The daughter, and the sister - Priyanka Gandhi

A version of this was published in Open Magazine in May 1, 2014 issue

http://www.openthemagazine.com/article/nation/the-intimate-daughter

Chinki Sinha

New Delhi, April 30, 2014

A handful of days before she was assassinated, former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi walked the lawns at the Nehru guesthouse in Srinagar barefoot telling a close aide how her meeting went with a priest. It was around 5:30 in the evening, and she had got her grandchildren Rahul and Priyanka for vacation. Moments ago she had returned from the Shankaracharya temple, which is housed in the Srinagar district on the hill known as Takht-e-Suleiman. Chinar trees lined the horizon in the evening sun.

She was with a close aide. She told him she could see herself in Priyanka Gandhi, who she had wanted to name Sarika when she was born but the name had been given to another worker’s daughter and so they had settled on Priyanka. According to close family friends who have been watching the Congress party for a long time, she told the trusted aide that the responsibility of her granddaughter’s education and training would lie with him in case anything would happen to her. Perhaps she knew. A few days later she was gunned down, and the aide was sidelined. But Priyanka Gandhi learned kathak, and Sanskrit, and generally about the India her grandmother who was often referred to as the ‘iron lady’ ruled. Her brother Rahul Gandhi, Congress’ vice president, was always more western. It was his sister who the grandmother had projected as her progeny.

That was in 1984.

It was not an easy childhood. By no means normal. First, they saw their grandmother getting killed, and later, their father in 1991. They lived in isolation, trapped within the dynastic setting. Heavily protected, they lived mostly indoors. At first, in fear. They couldn’t go to school, and both brother and sister formed a bond then that was cemented by their isolation in childhood. They were not free, family insiders say.

Even as adults, they would only move around with the SPG guarding them. There was no scope for encounters, or relationships. They say she met Robert Vadra when she was very young and was taken by his dance. They say he danced very well. To someone who hadn’t been able to explore love and life like others, that must have led to an infatuation. Love, marriage, and future. These are all private, and yet public questions when it comes to the dynasty. Speculation abounds. Insiders are tight-lipped about the marriage.

Now that Priyanka Gandhi, 42, has taken over the campaign in Amethi and Rae Bareilly, and is ruling the front pages of national dailies for taking on BJP’s Prime Ministerial candidate Narendra Modi, and defending her husband, there are those that see her as the savior of the Congress. Others, who claim to know her, feel she would not pose a challenge to her brother, who she shares a close bond with. They spent many lonely hours of their childhood being with each other, and for each other. It is the solitude of power, and dynasty. Surrounded by a coterie of men, who a few insiders say, have made them enigmatic, and inaccessible, they have nobody to turn to, or trust. There are insecurities, and expectations. There are winds of change that they are trying to deflect. Together, and alone.  Almost. The mother Sonia Gandhi remains an anchor, and as her daughter roams the hinterlands for her mother and brother, mobilizing cadres, stopping by to speak with the women and men, she is relying more and more on Priyanka Gandhi, who remains her trusted soldier on the ground. She connects easily. In the family bastion of Amethi and Rae Bareilly, they are waiting for her to come to the aid of the party. But she won’t say anything except standing by her brother when he needs her. Rahul Gandhi remains yet another enigma. His approach to power remains a baffling theory for most, who have not been able to understand why he would speak about empowerment within the party, and dismiss dynasty. That he is not much of a peoples’ person as his sister in the way she navigates through questions, and smiles, is a known fact. But to say he is a dumb person is a fallacy, a close aide who is handling the media for the party, says.

Last month when Rahul Gandhi came to file to his nominations to contest elections from Amethi, a seat vacated for him his mother Sonia Gandhi, Priyanka Gandhi and husband Robert Vadra came by road to greet him. Through the odd 40-kilometer journey paved with rose petals showered on the two as they held a road show in Sultanpur and Amethi holding hands of the people, and smiling, and waving, she was hailed as the daughter of the land. At chai shops, and chaupals, they recall how she came to the constituency after her marriage, and the women made her gifts.

Outside the guest house in Munshiganj in Amethi, Iqbal Ahmed, who is a party worker from Tiloi Vidhan Sabha area, was waiting for his turn to get an audience with her. She had come on April 17 for a few days to campaign in the two constituencies, and was meeting party workers to understand the issues. The sun was riding high, and Iqbal Ahmed was trying to find a cooler spot on this highway that was of people waiting for her to come out.

“She is better than Rahul Gandhi. If only she would come, politics would change. She listens to us, and she knows most workers by their names. She broke the caste barriers in the party by bringing in meritocracy. She doesn’t impose. But we tell her to take over, and she says there should be no issue between the brother and sister. She says she is here for him,” he says.

Her style of campaigning hasn’t changed much from what it used to be. It is much more visible. Those that are close to the party say she is much in sync with the system, and works mostly from Rahul Gandhi’s house on Tughlaq Road, or Jawahar Bhawan. She clocks in more than 12 hours of work every day. It is elections, and the party is worried they are losing. After May 17, the future will be decided. They will clamor for her to take over the reins of the party that seems to be facing anti-incumbency and confusion over the role of the dynasty. Already, the myth of the dynasty is fading out. A resemblance to her grandmother and imbibing her style in the public life aren’t going to bail out the congress from its current crisis – leadership.

In 2004, she had said she had inherited her saris from her grandmother Indira Gandhi . She said she was much taller so she had to put ‘fall’ to make the sari fit her profile. That was an instant identifier for people. In places where the memory has not been overwritten from the time when Indira Gandhi visited their forsaken land, that was a connection that was emotional, and loyalists that they were, they wanted to believe in the mythical powers of the dynasty – its eternal appeal, and charm.

It started with a comment on her cousin Varun Gandhi who is the BJP candidate from neighboring Sultanpur. She said he had gone ‘astray’ and that led to a war of words. That was the beginning of the battle of words that has now made her the reigning figure in Congress. But in the hinterland of Amethi and Rae Barielly, they will tell you she is an amiable person. Her body language doesn’t ever suggest she would attack anyone. It is mostly the media that picks selectively, and sensationally.

Shivmanohar Pandey, the bureau chief of Jansatta who is based in Rae Barielly, who has been covering her rallies, says Priyanka Gandhi connects easily.

“She goes around in the villages, stops by where she sees a gathering and generally smiles and talks to people. That’s her classic style – picking up children, folding hands, etc. But last election campaign, her body language was more enthusiastic. Not this time around,” he says.

There’s a meeting he recalls in 2012 when she was asked why she doesn’t come to Rae Bareilly so often. She told him she would like to come more often but she didn’t want it be perceived in wrong way.

“I try to come. My brother is dearer to me than my life. I don’t want to be a power center hence I don’t come here regularly,” she had told him.

He had also written a story in Nayi Duniya about this conversation back then.

“She doesn’t want to challenge Rahul,” he says. “They are very affectionate towards each other.”

He speaks about a friend who was a close family friend of the Gandhis who said they had spent so much time in solitude with each other and in fear that they have developed a different dynamic.

“They would cry together, hold on to each other when they had lost their father. They were afraid. They couldn’t trust anyone,” he says.

In Rae Bareilly, she has managed to reach out to the people.

“Rahul doesn’t connect to the workers. Amethi party workers say he looks at them with suspicion but he is just being careful about his name not being used in shady deals. He doesn’t have political tact,” he says. “But Priyanka has it.”

He goes on to recount yet another incident where a local asked her why he should vote for her. At this, she didn’t get angry. She smiled, and said they were restricted in their own ways because of the SPG protection, and admitted where the party had gone wrong. She said she would like his views, and this was done well, he says.

Again, her husband Robert Vadra isn’t around as much. At least not in the frames that have been captured of her as she navigates through the villages holding her nukkad meetings.

“Perhaps it is a strategy,” he says.

Again, there is the other side of her. Of a mother. Rolly Kumar, whose younger son Anmol is in the same grade as Miraya at Shri Ram School in Delhi, says she attends almost all the workshops and PTA meetings.

“She is always prompt. She would come to drop off her daughter and pick her up until Class 5,” she says. “You would see her early morning at the railway station when the school planned an outstation trip.”

That she came in a cavalcade of three cars, her bullet proof Safari in the middle, was a display of power. Although it was also out of a concern for security. But inside the campus, she would interact freely, smiling at everyone, Kumar says.

“Of course she is very stylish, and wears these long skirts. Always casual,” she adds.

Anmol, who is in seventh grade, finds Priyanka Gandhi funny. He says she is a Congress worker. Beyond that his own interactions with Miraya has never been about her family.

“She is into sports and is great in races,” he says.

Once Priyanka Gandhi had played a scientist in a skit when the kids were being taught a class, and he found her very funny. She always sends cupcakes, and other baked items to school.

“Miraya is not like others. She says hello, not what's up. She has a lot of friends. She is very popular,” he says. “And her mother is always there. Her class projects are really good.”

But beyond being a dedicated mother, and what is available about her in the public, she remains shrouded in mystery. Family insiders won’t reveal much. Nehru-Gandhi family has always been private. During the times of Indira Gandhi, accessibility was not a difficult thing. Now, it is only through a coterie of trusted soldiers that are their counsels.

In tough times, then there are demands from within the party that Priyanka Gandhi should be more involved. That’s how they can resurrect the dynasty. But she herself has refused any such commitment.

“She is very close to her brother who is not a classical politician who believes in the rhetoric that one has to win this election. He isn’t hungry for power. He has a vision, and is a strategist. I think when he talks about empowerment, he believes it.  But of course you can’t divorce RSS from the BJP, or the dynasty from the Congress. No Congressi can question the dynasty. Elections have been fought and won on dynastic charm,” another aide says.

They wouldn’t even speak over the phone. It is important that they not be named. Only then they would reveal a bit of her personality to a scribe.

These are ‘those times’, they say.

“She has charisma. She is less anglicized than her brother, and in a speech recently, the only English word she used was ‘computer’,” he says.

Language is a tool for connect. She understands it well.

In a rally in December 1998 in Sriperambudur in Tamil Nadu when Sonia Gandhi decided to enter politics, Priyanka Gandhi was with her. The rally was only attended by a couple of hundred of people, says a close family aide.

“She spoke a sentence in Tamil,” he says. “She had that instinct. She is a natural leader. She isn’t a housewife. That’s an understatement.”

Yet another instance he mentions that offers yet another window into her personality.

The day the Telangana Bill was mooted in the Parliament, the Congress workers were worried. They had gathered at Tughlaq Lane and said Rahul and Sonia Gandhi should not go to the Parliament that day because there would be opposition. That moment Priyanka Gandhi entered, and asked if they were going to shoot bullets, or explode bombs.

“The issue was explained to her. She said ‘We are political people. Why should we be scared? My brother is not a coward. My brother will attend and so will my mother’ and that explains her natural instinct for politics,” he says.

Previously, Rahul Gandhi was the face of the Congress, and now she has taken over by directly challenging Modi, he says.

“Call it her induction or call it her suction, it has begun. It is inevitable. She has spunk. She is uninhibited. It was the family’s decision to project Rahul Gandhi. She has been a great source of strength to her mother, and her connection to Hindi heartland in terms of her reach to the people,” he says.

But with the Vadra controversy, the party feels that he must be a liability to the dynasty. Like how Indira Gandhi lived with Feroze Gandhi despite differences but never divorced him, Priyanka should do the same.

In fact, a UP congressman had said she should divorce him. But private and public gets blurred in the political space.

“He was her biggest mistake,” the aide says.

But perhaps it is love. Who can tell?

But again, in politics as Harold Lasswell, an acclaimed political scientist, it is “who gets what, when, and how.”

Here, it about who gains what and at whose cost. It seems they have already admitted defeat this time. Only after May 17, they will ask for her. But what Priyanka Gandhi, the loving sister, will do, is yet another mystery.

“In many ways, the battle is about mindspace. She has managed to compete with Modi on that,” the friend says.

But again, why should a sister finish her brother? When difficulty comes, the party stands united, yet another friend who has been in and out of the family house, says.

“I was close to her father. But I have seen her grow up. Indira ji used to keep her by her side, making her make the lists to distribute gifts to. But again, she can’t be Indira Gandhi,” he says.

And then he recites a couplet from Allama Iqbal. That’s signals his loyalty to the dynasty, and allegiance to that one name – Indira Gandhi.

“Hazaron Saal Nargis Apni Benoori Pe Roti Hai Bari Mushkil Se Hota Hai Chaman Mein Didahwar Paida,” he says.

Maybe that time isn’t far. That’s what he would like to hope for. But again, the mind is a difficult thing to navigate. There are a million sides to her. Like her grandmother.

Barefoot on grass that evening in Sri Nagar she had known. Or wished. Now, the party is hopeful, and wishful.