Tag Archive for ‘Sonia Gandhi’ at Asian Window

Tag Archive for 'Sonia Gandhi'

The catholicity of Sonia

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on March 13, 2010

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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:

Reinvigorating the BJP

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on February 26, 2010

in India and Politics

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Swapan Dasgupta in The Wall Street Journal:

Barely 10 months ago, India’s elites agonized over the possibility that the general election would produce an unstable and fractious coalition government that would jeopardize the country’s economic growth. Today, with a stable government in place and the Congress Party having clearly established its political primacy, Lutyens’ Delhi resonates with whispered concern over the absence of a purposeful opposition.

The concern is based on a string of misgivings. The Manmohan Singh government is perceived to have grown utterly complacent. With inflation having crossed 8% and the price of food having registered a sharper increase, there is a feeling that the government is letting matters slide because it doesn’t fear political opposition and social unrest. There are fears that political considerations are preventing a robust response to the Maoist threat. Finally, in the aftermath of the Copenhagen summit and the resumption of dialogue with Pakistan, there are concerns that the prime minister is obliging the Obama administration excessively.

Since it lost power in 2004, the Bharatiya Janata Party, India’s principal opposition party, has lost its earlier appeal among the middle classes and the youth. This erosion of support was a consequence of a tired leadership, internal feuding, the pursuit of a policy of blind obstruction to all government initiatives and a failure to check sectarian hotheads identified with its Hindu nationalist ideology. From being a party of conservative Middle India, the BJP ceded its centrist space to the Congress Party. In recent months, it has been paralysed by a failure to counter the appeal of Rahul Gandhi, the Congress heir-apparent. More:

The tallest short man

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on February 26, 2010

in India and Politics

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In The Hindustan Times, Sumit Mitra profiles veteran politician Pranab Mukherjee:

Pranab Mukherjee

But, more importantly, PKM, as he is called by his colleagues in affection and awe, is a consummate politician. It is a badge that unfortunately very few contemporary politicians can wear. (A.B. Vajpayee is an exception, but he is no longer a contemporary.) It is Mukherjee’s razor-sharp political judgement that overshadows the minor question marks — such as his being a closet dirigiste, not to speak of his mercurial temper or his home-grown English, which the smart set of his party has named ‘Pranabese’. But it is a pleasure to hear the argument that rings out of his misplaced sibilants, subtly structured, brilliantly argued, and delivered with a rich cadence.

It was left to another master politician, Indira Gandhi, to discover this little master when, in 1969, Mukherjee, as a member of the Bangla Congress, a breakaway Congress group, delivered in the Rajya Sabha a speech that foreshadowed the vivisection of Pakistan — still two years ahead. Maybe Indira thought how could this five foot wonder, son of a freedom fighter from faraway Birbhum, peep into her innermost thoughts. Within a year Mukherjee and his faction was in the Congress. As a junior minister with independent charge of revenue and banking departments, he was quickly making headlines with a crackdown on the then Bombay smuggling underworld don who had become a law unto himself. Haji Mastan, whom he got arrested, was the inspiration behind emerging superstar Amitabh Bachchan’s cult movie of the time, Deewar.

Indira hit it off so well with her favourite find that, after her return to power in 1980 from the post-Emergency oblivion,

she promptly dispatched the grave and stodgy R. Venkataraman from the Ministry of Finance to Defence and, in January 1982, led Mukherjee to the room in North Block that he’d love most through the rest of his career. More:

The politics of Amitabh Bachchan

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on February 13, 2010

in Entertainment, India, Movies, People and Politics

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Why does the greatest superstar in Indian cinema history hanker so much for political patronage? From Open:

In his biography of Sonia Gandhi, journalist Rashid Kidwai writes of a winter day on 13 January 1968, when Sonia Maino landed in Delhi to marry Rajiv Gandhi. It was Amitabh who received her at the airport. In a 1985 interview, Sonia said, “Mummy (Indira) had asked me to stay with the Bachchans so that I could learn Indian customs and culture from close up. Slowly I came to learn a lot from that family. Teji Aunty is my second… no, my third mother. My first is my mother in Italy, the other was my mother-in-law Mrs Indira Gandhi, the third is Teji Aunty. Amit and Bunty (Amitabh’s brother Ajitabh) are my brothers.”

In 1984, after the assassination of Indira Gandhi, Amitabh was one of the men drafted by Rajiv into politics. The two men had known each other since childhood—Amitabh was four and Rajiv two when they met at a fancy dress party at the Bachchan home in Allahabad. “Ma says he messed up his pants,” Amitabh was to recall.

But the mess that was to follow their entry to politics was more than Bachchan could stand. It took no more than a few years for controversies such as Bofors to surface, where Amitabh’s name figured along with Rajiv’s. It was only then that this son of a Sikh mother, who had given little thought to fighting the 1984 election for the Congress in the wake of the massacres of Sikhs, chose to quit. More:

From INC to Congress Inc.

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on January 12, 2010

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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]

Mrs Gandhi and her extra god

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on May 23, 2009

in India, Indian elections 2009 and Politics

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An open letter to the unlikely woman whose tenacity in staying the course has changed the contours of Indian politics. Tarun J Tejpal in Tehelka:

Dear Mrs Sonia Gandhi,

We all know the cliché that India moves on faith. We love our gods, and it is at their feet that we place all our successes and failures. It is in this department that those who oppose you – and perhaps even some of those who support you – will assert that you have an unfair advantage. Through marriage and masquerade you have acquired all the gods Indian politicians have, while also possessing one you brought along from your faraway home all those aeons ago.

Since we do not oppose you, we are happy that you have an extra god. As you know, India has so many gods only because it has so many problems. (Yes, there are men on the far left and far right who think god is the problem, to be banished or to be rescued – but let these men not detain us, since they’ve failed to detain the electorate.) So we are glad that you have an extra god. One more is always handy. Our gods are playful, multi-faced, philosophical. Often their moralities are slippery to grasp, sheathed as they are in the complexities of karma and dharma, moksha and maya. The one you bring along, the extra one, is more cut and dried. Quite clear about right and wrong, good and bad, sin and virtue, charity and compassion. We – who do not oppose you – welcome that. Amid the material excesses born of our religious abstractions, a little bit of clarity is not a bad thing. More

Also from the latest issue of Tehelka whose focus is the recent elections in India.

The hour of the untamed cosmopolitan

Bred on radical diversity and an epic culture, the voter makes a reckoning of Narendra Modi, Prakash Karat, Mayawati and the politics of excess. By Ashis Nandy, social scientist

After almost two decades, in many ways, the election of 2009 was a normal election. No overriding consideration drove the voting across the country. Diverse configurations in diverse places determined the fate of different candidates and parties. Different regions had different logic even within a given state. Still, underlying the diversity there were some common themes.
image

First, I think people were looking for ways to lower the temperature of politics. High-pitched politics has reigned in our polity for nearly 15 years now. My suspicion is people were a bit tired of this. For example, the past two elections showed that in Uttar Pradesh, only one percent of the electorate was interested in Ram Janmabhoomi. The BJP probably played down the issue this year because their internal assessment showed the same thing. Except in West Bengal, nowhere did the election involve an emotional arousal of the kind we have come to routinely expect.

There are reasons for this. In our society, we live with radical diversities – diversity that is not based on tamed forms of difference. The US is a perfect example of tamed diversity. You get every kind of food and dress and cultural activity in America. You think you are very cosmopolitan if you can distinguish Huaiyang food from Schezwan food, or South Korean ballet from Beijing opera, or Ming dynasty china from Han dynasty china in a museum. This is diversity that is permissible, legitimate, tamed. More:

The vanquished in the rear-view mirror

For the BJP to survive as a national party and for it to remain politically relevant, it will need new leaders. By Swapan Dasgupta, political commentator

Among the more fascinating features of an Indian election is the fact that the writing on the wall isn’t apparent till after the event. This was as true in 1971 and 1984 as it was last week when the electronic voting machines revealed a clear mandate in favour of the Congress-led UPA. If the BJP didn’t expect to be mauled in two successive elections, the Congress never imagined the electorate would give it a firm thumbs up after five years of indifferent governance. But while the winner can afford the luxury of post-facto smugness, the loser suffers grievously from the hangover of miscalculated triumphalism.

It is natural for the defeated to get into a tizzy over what went wrong. It is also customary for the vanquished to focus less on what the other side did right and more on what it did wrong. Wisdom in hindsight, convulsions and recriminations are the inevitable consequence of political defeat. It happens in all democracies. More:

India finds the centre

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on May 18, 2009

in India, Indian elections 2009 and Politics

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Salil Tripathi at Far Eastern Economics Review:

What happened? Analyzing the decisions of some 700 million voters is not for the faint-hearted: All generalizations about India are wrong, because the opposite is also true. And yet there is a common pattern, a recurrent thread, which is this: in the end, Indian voters settle for the middle path. They abhor extremes. To paraphrase what V.S. Naipaul wrote in another context, Indians find their center. That center can be boring, predictable, and dull; but in a country where people must be prepared for all sorts of uncertainties (and then blame the adversities on karma) stability provides assurance. But this is not the kind of stability Indonesia’s Golkar, or Malaysia’s UMNO, or Singapore’s People’s Action Party, champion: ruling parties have often lost elections in India. Indians prefer the stability where MPs do not steer the country too far from its central ethos. More:

Landslide in India vote reshapes landscape

From the New York Times:

Eleven years ago, when she took over as president of India’s oldest political party, Sonia Gandhi was seen as India’s most improbable politician: a foreigner with a shaky command of Hindi, reclusive to the point of seeming aloof, a wife who had fought to keep her husband from joining politics and who lost him to an assassination.

Today, Mrs. Gandhi, 62, is credited with having scored a stunning political coup. Her Indian National Congress party made its best performance in 25 years in the parliamentary elections completed last week, picking up 205 of 543 seats on its own, and with its coalition partners coming only 12 seats shy of an outright majority. All it needs to do now to form a government is stitch up alliances with a handful of independents and small parties. More:

Dear Shri Advani

Mallika Sarabhai, Gujarat-based social activist and performer who contested the election and lost, in Outlook:

I was asked to write about whether it was a daunting experience for me, an independent, to contest against you, a mighty prime ministerial candidate. I choose to write a letter to you instead. By the time you read this, the election results will be out. You will either have lost or won. Either way, what I have to say to you will stand.

I am a post-Independence Indian. I was brought up to value and treasure my unique Indianness, to value our Constitution, which gives equal rights to all Indians, irrespective of belief, culture, practice or language. I learnt to revel in the differences that made us a rainbow country. We are a salad-like melange of cultures and not a soup where all variations get reduced to a homogeneous pulp-this, to me, is our greatest strength. More:

Indian election 2009: The verdict

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on May 17, 2009

in India, Indian elections 2009 and Politics

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A selection of front pages, their lead stories, and comment:

National, a forgotten idea, is reborn in the triumph of Congress

Manini Chatterjee in the Telegraph, Calcutta:

The idea of India – a vibrant, secular, plural, resurgent nation that can transcend its myriad differences and complexities to reaffirm an essential unity of purpose – received a resounding victory today as the world’s largest electorate shed the politics of extremes and delivered a decisive mandate to the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance.

For the Grand Old Party, today’s verdict was, arguably, its sweetest victory in many decades. In terms of numbers, the Congress secured much bigger wins in 1984 and even in 1991. But those came in the backdrop of tragic assassinations and were harvested in abnormal times and soon became a thing of the past as the politics of identity and regionalism, of caste and creed left little space for the middle-of-the-road politics of the only truly pan-Indian party. More:

Mrs G & Mrs G: same score

From the Telegraph, Calcutta:

The original Mrs G delivered a second successive election victory for the Congress but before that she had to win a war in 1971. The reigning Mrs G has also led the Congress to a consecutive poll success but hasn’t had to go so far as to fight an external war, though there might have been many domestic battles.

At least on one count, Mrs G equals Mrs G. Both have now won elections back to back. Indira Gandhi never won a third one running.

Given the culture of worship in the Congress, no one would openly weigh Field Marshal Sonia against Indira but comparisons are inevitable if only because they share the name. More:

Hands down

Shekhar Gupta in the Indian Express:

There are winners and there are losers in any election. But this is one election India can feel particularly good about. Not only because it’s been one of our smoothest ever – for which the Election Commission deserves the nation’s gratitude – but also because it confirms the positive trends that some of us, incorrigible optimists, have been flagging for a while. This newspaper has argued that the politics of grievance, rooted in our complex past, is giving way to the politics of aspiration. Or, as Thomas Friedman puts it, the weight of dreams is turning out heavier than that of memories. This election, powered by 60 crore voters, shows our democracy is firmly on that virtuous curve.

For, anybody who built a campaign on negativism, prejudice, victimhood and vengeance has been demolished. The voter has, in fact, been even less forgiving with victims of hubris, with those who loftily announce themselves as “next” Prime Ministers without being sure of even 40 seats; those who build their own statues; and those who with a fraction of seats in Parliament aspire to control the nation’s foreign and economic policies without, of course, being accountable for anything. More:

The headline says it all.

Red in the face

Jayati Ghosh in the Asian Age:

In West Bengal the picture is more disturbing. There is clear evidence of vote shifts against the ruling Left Front, and this message from the electorate cannot be ignored but must be addressed. The Left Front has ruled the state for more than three decades, providing not only stability but also many extremely positive measures for the improvement of conditions of life of ordinary people: not just the crucial land reforms that were the most extensive of any state government in the last 30 years, but the pioneering moves towards decentralisation and providing more powers to locally elected bodies.

However, in the past few years the state government of West Bengal, through its own actions or its inability to get its message across, has contributed to some loss of goodwill among the people. Three factors that have contributed to this and which must be recognised and addressed are:

The sense of alienation among the peasantry in the face of the events at Singur and Nandigram and the inability of the government to adequately justify its actions to the people or even to publicise its continuing land distribution programme;

The perceptions of discrimination among the Muslim community, even among those who have earlier been consistent Left supporters; More:

Man who would have been king

Ashok Malik in Hindustan Times:

The May 16 verdict is not a mandate for continuity; it is a vote for change. People never vote for the status quo. They vote in hope, they vote for better times, they vote for change. In this election, in substantial swathes of India, Rahul Gandhi came to represent change.

Uttar Pradesh is the most striking example. The Congress made gains in the eastern part of the state and in Bundelkhand, where Gandhi toured extensively over the past two years. In Jhansi, he sat in dharna on a local issue. The Congress won the seat. More:

Yesterday once more

Sunil Khilnani, author of The Idea of India, in Mint:

The demand in New Delhi for cars with opaque windows, and for large suitcases, has suddenly dropped. The extraordinary decisive victory of the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) now gives it the opportunity to form a government without the usual, tortuous machinations-and with the nearest approximation to an electoral mandate that India has seen in 25 years. The victory asserts Manmohan Singh’s personal authority at the heart of government, and it vindicates his decision last year to dispense with dependence on the Left parties. He now has the opportunity to serve a historic second term, and Congress has that rare thing in politics, a second chance. After the UPA government came to power in 2004, it squandered-despite some golden economic years-many opportunities to develop infrastructure, to improve primary and higher education, to pursue financial reforms, to provide basic health, and to work towards stabilizing the region. More:

Bharat Shining, Cong Smiling, Left Whining

Swaminathan S Anklesaria Aiyar in the Times of India:

I was dead wrong in predicting a hung parliament with Mayawati having a kingmaking role. Yet, I cannot resist recalling the heading of my March 9 column, ‘India slumps, Bharat rises, Congress smiles’. Despite a global recession that has hammered industry, rural areas – called Bharat – have prospered, enabling Congress to win a smashing victory.

Indian voters throw out 80% of all incumbent governments, especially in bad economic times. The global recession has hit India hard – industrial production slumped into negative growth, and exports were down 33% last month. Rural consumer prices are up almost 10%.

For Congress to get re-elected in such circumstances is remarkable. The main reason is prosperity in rural areas, which have 70% of the population. The entire organized sector has barely 30 million workers out of India’s total workforce of 500 million, which is overwhelmingly rural. Industrial captains, trade unions and information technology may hog newspaper headlines, but are barely visible to the rural millions. More:

The Manmohan Singh impact

Harish Khare in the Hindu:

Three months ago some of Dr. Manmohan Singh’s friends and aides were not averse to expressing their sense of disappointment that the Congress seemed so reluctant to project him as its prime ministerial mascot. Their argument was that he was an asset to the party, and the electorate was bound to appreciate his honesty, integrity and efficiency.

Then the Bharatiya Janata Party did the good doctor a favour. The principal Opposition party took a strategic decision to convert the Lok Sabha elections into a kind of presidential contest between its “strong leader” L.K. Advani and the “weak” Manmohan Singh. Mr. Advani started attacking Dr. Singh as the “weakest Prime Minister,” ridiculing him for being subservient to the Congress president, taunting him as a wimp, and heaping scorn, saying: “I do not get angry with him; I pity him.” More:

Fronts and friendships

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on March 21, 2009

in India, Indian elections 2009, Leaders and Politics

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The Indian political party is just a vehicle on its way to Delhi. Sunanda K. Datta-Ray in The Telegraph:

Despite Disraeli’s belief that parliamentary government is impossible without parties, the current campaign suggests that the principal – often only – purpose of a party is to further the ambitions of an individual. Parties presuppose ideas if not ideology. A great deal of time, effort, expense and anguish might be avoided if this pretence were dropped.

It has in practice. There’s anxious heartburning when Sitaram Yechury calls on Sharad Yadav or any other party leader not because he might convert them to revolution but because he keeps the headcount in the quinquennial Gentlemen vs Politicians race for the prime ministership. As for the other half, Mayavati and Jayalalithaa probably regard themselves as the only men in clusters of old women. But does that make them Gentlemen? When Barbara Castle lamented in the Commons that the English bulldog (Churchill) had become America’s lapdog, a Tory MP yelled, “You are not, of course, a dog!” He didn’t need to spell out the alternative for sedate members even on his own side to express shock.

On Newsweek’s Power List

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on December 21, 2008

in Lists

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Congress president Sonia Gandhi, Bollywood superstar Shah Rukh Khan, Buddhist spiritual leader the Dalai Lama and Pakistan army chief Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, who controls the the country’s nuclear weapons,have been ranked among the 50 most powerful people in the world by Newsweek.

From the magazine’s cover story by Jon Meacham headlined “The Story of Power”:

In the popular imagination, power tends to be viewed in one of two ways, both extreme. The first is totemic and tactical (how to get ahead at the office, to win friends and influence people). The other is epic and amorphous (the fate of markets, of vast global events and forces that seem beyond anyone’s control, but especially yours).

Power is both these things, and more. At heart, it is best understood in terms of command and control. It is either the capacity to make others do as you wish (the command function) or to reorder the environment around you (the control function).

No. 1 on the power list is Barack Obama, followed by Chinese President Hu Jintao, French President Nicolas Sarkozy, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, German Chancellor Angela Markel and powerful Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin.

Sonia Gandhi is at No. 17. “In the world’s largest democracy, she is the queen,” says Newsweek. Gen. Kayani is at No. 20 and ‘King of Bollywood’ Shah Rukh Khan at No.41.

Click here for Newsweek’s full and list and for their profiles.

The world’s 100 most powerful women

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on August 29, 2008

in Lists

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Forbes’ list has five names from this part of the world:

#3 Indra K. Nooyi, Chairman, chief executive, PepsiCo, U.S.: Nooyi continues to grow PepsiCo, the $39 billion food and beverage giant, through new product offerings and acquisitions

#21 Sonia Gandhi, President, Indian National Congress Party, India:Gandhi, the Italian-born leader of India’s most powerful political party, the Indian National Congress Party, has by now assumed the role of elder stateswoman.

#38 Aung San Suu Kyi, Deposed prime minister; Nobel peace laureate, Myanmar: Since the democratic elections in 1990, when she was elected prime minister, Suu Kyi, 63, has been kept from power and is now in the sixth consecutive year of house arrest.

#59 Mayawati Kumari, Chief minister, Uttar Pradesh, India: In the running to be prime minister, from her perch as chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous state.

#99 Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw, Chairman and managing director, Biocon, India: Trained in Australia as a brewer, she founded Biocon in 1978 to make industrial enzymes with a small Irish company, Biocon Biochemicals.

Click here for the complete Forbes list and the profiles:

Amethi’s discovery of Rahul

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on July 18, 2008

in Leaders

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Even as Gandhi junior logs in frequent flyer points during his country-wide ’discovery of India’ tour, constituents in the family pocket borough, Amethi — which Rahul Gandhi visited days before the crucial no-confidence vote that could well pull the United Progressive Alliance down — wonder what, if anything, he is going to deliver to them, writes S Mitra Kalita in MInt

If Rahul Gandhi wanted to better understand India’s ills, why bother leaving his constituency?

The question looms in Amethi, a seat that has passed hands from one family member to another, down four generations and six decades. And so over the last few months, as Gandhi traversed the nation to “discover India”, as the media dubs it, in planes, trains and helicopters—to Orissa, Chhattisgarh and Karnataka—many here watched bitterly.

“Rahul is the name and fame of Amethi but the ground level work is zero,” said Ram Singh Raghuvanshi, an advocate and mango farmer. “Rahul Gandhi is making a tour of India, playing cricket with children, distributing toffees. It is all a political drama. That will not help the people of Amethi.”

The year of the rat is eating our vitals

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on May 29, 2008

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In Mail Today, Manoj Joshi argues that the travails of the Congress seem to be deepening as the darkness descends on the political landscape of the country

JUST eight months or so ago, everything seemed to be going well for the world. The global economy was ticking along; the US, was headed for an election whose winner felt she was predestined; following a spectacular 2007 when its economy did even better than before, Beijing was readying itself for its coming out party, the 2008 summer Olympic games. In New Delhi there was a government which was beginning to believe that given the disarray in the ranks of the principal Opposition party, and the country’s buoyant economy, the next election was a cakewalk.

Then came the Year of the Rat and everything seems to be in turmoil. Things are not looking too good, not for the world, not for India. Super-billionaire Warren Buffet has declared that the US is now in a recession, one that could last for several years. Having managed to beat down the pro-Tibet agitation, China has been struck by a natural calamity of enormous proportions. The May 12 earthquake has taken 100,000 lives and caused widespread destruction and has brought a pall of gloom over the country which the Olympic celebrations will not lighten. As for India, it is gripped by a different kind of a crisis, a madness, if you will, that is impelling our political class to wantonly undermine, squander, and even destroy, every opportunity and advantage the country has been blessed with.

The pilgrim prince

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on May 7, 2008

in India and Politics

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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.

Meanwhile, with the other Gandhi: Rahul as PM?

Published

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on April 16, 2008

in Politics

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Congress president Sonia Gandhi snubs Human Resource Development minister Arjun Singh by saying the ‘prime minister’s post is not vacant’. Congress spokeswoman Jayanti Natarajan says there is no place for ’sycophancy’ in the Congress party. But is there more to Arjun Singh’s endorsement of Rahul Gandhi as prime minister than meets the eye? Alistair Scrutton in Reuters looks at the issue

Important voices are being raised in favour of Rahul Gandhi as India’s next prime minister, as the ruling party looks to its family dynasty to fill a leadership vacuum as a general election approaches.

“What is wrong in wanting a young person like Rahul Gandhi to be Congress’s prime ministerial candidate?” Human Resource Development Minister Arjun Singh, one of the ruling Congress party’s elder statesmen, told Indian Express newspaper.

Similar comments from Singh were widely reported across India’s media. They were followed by another statement of support, this time from Tamil Nadu chief minister M. Karunanidhi, one of the government’s key regional allies.

To know what sister and private citizen Priyanka has been up to, go to AW’s earlier post here.

Priyanka Gandhi visits father’s assassin

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on April 15, 2008

in India

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(Updated on April 16)

From CNN-IBN:

Former prime minister Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination is making news once again. This time it is because of his daughter Priyanka Vadra’s visit to a Vellore prison, where the only living member of Rajiv’s assassination squad, Nalini Sriharan, is lodged…

…”It’s completely personal, I don’t want to say anything about it. I needed to make peace with all the violence in my life,” she said.

“I don’t believe in anger or violence and I refuse to let it overpower me. Meeting Nalini (Sriharan) was my way of coming to terms with my father’s death,” Ms Gandhi said.

And on CNN-IBN: My family doesn’t carry anger, hatred: Rahul Gandhi

The Priyanka-Nalini meeting is a moment of grace and humanity, rare in our public life says an editorial in The Indian Express

It is an almost novelistic encounter — Priyanka Gandhi meeting Nalini Sriharan, one of her father’s assassins in Vellore jail, “to make peace with the violence”. Nalini, an LTTE rebel, was part of the squad that killed Rajiv Gandhi in 1991 during an election rally in Sriperumbudur, Tamil Nadu, and would not even have lived if Sonia Gandhi had not pleaded for clemency on her behalf because she had a young child. Priyanka asked Nalini why her father had been so brutally killed, whether Nalini had known him — talking to her, trying to come to terms with his death and refusing to let “anger and violence overpower” her.

Finally, Nalini believes her sins have been cleansed following her meeting with Priyanka, writes Radha Venkatesan in Times of India

To the world, it was a stunning revelation to learn that Priyanka Vadra had met Nalini, serving a life term for involvement in Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination.

For Priyanka, it was an attempt to attain closure, to come to terms with the tragic loss of her beloved father. But how did Nalini feel about the meeting?

According to the account she gave to her brother, it was a singularly emotional encounter. “I feel all my sins have been washed off by Priyanka’s visit…I feel she has pardoned me by calling on me at the prison…. I am indebted to her all my life,” she told her younger brother P S Bhagyanathan a few days after her March 19 meeting with Priyanka behind the majestic walls of Vellore prison.

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