"Feed the people, but do not lean on them.
Rear them, but lay no claim to them.
When your work is done, then withdraw.
Such is Heaven’s way."
With her one act, Mrs G has leavened our daily political bread in myriad ways
Lao Tze’s ancient Chinese classic echoes Sri Krishna’s urgent instructions in the final chapter of the Bhagavad Gita. Both point in a single direction; to an ultimate act—renouncing the highest crown in life when you hold it in your grasp at the end of a lifetime’s effort, for the sake of common welfare. In the one case, this action is presented as the highest spiritual ideal. In the other, as the most potent and unfailing method of ensuring stable and lasting good governance.
I have no idea whether or not Sonia Gandhi is familiar with either text. That is entirely by the way. She has instinctively shown both that inner ‘noblesse’ and that brilliant grasp of statecraft which marks out true political aristocracy. In a dazzling 24-hour display of high political theatre, she exorcised a dozen personal demons and laid to rest a score of family ghosts. She has made Sushma Swaraj and Uma Bharati and Narendrabhai look inept and lumpen. She has outpaced and out-manoeuvred that grand old statesman, Atal Behari Vajpayee. She has deprived the bjp of any coherent agenda for the foreseeable future, except for the tired ritual of building mandirs and burning Muslim babies. She has made her peace with the Sikhs, whose massacre her husband witnessed silently after his mother’s assassination.
Those who sniggered at her political naivete stand confounded by the most skilful display of political weaponry since her mother-in-law dismantled the Janata government bit by bit in 1977...by turning each senior minister against the other...till its final collapse and rout in the 1980 general elections. Those who pointed fingers at her foreign origins must now hang their heads at her quick display of ‘tyaga’, in the finest Hindu tradition. And those who accuse the ‘dynasty’ of perpetuating its hold on power have now been made to look foolish by her stepping away from the throne.
Politics breeds cynicism and there will always remain a gang of snipers who will shoot from the hip at sinister covert motives and Italian conspiracies. It no longer matters. For the first time in a decade-and-a-half, political punditry, editorial comment and media wiseacring have been rendered irrelevant. And after a very long time, page three and the sports page have been made to look trivial and shown the back door by the preeminence of a genuine page one icon. And that is the point that our current political pundits may have missed. Ever since the first Mrs Gandhi gave the finger to Richard Nixon and smashed the Pakistani army whilst storming Dhaka, Indian politics has become a spectator sport, a form of participatory theatre, a kind of universal, flesh-and-blood popular cinema. But the political scene has remained barren for two decades. If Mr Bennett Coleman and his children have been able to extend page three to three whole daily publications, it is simply because page one has become so drab and lacklustre, so drearily predictable. An unending round of old men in waistcoats and rotund women wearing large red bindis and an armful of bangles have played their non-stop games of chair-grabbing and horse-trading, and have left the field wide open to usurpation. Open to bony middle-aged models in their beach houses masquerading as high society hostesses. Open to out-of-form cricketers and temperamental hockey players. And to the current poster boys of Indian advertising, dimpled and curly haired and uncertainly located between a Los Angeles wine bar and the back seat of a new E Class Mercedes parked on Teen Murti Marg.
And this is the point that needs to be made. Sonia Gandhi is probably no simple-minded renunciate attempting to gatecrash a small hallowed circle of Indian Mahatmas: men whose refusal to bear public office allowed them to perform extraordinary acts. Men like Jaiprakash Narayan, who was given the privilege of personally selecting the leader of a parliamentary party without any form of election. Men like Mohandas Gandhi who could hold a nation to ransom by means of undertaking a single hunger fast. Nor is she likely to be a Machiavellian widow attempting to perpetuate dynasty by the back door five years on. She may be either or neither or both. What is starting to become clear, as she relaxes and smiles, is that we may be witnessing the birth of a new superstar on our political horizon. And we have not had one since the first Mrs G was gunned down by her own bodyguard in 1987.
The government that Sonia has almost single-handedly created may last its full term or it may not the year. Either way, she will continue to occupy political centrestage for some time to come. The sheer audacity of that single act on the night of May 18 has shown her ability to surprise, displayed the speed of her political reflexes and demonstrated a brand new quality of political thought. In re-inventing herself, she has annulled her family’s sins and redeemed her party’s political future. By breaking a deadly cycle of cynical apathy and political boredom, she has cleared the polluted air we breathe and leavened our daily political bread.