New Delhi: It was a crowded bazar street in Amethi’s main town, and the mood was electric. Sonia Gandhi was contesting for the first time in 1999, almost a decade after her husband, former prime minister Rajiv, was assassinated. She was the Congress candidate in the ‘Gandhi family borough,’ as the town was famously called. But it was not Sonia Gandhi who was the campaigner for the day, but her daughter Priyanka Gandhi Vadra who was running a foot march through the markets and main town.
As Priyanka scooped babies and gave them back, hugged ladies and old women, waved to the throngs hanging out on balconies and swinging from trees, it was a crackling show. She spent the whole afternoon meeting and greeting people, clearly energised and enjoying the enthusiasm and fervour of a constituency waiting for a true blue Nehru-Gandhi to return home again.
Sonia Gandhi won Amethi decisively, Priyanka vanished almost instantly, going back to her life of homely domesticity, often spotted in her children’s school or firmly by her husband, businessman Robert Vadra’s side.
Yet, despite her stubborn refusal to be dragged into politics, she was soon thrown in, especially after the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance coalition government came to power in 2004, after a surprise win led by Sonia Gandhi, as she toured the country in the midst of the BJP’s empty ‘India Shining’ campaign. It made the BJP, then under prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, sit up and look at the Nehru-Gandhis as a powerful and significant threat. The 2004 election had shown that the family was very much in the reckoning and still a mighty force, both in the Congress party and among voters.
This is a story of two decades ago, but it was a time when the trio of Sonia, Rahul and Priyanka pulled in electoral appeal, glamour and enchantment.
Sonia Gandhi was the eminent and all-powerful coalition head even as she handed over the prime minister’s post to Dr Manmohan Singh, who went on to win another term in 2009. Rahul was touted as the PM-in-waiting even as the BJP saw Priyanka as the silent threat waiting in the wings.
For even as Rahul rode the wave in the first few years of the UPA government, he was soon seen more and more as a reluctant politician. He was then reticent, self-conscious, and awkward in public life, and had even called power ‘poison’. Priyanka, on the other hand, had no discomfort facing people. She was confident, assured and assertive as her few interactions then revealed. In Amethi, when reporters had asked her about her mother’s foreign origins, she charmingly retorted saying, “Look at my hands, does it have foreign blood flowing my veins?”. Soon, she had people eating out of her hands.
Despite Priyanka’s refusal to enter public life in the UPA decade of 2004-2014, the BJP leadership at the time was keeping a laser watch on her intentions for it. The media and public speculation for her unwillingness were many. Some wondered if she had opted for a domestic life – as pictures of her at dinner parties and holidays at tiger safari parks with her husband, children, and friends popped up in the media off and on. Some wondered whether she sought spiritual answers to her life of strife and tragedy, and was intent on not wanting to outshine her brother.
No one can forget when Priyanka went to meet one of her father’s assassins, Nalini, in 2008, who was incarcerated in Vellore Jail, in Tamil Nadu. According to Nalini, who was in prison for 30 years, and was released in 2022, an emotional Priyanka wanted to know every detail that led to the assassination of her father, Rajiv.
However, the BJP persisted in shadowing Priyanka, and as a prominent and senior leader had said, if and when Priyanka puts her foot forward in public life, the alleged corruption cases against her husband, Robert, will be put on breakneck speed for investigation. And the cases Vadra was embroiled in were many. From a business family dealing in brassware and artificial jewellery from Moradabad, Vadra jettisoned into the big league after he married Priyanka in 1997 – within a year he founded many firms, dealing in realty, IT parks, hotels, hospitality, aircraft charters and more. The allegations were that Vadra got the contracts from businessman
in return for political favours of doing ease for business.
In 2011, Arvind Kejriwal, then with an NGO, accused Vadra of getting sweetheart deals with DLF, the booming premier realty company. He said Vadra got interest free loans and discounted land bargains in exchange for political favours. Allegations flew from money laundering, land grab and kickbacks from deals; and the luxury properties he amassed from Gurugram to London. In 2015, within a year after Narendra Modi became prime minister, the Enforcement Directorate registered a money laundering case alleging Vadra had acquired land meant for the poor in connivance with state officials at cheap rates and later sold it for exorbitant profit. In 2017, the CBI also began investigations on the land deal, even as Vadra accused the Modi government and the agencies of a witch hunt.
Priyanka has not been bludgeoned to silence by the Modi government’s investigations which are yet to come to any conclusion despite more than eight years. Instead, she has taken the prime minister on – publicly, sometimes jeering, and most often scathingly, about his ‘hate politics.’ In 2014 itself, Priyanka retorted acidly to Modi’s patronising remark during the campaign that brought him to power. He had said Priyanka is like a daughter to him. Priyanka had said Rajiv Gandhi was her father. In Lok Sabha campaign in 2024, she had likened Modi to ‘gyani uncles’ who throng weddings, complain incessantly and sermonises to everyone.
It was only 33 years after Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination that his daughter took up a leadership position in the party and was appointed general secretary. It was just months before the 2019 general election, and Priyanka Gandhi’s formal political debut did not take off with a bang. She took over as the UP in-charge but despite her high profile mobilising of the ‘women’s vote’ and other tactics, she did not win Congress any political space in the state. She was soon to be replaced.
In today’s world of a hyper social media, a paralysed and submissive legacy media, and a new political order of Modi’s ambitious and powerful BJP, the Nehru-Gandhis will have to be combat ready to play the new game. As it is popularly said, ‘3G’ has now become ‘2G’ after since Sonia retreated from active politics. It seems now that the 2G is finally converging – Rahul is finally on the political battlefield with fervour and commitment, and Priyanka has taken the plunge, finally. Both have much at stake, and now have to make a success of it.
PS: It must be said here that after the campaign in 1999, Priyanka had made it a point to tell my then newspaper editor that I had spent the whole afternoon with her. It was like putting in a good word for the reporter.
Vrinda Gopinath is a senior journalist.
