One of India’s most powerful politicians is killed by his brother. Son goes on drug orgy, friend dies. Killer brother dies in jail. Now son gets married on reality TV. Here is a family that is stranger than fiction. Haima Deshpande in Open:
On a day when Rahul Mahajan upped the TRP ratings for a TV channel and married Dimpy Ganguli on a reality show, his deceased uncle Pravin Mahajan’s ashes had just been immersed. Pravin’s family did not know of Rahul’s wedding as they had not watched TV for some time. On that evening when Rahul gained a substantial sum of money from the show, his uncle’s family was looking for ways and means to pay off the Rs 18 lakh hospital bill accumulated over 82 days of Pravin’s hospitalisation and subsequent death due to brain haemorrhage.
The three years since the death of Pramod Mahajan, who fell to the bullets of his brother Pravin on 26 April 2006, have kept the Mahajans in the spotlight. They have made headlines with amazing frequency. When Pravin died on 3 March this year, whispers of foul play got a few decibels shriller. Convicted for his brother’s murder, Pravin was serving a life sentence at the Nasik central prison. He was granted a 14-day furlough as his wife Sarangi had an acute gynaecological problem which needed surgery. She was adamant on undergoing the medical procedure only if her husband was with her.
On the last day of his furlough, Pravin was hospitalised following brain haemorrhage. More:
Aakar Patel in Mint-Lounge:
Born in December 1946, Sonia got her certificate at 18. She’s had no education since. Her important qualification is for English, but those who watch her on television are struck by how poor her English is. She cannot express complex ideas in it.
The Nehru-Gandhis were all dull students. Rajiv failed in Cambridge, Indira failed in Oxford, Sanjay failed in high school and Nehru didn’t shine at Trinity.
It’s unlikely Sonia knows much about world history. If she has read Seneca and Cicero she doesn’t show it. Those unburdened by education, like Sanjay Gandhi, find it easier to view things as either good or bad. How has this affected Sonia’s decisions? We shall see later.
Sonia is slim and fit. At the dining table, she is probably disciplined. She looks younger than 64. Her aesthetic sense may be seen in her understated saris. She dresses in neat perfection, like an Italian woman. Her manner isn’t brusque. With the press she’s polite, and listens before responding. Her tone rarely changes. When attacking BJP leaders, she uses the oblique unko or unhonein. This distances her from them, while BJP is crude and direct with her. Her Hindi is broken, but she persists with it through a sentence, unlike urban Indians who mix Hindi with English. More:
It was a party of educated professionals once, and Rahul Gandhi wants to make it so again. But his father before him had tried, and he will succeed only if he finds a new way to do it. Jatin Gandhi and Hartosh Singh Bal in Open:
Indeed, as an organisation, the current Congress faces the same challenge any family-run business faces—how to bring about greater professionalisation while retaining control. The need to do so is not in doubt, spelt out as it is by the first of Ramachandran’s working hypotheses: family businesses with a higher level of professionalism practised both in business and by the family are likely to perform better and perpetuate their success over a longer time frame.
This, though, is easier said than done. Within the Congress, the idea has been in the making since Rajiv Gandhi’s ascent to power. But what was then a limited initiative to bring in a few friends with professional qualifications has now given way to a far more ambitious approach. Already, in the transition from Rajiv to Rahul, Sonia Gandhi has managed to implement an important step. She has placed a ‘professional CEO’ such as Manmohan Singh in charge of what managers call a ‘key result area’ (KRA): governance. Since 22 May 2004, Manmohan Singh has wrought professionalism across several governance functions, but his party itself has remained much the same. More:
[Image: Open]
The Gandhi name can be both a burden and a gift. With the tours of rural India, is Rahul Gandhi starting to find his feet, asks Shoma Chaudhury in Tehelka:
IT’S 6 PM in Jagdalpur, 300-odd kilometres away from Raipur in Chhattisgarh. Four Scorpio-loads of journalists have travelled here from faraway Delhi, in search of an elusive moment with Rahul Gandhi. A surprising sense of order grips the air. Everyone seems to know what they have to do; things move with clockwork precision. Rahul Gandhi is due any moment for a small closed-door meeting with tribal representatives. A slow but efficient line of people are snaking their way through the door. A frisk, and a question: Are you a tribal? Where is your card? Several sundry enthusiasts want to get in, many have travelled long miles, but they are turned away: this is strictly a meeting for tribal representatives. The journalists are made to stand about a 100 metres away, resolutely cordoned off by a polite row of sten-gun carrying cops. Rahul does not want media intruding on his meeting.
A few minutes later, almost on the dot, Rahul’s BMW SUV pulls up in a convoy of heavy security. It’s hot outside. The mosquitoes are humming in maddening towers overhead. He does not wave at the media, but walks with single- minded focus into the room and squats on the floor with the waiting audience. Their discussions are impossible to overhear.
More:
On the blog pakteahouse, the full text of Nighat Said Khan’s open letter to Fatima Bhutto, published in The Friday Times, and a question: If Fatima does not believe in heirs or dynasties, then why is her immediate family doing political business in the name of late Murtaza Bhutto?
It is for bread we fight, but we fight for roses too…
Dear Fatima,
I looked forward to your articles over much of 2007. I read you with interest. My sense of you was of a serious and sincere young woman who had sensitivity and an openness that was engaging.
Unfortunately, your personalized attack on Benazir Bhutto a couple of months ago jolted me. As a reader, I don’t want to be part of the internal pain and betrayals of the Bhutto family. My concern is only at the level of what the Bhuttos were, are and will be in the public sphere. I respected Benazir Bhutto for many things (while being only too critical of her failings) but I was particularly appreciative of the fact that she didn’t wash her family linen in public even under extreme provocation. Nor, I understand, did she indulge in personal vendettas or bear grudges. She was either “polite” or magnanimous. Either way, I felt better that she was not publicly vicious and that she kept her personal pain and betrayals to herself. I always felt that she dealt with me as a citizen and a woman and in that gave me respect.
As a feminist I am appalled that you are so deriding of Benazir as a woman.
[Nighat Said Khan is the Director of Institute for Women’s Studies, Lahore/Applied Socio-economic Research Center, Pakistan]
More:
NewsPostIndia caught up with the charismatic Fatima Bhutto at the ongoing Jaipur Literature Festival
The lines between the world of books and politics blurred once again Thursday when Fatima Bhutto, the 25-year-old niece of former Pakistani prime minister Benazir Bhutto, said she wanted to make her mark – but without the Bhutto tag.
The young author, who inherits the Bhutto legacy of politics from her father Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, her aunt Benazir and her father Murtaza all of whom died unnatural, brutal deaths, was the cynosure of attention at the ongoing Jaipur Literary Festival here.
more
The Nation
Humayun Gauhar on dynasty and the Bhuttos
People were hoping against hope that the PPP would take a quantum leap forward by making a break with its dynastic past. Sadly, it couldn’t rise above pleading ‘ground realities’, which often is a copout. So what we saw on December 29 was the coronation of a young boy with his father the appointed regent. The ‘ground realities’ are that the entire subcontinent is riddled with dynastic rule, “because this is something that our illiterate, unwashed, underfed masses understand.” Sure they understand it, because monarchy and dynastic rule is what they knew as their natural system before the British intervention and formal take over of India in 1857.
Continue reading ‘What’s in a name?’
