Implosion (34 page)

4
.   JE, ‘At last, India’s imperial phase draws to a close’,
New Statesman
, 10 May 1999,
http://www.newstatesman.com/node/134728 5.
Sonia a Biography,
pp. 75–77 as above.

6
.   David Lyon, ‘Obituary: Rajesh Pilot’,
The Independent
(UK), 14 June 2000,
http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1P2-5070727.html

7
.   Vir Sanghvi and Namita Bhandare,
A Life of Madhavrao Scindia
, p. 303, Penguin Viking India 2009

8
.   ‘A victory of sorts – Sonia Gandhi trounces Jitendra Prasada but not in an election that was completely free and fair’,
Frontline,
25 November 2000,
http://www.frontline.in/static/html/fl1724/17240280.htm

9
.   ‘The unlikely heiress, Can Sonia Gandhi lead Congress to victory?’,
The Economist
, 22 January 2004,
http://www.economist.com/node/2370836

10
. ‘In the Name of the Father – The new Gandhi generation’,
The Economist
, 24 April 2004,
http://www.economist.com/node/2618146

11
. Ibid.

12
. ‘Sonia more comfortable with Left than with regional allies’,
The Hindu,
27 March 2011,
www.thehindu.com/news/the-india-cables/article1574328.ece

13
.
http://ridingtheelephant.wordpress.com/2007/10/23/indias-unhappy-pm-faces-unclear-future/
and
http://business-standard.com/india/news/pm-talks-toughallies-over-nuclear-deal/302065/n

14
. ‘Sonia Gandhi’s letters guiding Prime Minister & cabinet ministers’,
Economic Times
, 13 August 2012,
http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2012-08-13/news/33182673_1_domestic-workers-sonia-gandhi-law-minister

15
.
http://ridingtheelephant.wordpress.com/2009/05/12/india%E2%80%99s-voting-ends-%E2%80%93-after-four-weeks-of-hot-air/

16
.
http://ridingtheelephant.wordpress.com/2009/05/16/congress-wins-%E2%80%93-communists-lose-%E2%80%93-orissa-stable/

17
.
http://ridingtheelephant.wordpress.com/2012/04/04/army-intrigue-and-graft-hits-indias-defences/

18
.
http://ridingtheelephant.wordpress.com/2008/11/30/chidambaram-is-a-good-choice-as-india%E2%80%99s-home-minister/

19
. ‘Dogged by Controversy’,
Outlook
magazine, 30 April 2012,
http://www.outlookindia.com/article.aspx?280623

20
. Sources in his office told JE.

21
. ‘Manmohan Singh says open to Rahul Gandhi succeeding him’,
Economic Times
, 29 June 2011,
http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2011-06-29/news/29717287_1_lokpal-bill-congress-high-command-prime-minister

22
.
http://ridingtheelephant.wordpress.com/2012/02/06/government-in-blundering-retreat-on-corruption-crisis/

23
.
http://ridingtheelephant.wordpress.com/2012/07/09/time-mag-misses-the-target-in-dubbing-manmohan-singh-an-under-achiever/

24
.
http://ridingtheelephant.wordpress.com/2012/08/15/has-india-abandoned-economic-debate/

25
.
http://ridingtheelephant.wordpress.com/2012/09/11/india-is-looking-sticky-as-the-system-crumbles/

26
. ‘Popular war on corruption ignites India – A former tax man is taking his campaign to the streets’,
The Independent
, 14 October 2012,
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/popular-war-on-corruption-ignites-india-8210445.html

27
. ‘Robert Vadra and DLF accused of illicit links by Arvind Kejriwal’, NDTV, 5 October 2012
http://www.ndtv.com/article/india/robert-vadra-and-dlf-accused-of-illicit-links-by-arvind-kejriwal-276051

15
Waiting for Rahul

Sonia Gandhi has managed to build around herself such an exclusive and untouchable aura of personal privacy and secrecy, combined with ultimate authority, that few people have dared publicly to question her role or criticize her supremacy despite the government’s growing failings. Apart from election campaigns, she has rarely appeared in public and never made herself available for the sort of public questioning routinely faced by most national leaders elsewhere.
¹
She has done this with a style of modest elegance, her demeanour refined, and the effect much more persuasive than that of many other politicians.

Before she entered active politics in the late-1990s, Gandhi seemed unassailable, protected by a charismatic protective halo. Believers say that once someone steps outside a chakra’s psychic circle of protectiveness, it shatters and cannot be repaired.
²
Gandhi however managed to retain her psychic chakra when she ventured into the real world of politics and even extended its reach so that the whole family became virtually unassailable, growing aloof with an understated but pervasive arrogance. The acceptance of this preeminent position would be envied by many less democratic rulers, as would Sonia Gandhi’s ability to rule with a minimum of public utterances.

Remote, Aloof – and Ill

This, of course, is the secret of her success. By rarely commenting on, or becoming associated with day-to-day policies and other such issues, she rarely exposed herself to criticism and thus avoided the risk of arousing controversy and generating political attacks that could undermine her authority and upset the future of the dynasty. She intervened on pro-poor subjects such as fuel prices and the industrial use of agricultural land and, later, on legislation providing food aid, but she mostly stayed away from major controversies such as India’s 2008 nuclear deal with the US and foreign direct investment regulations (though both she and Rahul Gandhi made one or two references in favour of foreign involvement in supermarkets). Neither she nor Rahul showed any interest in foreign policy, which they left to Manmohan Singh. ‘Rahul won’t pontificate on things that might go against him,’ said a friend.
³

Among the mysteries is the question of who advises Sonia Gandhi and the family, and manages so successfully to modulate their appearances and utterances. ‘The Gandhis don’t give their very closest loyalists top posts, preferring to keep them close,’ a contact with links to the family’s coterie told me, citing, as an example, Suman Dubey, a former journalist and newspaper editor who advises Sonia as a friend on media and other matters and plays down his proximity and insider knowledge. ‘Suman is the closest outside the family and he doesn’t want anything anyway,’ said my source. Ahmed Patel, her political secretary, is her closest full-time adviser, running her office and acting as her gatekeeper, high-powered political manager, and guardian of the status quo. Then there are various Congress politicians and others who have fluctuating roles.

At a
Hindustan Times
Leadership Summit conference in October 2007 that I attended, Sonia was asked who her advisers were and she said (twice) that she consulted ‘my son, my daughter and my son-in-law’ when making key decisions. Sources wonder whether there is someone else in addition to Patel, maybe outside India, who provides Rahul with an elder’s advice. Lee Kuan Yew, Singapore’s veteran political leader, for example, met Rahul when he was on a week-long visit to the city state in 2006, learning about politics and development
⁴
.

In 2005, the American Embassy reported (in the cable
⁵
that discussed Sonia’s affinity with the Left) that the party had evolved an elaborate protective culture. ‘Mrs Gandhi’s inner circle carefully controls her access to information, and inoculates her from criticism, while her carefully scripted public appearances protect her from making gaffes or missteps. This has the advantage of preserving the “sanctity” of Mrs Gandhi and the dynasty, but can also complicate her efforts to wield power.’ Gandhi, the embassy report continued, deliberately attempted to preserve the image of being above the fray politically, ‘taking maximum advantage of Congress culture, which prescribes that the party figurehead be surrounded by an “inner coterie” to provide advice, and shield the leader from criticism and dissent’.

That protection, however, went too far on 4 August 2011 when a Congress party spokesperson announced that Gandhi, then 64, had been diagnosed ‘with a medical condition’. On the advice of her doctors, she had travelled abroad and was likely to be away for ‘two-three weeks’, said the spokesperson, adding that the surgery had been successful and her condition was ‘satisfactory’.
⁶
Beyond that, her health was a ‘personal matter’ and the people of India should respect her family’s request for privacy.

She had appointed four people to look after the party’s affairs in her absence – Rahul Gandhi, A.K. Antony, Ahmed Patel and Janardhan Dwivedi, the party spokesperson. The naming of this group indicated that the illness was serious, as did the fact that Rahul and Priyanka had left the country with her (even though Rahul was one of those left in charge). Yet there was no official announcement on the nature of the illness, nor of where she had gone, though she was widely reported to have had a cancer operation in New York’s Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center where she had apparently already been treated for several months.
⁷
(A year earlier, she had left Delhi at short notice, cancelling meetings with David Cameron, the British prime minister, who was visiting.
⁸
She flew with Rahul, and it was thought Priyanka, to the US, reportedly because her mother was ill there, though later it was suspected that she was tested or treated for her own illness.)

It arguably borders on arrogance and disdain – and a lack of responsibility – for the leader of a ruling coalition and its main party to go abroad without explanation. The reasons have remained officially a secret, as have the nature of her illness and whether the suspected cancer has been successfully removed. She returned to Delhi after just over a month away, and appeared to recover and stabilise from the operation in the following months though she never looked completely well. She gradually returned to political work, but occasionally cancelled appointments because of ‘ill health’ and made regular return visits to the US for tests, and maybe treatment.

Tamed Media

The media’s response to her disappearance was relatively limited after the BBC and AFP broke the news internationally. There were prominent reports in India, but only two newspapers – curiously, both business titles – ran critical editorials within a few days of the announcement. ‘Such lack of clarity on the well-being and whereabouts of someone who, right now, is the most important political leader of the country is just not acceptable,’ said
The Economic Times
on 6 August
.
Normally pro-establishment, its headline was explicit:
‘
Sonia Gandhi a national leader and her health not just a private matter.’
⁹

The
Business Standard
(then edited by Sanjaya Baru, an economist and journalist, who had been Manmohan Singh’s trusted spokesperson and speech-writer from 2004 to 2009) ran an editorial on 7 August under the headline ‘Right to information – Ms Sonia Gandhi’s health is a matter of public concern’. ‘In a democracy the people have a right to know detailed information about the health of their leaders,’ it said. ‘This is neither a “private matter” nor can the family of the concerned public personality have the last word on the matter.’
¹⁰
There was a good television panel debate (including Baru) on some of these issues a few days later,
¹¹
but there was little more comment for several weeks. Congress party spokespeople stated that only information the family wished to share would be publicized. In another formulation, they said the government could only issue information that it received – suggesting that the government itself did not know about its leader’s health.

The only thorough reporting of the illness came much later in the
India Today
weekly news magazine, which ran a cover story in its 16 October issue headlined ‘How ill is Mrs Gandhi?’
¹²
Challenging the family’s insistence on secrecy, the story broke new (but not necessarily accurate) ground on the illness by reporting an (anonymous) New York doctor saying it probably wasn’t cancer but ‘was most likely an unusual disorder, pancreatic tuberculosis’ whose symptoms can be very similar to cancer.

Politicians around the world enjoy varying degrees of privacy, as
The Hindu
discussed on 22 September 2012 when, some weeks after Gandhi’s return, it ran an editorial headlined ‘The omertà on Sonia Gandhi’s illness’ – mischievously, given her origins, using the Italian word
omertà
, which means code of silence
¹³
. Such scattered coverage scarcely amounted to a real attempt to discover – either through an official spokesperson or other sources – the nature and seriousness of the illness. This sort of disregard by the media of its proper role in guarding the public interest is surely not healthy for a democracy. Even if one recognizes that politicians like Gandhi will guard their privacy as much as they can, this still leaves the question of the Indian media’s largely hands-off response – a reaction that enabled the family to ignore the limited criticisms.