Oxford was ‘a colossal mistake’, Madhavrao had insisted. But Sardar Angre, addressed by his friends as ‘Baldy’, had a different take. ‘He [Madhavrao] chickened out because the Jana Sangh did not do so well in the 1972 Vidhan Sabha elections,’ Angre had told Singh.

Some of the surviving members of the Scindia family accept that the rift between the Rajmata and Madhavrao dates back to before the June 1975 declaration of the Emergency. Madhavrao deeply resented Angre’s influence on his mother and felt strongly that the Scindias’s wealth was being spent ‘recklessly’ on politics. He had differences with his mother over money and her funding of the Jana Sangh, the political arm of the right-wing Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and the earlier avatar of the BJP. Close friends of Madhavrao have claimed that the young maharaja was shocked to see money and jewellery disappearing from Jai Vilas Palace. ‘There were supposedly wells full of gold, silver and precious metals. Madhavrao was stunned to see these “wells” depleted,’ one of them has said. 

In Madhavrao’s assessment, his mother had ‘zero business sense’ and that, often, prime properties in Bombay and elsewhere were ‘disposed of ’ at a throwaway price when the market value was much higher. On many occasions, Angre was said to have facilitated these sales and allegedly received a ‘cut’. On top of this, the Rajmata, it has been claimed, would invariably hand over a part of the money from the sales proceeds to Angre as a sign of her ‘gratitude’. Angre increasingly became the man who stood between Vijaya Raje and her son.

Madhavrao had initially agreed with his mother’s assessment of Angre’s acumen and devotion towards the house of the Scindias but increasingly grew wary of him. Madhavrao’s childhood friend, Balendu Shukla, recalls a conversation he had one day with the titular maharaja of Gwalior. ‘What do you think of Angre?’ Madhavrao had asked his friend, after a game of squash. ‘There is something about him I do not quite like,’ Shukla had responded.


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On 30 September 1991, while speaking to N.K. Singh, Madhavrao had described his mother as a dominating woman who had used emotional blackmail to keep him in her political party. He also described her as being in thrall of Angre. ‘Angre is a vicious man making a complete fool of my mother, siphoning off her money,’ Madhavrao had told the India Today journalist. ‘He has some strange hold over her. Sometimes I think he has performed some sort of black magic on her.’ In the interview, Madhavrao made some sharp comments about the Rajmata, too. ‘She made her choice in 1977. I did not want Angre to interfere in our household affairs. So I asked her to make a choice. She chose Angre. I was very hurt,’ he said. Madhavrao also described his mother as a ‘highly strung’ person. ‘She is very dominating. When she was with my father, that was the situation. The same when she was with us. She can become totally hysterical. There is so much more peace in the family, now that she is staying separately,’ he had said. ‘The sort of things she says about me, make the parting much more painful,’ he had added ruefully. ‘Once she said that I should have been trampled under the foot of an elephant.’ 

But there was a time when Madhavrao was exceptionally close to his mother, to the extent that he discussed his girlfriends with her. Singh had interviewed the Rajmata and her comments appeared in the same issue of the magazine. ‘Bhaiya [the Rajmata addressed Madhavrao as that] and I were like friends. One night he came to my hotel room and lay down on the carpet. He was feeling lonely, and talked till 2 a.m. He was so free with me, he even used to discuss his girlfriends,’ the Rajmata told the journalist, according to a passage quoted by India Today. The Rajmata, while speaking to Singh, had blamed Madhavrao’s wife, Madhviraje, for the family rift. ‘He was a sterling boy. He used to pick up my shoes in front of everybody. But his wife could not bear his proximity to me. So she caused the rift. She is extremely greedy and ambitious. People hate her. Find out what her own staff says about her,’ the Rajmata had said. ‘My bahu’s mother has taken my place,’ she added, blaming Madhavrao’s in-laws who, like her, hailed from Nepal. The Rajmata looked composed but broke down twice as she spoke to him, Singh recalls. 

Singh remembered that Angre, who was present during the interview, had intervened to say, ‘She [the Rajmata] is reacting like a mother by trying to shift the blame on to her daughter- in-law.’ To Angre, Madhavrao’s most reprehensible action was ‘fleeing’ to Nepal during the Emergency. ‘While the Rajmata was in jail, being treated extremely badly and kept with mad women and criminals, he was in Nepal and then to England,’ Angre told Singh. ‘He [Madhavrao] ran away. This upset the lady. She was a very emotional person.’ 

Angre would often narrate an anecdote related to the legendary Maratha queen, Ahilyabai Holkar. According to him, Ahilyabai had established a custom of making charitable donations to her subjects every morning. One day, she discovered that her only son, still a boy, was putting poisonous scorpions inside the shoes of those who came to seek her benevolence. An angry Ahilyabai ordered her son’s execution – he was crushed to death under the foot of an elephant – and made Yashwant Rao Holkar, her general, the next maharaja. Angre viewed Ahilyabai as a heroine and often compared Vijaya Raje with her for disinheriting her son and leaving much of her fortune under the control of a trust. Angre was both a trustee and the executor of Vijaya Raje’s will.


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Author-journalist Saba Naqvi, who closely tracked the BJP, had claimed in an article in Outlook magazine that Angre’s influence turned the Rajmata against her son. She quoted a close friend of Rajmata as saying, ‘I told her that you should make up with Madhavrao. After all, you are called Rajmata [queen mother] because you are the mother of your son, the Maharaja.’ In response, Vijaya Raje had reportedly said, ‘It was Bal’s [Angre’s] influence over me which gave my political beliefs their rigidity. That is why he [Madhavrao] has taken special trouble to subject “Bal” to a host of major harassments such as getting his staff to file criminal cases.’16 

Before the mother and son parted ways, an angry showdown was said to have taken place at Jai Vilas Palace where Madhavrao had questioned Angre’s dominance on the Rajmata’s life. ‘Amma, this can’t go on. You simply have to choose. It’s either Angre or me,’ Sanghvi has quoted Madhavrao as saying. To his horror, the Rajmata had made the choice with no apparent difficulty. ‘I cannot leave Angre. He has stood by me through some of my worst times,’ she had reportedly said. ‘You will not leave Angre even if it means alienating your only son?’ a shocked Madhavrao is said to have replied. The Rajmata apparently shrugged her shoulders and an angry Madhavrao had stormed out of the room. 

Soon, word was out that the Scindia family was on opposite sides on most issues – two separate political parties; two separate palaces; two separate courts; and two separate sets of assets. The formal split took place on 12 October 1980, the Rajmata’s sixtieth birthday. It was both dramatic and unfortunate. 

This excerpt from ‘The House of Scindias’ by Rasheed Kidwai has been published with permission from Roli Books.

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