Rae Bareli voted on Monday (May 20) in an election whose significance is in the will to fight, not in the result.
“Aaj main aapko apna beta saump rahi hoon. Jaise aapne mujhe apna maana hai, waise hi Rahul ko apna maan kar rakhna hai. [Today, I am handing you my son. Like you made me your own, you have to hold Rahul as your own].”
Sonia Gandhi was taking her leave from Rae Bareli and vacating a stage that has been hers for 25 years, her son Rahul and daughter Priyanka standing at attention to her right – three individuals whose lives were changed forever by two assassinations that wounded India.
Last month, Sonia took oath as Rajya Sabha member. In February, before filing her nomination as a member of the upper house from Rajasthan, she wrote a letter to Rae Bareli to bid goodbye as an MP.
On May 17, she took to the stage as the constituency’s representative for the last time and passed the baton on.
Priyanka, Rahul and Akhilesh Yadav had spoken before and had received loud cheers at the joint INDIA rally at the ITI grounds as they made promises for the future and aimed potshots at the ruling party and its supreme leader. But the applause that broke out spontaneously and continued as Sonia spoke was not that of a political gathering.
“Rae Bareli is my family. Amethi too is my home. For the past hundred years, my family’s roots are tied to this soil,” Sonia said.
In the letter in February, written in Hindi and addressed to “my dear family members of Rae Bareli”, she had recalled coming there after having lost her mother-in-law and her husband and being embraced with open arms.
The applause on Friday was Rae Bareli’s articulation of the same feeling.
Parivar (family) is not the same as parivarvaad (nepotism). Nepotism is rampant in India and not just in politics, where it is criticised most.
Few speak of parivarvaad in business. If you build a grocery store with your own hard work and your own money, you can of course pass it on to your child without questions being asked, but when you build your business using shareholder money and taxpayer money as most big businesses do, should the children of the promoters automatically get to take the reins? That is a debate for another time.
While parivarvaad is wrong and needs to be fought everywhere, parivar is a building block of the community, country and the world. It is where you receive and learn to give love, respect and support and where you are taught the values that define your life.
Family is not always biological, it is anybody who takes you as their own and has your back. But it always brings with it a sense of duty – the duty of parents to bring up their children to the best of their ability, of children to care for the parents when the time comes, of siblings and spouses to stand by one another, and of the extended family to rally together in celebration and sorrow.
In an interview in February 2004 at Swaraj Bhavan, the Nehru family home in Allahabad that is now a museum, Sonia pointed to this sense of duty as the reason she stepped into politics seven years after the assassination of her husband Rajiv Gandhi, whose entry into politics she had resisted.
“I have in my office photographs of my husband and my mother-in-law and each time I walked past the photographs, I felt I wasn’t responding to my duty, to the duty to this family and the country … That was 1998 and the BJP was gaining somewhat, and that was the main reason for me taking that decision…
“The BJP is a party which believes in a divisive agenda … we all know what their agenda is and this is an agenda against which my whole family fought; they lived and died for the country and also to fight this agenda because they believed, and I believe, this agenda if it is carried out is going to divide our country and break our country.”
Sonia picked up the baton in Sriperumbudur, addressing her first political rally in the town where her husband had been killed by a suicide bomber during an election campaign.
A year later, in 1999, Sonia contested the Lok Sabha election for the first time. She won her seat, but the BJP won that election.
Five years later, the BJP was predicted to return to power comfortably, riding the India Shining wave. Sonia’s Italian origin had been made an election issue, she was clearly not a public speaker and certainly no match for Atal Bihari Vajpayee, and the Congress party did not inspire confidence.
Sonia campaigned by road despite her asthma, holding smaller meetings where her personal connect would make up for her lack of oratory, and she stitched together an alliance that was as formidable as it was unlikely – she reached out to and included Sharad Pawar, who had led the rebellion against her in the Congress and split the party.
The 2004 election victory was stunning, but what followed was more remarkable. Declining the prime minister’s chair, Sonia presented Manmohan Singh as her choice for the role.
The sight of the two leaders standing in the forecourt of Rashtrapati Bhavan on May 19, 2004, where Sonia told the media that she believed the country would be safe in his hands and Manmohan acknowledged that the people’s mandate was for her, set the tone for a partnership that steered the country for the next ten years.
If Manmohan scripted the historic India-US nuclear deal, navigated the country out of the 2008 global economic crisis and tackled such storms as the Satyam scandal that had threatened to rock India’s IT industry, Sonia was behind the social reforms.
The right to education Act that assures every Indian child free schooling from the age of six to 14; the right to information Act that brings transparency to government and without which we would not have known that the State Bank of India was tracking electoral bonds; the national rural employment guarantee scheme that became the lifeline of the poor during the COVID-19 pandemic; and the right to food that guarantees the poor subsidised ration, are schemes that came out of Sonia Gandhi’s National Advisory Council and were pulled off by Manmohan’s government.
To those that mocked him as a puppet and took his silence as a sign of weakness, the answer would come in July 2008 when Manmohan staked the survival of his government for the success of the nuclear deal.
A political leader who gave up the opportunity to be prime minister after earning it, and a prime minister who was willing to sacrifice his chair for a decision he believed was right for the country – today, when winning power is everything, it seems like a partnership from a dream.
As Sonia steps away from the electoral stage, Manmohan has already retired from politics. His Rajya Sabha term ended last month.
He is the only leader mentioned by name in the Congress election manifesto, which is perhaps fit given that it was his government’s record of delivering the rural jobs scheme, the right to information, the right to education, the direct benefits transfer scheme and the right to food, while ensuring an average 7.7% economic growth rate, that lends weight to the party’s guarantees.
Priyanka and Rahul stood attentively, hands clasped in front, eyes lowered, as Sonia started speaking. The three on the dais had a long time ago been seen together on a platform, in white, when Priyanka held Sonia as Rahul lit the funeral pyre of their father Rajiv.
Earlier, at another public funeral, all four of them had bid goodbye to Indira Gandhi, a beloved grandmother, mother and mother-in-law.
The family had been the target of two of the three assassinations of political leaders that India has been witness to since independence.
“Main aapko apna beta saump rahi hoon. Rahul will not disappoint you,” Sonia said.
“I have taught Rahul and Priyanka what I learnt from Indira ji and from the people of Rae Bareli. Respect everyone, protect the weak, fight whoever you need to fight for the people’s rights and against injustice. Don’t be afraid because your roots and tradition of struggle are very strong. Jisse bhi ladna pade, lad jao. Darna mat kyunki sangharsh ki tumhari jaden aur paramparayein bahut majboot hain.”
Daro mat is a cry we have come to associate with Rahul, such that at a recent rally in Bengal, Modi used the phrase to mimic the Congress leader. For years mocked relentlessly as a dynast and a ‘Pappu’, Rahul has fought his way through. At Rae Bareli, he told the crowd he could get Narendra Modi to say anything he liked.
“I said Narendra Modi ji, you will never utter the name of Adani-Ambani. Two days later, he says, ‘Adani-Ambani’.”
It has taken ten years, but Modi publicly accusing Adani and Ambani of sending tempo-loads of black money to the Congress is a big victory for Rahul. As is the failure of the BJP’s repeated efforts to make hate the agenda for this election.
The result is anybody’s guess but Rahul has dominated the fight. He has internalised at least one lesson from his mother: “Jisse bhi ladna pade, lad jao.”
On Gandhi Jayanti in 2022, 25 days into the Bharat Jodo Yatra, Rahul had told his audience in Mysore that stood listening in driving rain: “We are today embarked on a battle with the very ideology that killed Gandhi. This ideology has delivered inequality, divisiveness and the erosion of our hard-won freedoms in the past eight years.”
In undertaking the yatra, Rahul was putting in practice a lesson learnt from Gandhi – the Dandi March, which was to become a turning point in the freedom struggle, was a walk for unity and against inequality.
At the All India Congress Committee session in Wardha in 1942, Gandhi had said: “I have always said that not Rajaji, nor Sardar Vallabhbhai, but Jawaharlal will be my successor.”
Speaking after the assassination of the Mahatma, Jawaharlal Nehru described all Indians as children of Gandhi. The first prime minister spoke of the poison that had been spread in the country and said: “We must face this poison, we must root out this poison…”
Nehru spoke of the darkness but he also spoke of hope:
“When we look into our hearts we still find the living flame which he lighted there, and if those living flames exist, there will not be darkness in this land and we shall be able with our effort, praying with him and following his path, to illumine this land again, small as we are, but still with the fire that he instilled into us.”
Hundreds of thousands of children of Gandhi, across generations, have carried this fire. The women of Shaheen Bagh, the farmers who sat on Delhi’s borders and the students across Indian campuses who came out in December 2019 to resist the Citizenship (Amendment) Act are among them. As is the civil society that led the fight in the Bengal Assembly elections, and did so again in Karnataka.
Some faces of resistance come to mind, such as that of Umar Khalid, who was jailed after calling upon people to follow Gandhi’s path of peaceful protest; Teesta Setalvad, who has fought bravely for the victims of the Gujarat riots; Roop Rekha Verma, who gave surety for the release of Siddique Kappan; and Harsh Mander, who has striven tirelessly for peace and harmony. But there are many, many more.
After a long diffidence that might have been due in part to the fear of losing votes but was also in a large measure because many of its leaders did not really see themselves as children of Gandhi, the Congress is today once again leading the political fight against the ideology that cost the nation its father.
Credit for this must go to Rahul, who has prioritised fighting hate over fighting elections. When he went on the Bharat Jodo Yatra, walking 4,000 km from Kanyakumari to Kashmir, many television and newspaper pundits had asked whether he should not be campaigning instead for the state assembly polls.
Now, as the prime minister swings between trying to build a Hindu-Muslim narrative and trying to distance himself from it, the MP from Wayanad can be allowed a wink.
In Rae Bareli, as Sonia entrusted her son to the people, she also formally handed over to Rahul a flag which he had already clasped.
Harshita Kalyan is a Calcutta-based journalist.