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Sonia Gandhi is still the power behind the throne

Congress President Sonia Gandhi, 63, created a kerfuffle of sorts by being elected unopposed to the party’s Presidential post for the fourth consecutive term.

This makes her the most durable party chief in the Congress’ 125-year history, not an insubstantial feat considering none of the other stalwarts — Sonia’s late husband, Rajiv, her mother-in-law Indira nor her grand father-in-law, Jawaharlal Nehru—could helm the party for that long.

When a senior leader of the right-wing Opposition party — the Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP) — quipped that Sonia’s election was proof of the Gandhis’ “monopoly” over the party, a Congressman retorted that “Sonia could be party chief not for four terms but even 40”!

So what explains the Sonia charisma? For hers has been a spectacular political trajectory even by the quirky standards of Indian politics. Born Sonia Maino on December 9, 1946, in the town of Orbassano in Italy to a building contractor and homemaker wife, Gandhi moved to India after marrying into the illustrious Nehru fold 
in 1968.

Though she “hated” politics, she was pitch-forked into it soon after her husband’s assassination in 1991.

Voted Congress president in 1998, the post proved to be Sonia’s baptism by fire. She inherited a party organisation that was in a complete disarray, shorn of the patina of respectability that had characterised it earlier. There was internal strife and factional infighting even as the threat of a hostile National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government — fronted by the BJP’s iconic leader, Atal Behari Vajpayee — loomed large. Worse, the Congress’ Parliamentary seat share had plummeted from 400 during Rajiv’s time to an abysmal 112.

However, despite Sonia taking over the Congress’ reins, the party still couldn’t come into its own for the first few months. Critics wrote her off. Her Hindi was weak, they carped, as the mother of two struggled to read her public speeches. She was a ‘reader’, not a ‘leader’ screamed the 
Opposition benches! But the redoubtable woman soldiered on. She worked to a strategy by focusing on revitalizing the moribund party and cobbling together alliances with sundry political outfits. By the 2004 general election, the Congress had sewn up partnership pacts in Bihar, Tamil Nadu, Maharashtra, West Bengal and Haryana. The party’s pan-India alliances and its pro-poor agenda found a resonance across the national landscape. They also helped it trounce a seemingly invincible BJP in the 2004 Lok Sabha election.

After the Congress victory in 2004, when Sonia was just a heartbeat away from becoming prime minister, she stunned her rivals by renouncing the post and anointing, instead, Manmohan Singh as the chosen one. This won her instant plaudits and took the wind out of the sails of the Opposition’s “foreign origin” campaign.

In her 12-year tenure, Sonia has helped flesh out the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) combine’s social agenda. She is the brain behind the government’s signature schemes such as MNREGA, Bharat Nirman and Right to Information (RTI).

Gender empowerment has been the savvy politician’s rallying cry as she pushed for Pratibha Devisingh Patil’s candidature as India’s first woman President and Meira Kumar’s as the first Dalit (untouchable) speaker for the lower house (Lok Sabha). She also put her shoulder to the wheel of the contentious women’s reservation bill which was passed by the Parliament after years of bitter dissent earlier this year.

However, despite winning a decisive mandate last year, the Congress-UPA government seems buffeted by widespread disenchantment in its second tenure. A raft of issues — the Kashmir imbroglio, inflation, Maoists and a leadership crisis—have further underscored the party’s sense of drift. Its ministers have also been accused of graft and corruption in the conduct of the Common-wealth Games.

The Congress’ aam aadmi (common man) pitch — earlier its winning ticket — also rings a bit hollow now. For even though India is on a strong economic wicket, poised for an 8.8 per cent growth despite a bruising meltdown, the fruits of that growth are not percolating down to 
the masses.

The government’s much-vaunted schemes like the Universal food security and Right to Education Act too, have got caught in a bureaucratic quagmire and are looking like increasingly difficult goals to achieve.

However, for the pro-Sonia lobby, these are mere blips on the radar. As the leader prepares to pass on the baton to her 40-year-son Rahul Gandhi, against a rising chorus of voices which accuse her of perpetuating dynastic politics, her supporters couldn’t care less. For them, Sonia is their saviour, the multipurpose glue that binds them together into a cohesive whole and also gets them out of 
sticky situations.

Neeta Lal is a New Delhi-
based journalist