An animated abstraction

Actually, the Leader did die for him. When Indira Gandhi was consumed by forces once unleashed by her own politics, death and dynasty gave him a perfect text of martyrdom. The enigmatic complexity of her personality, her awareness of power, her paranoia, made her dramatic death themost defining moment in the life of the Congress. Rajiv Gandhi8217;s brief interregnum only magnified the inanimate submission of the party to the Dynasty, the chosen agent of redemption. The leader who was picked up from Rajiv8217;s funeral party could only take the Congress to a political dead end. And the leader who ca-me after the retirement of Narasimha Rao was in such a hurry that he didn8217;t know where he or his party was going. No-where. Suddenly out in the sun, without the protecting canopy of the Dynasty, the Congress bodies couldn8217;t comprehend their own freedom. The cosy captivity was supposed to be eternal. It was too late to activate the rusted braincells of the Congress- men. So they, the abandoned crowd of arrested growth, sought out an abstraction called Sonia Gandhi.

And Sonia Gandhi continues to be an abstraction, occasionally animated by the collective desperation of the Congress-men. You may say that the party has given her an opportunity to personalise, forget Indianise, herself when she was sopathetically invoked by the Congress population in the aftermath of the infamous Jain Co-mmission Report. That moment was me-ant to be Rajiv Gandhi8217;s second coming, for a spectral re-conquest of India. Sonia was invited to be, to borrow from the ph-raseology of an American cult, the container8217; of the spirit. It was her destiny, she was told, to be the redeemer. The new aesthetics of Congressism said it all: We, the Congressmen, have failed in realism, let us try the abstract, let she, she with the motherness of Madonna and the enigma of Mo-na Lisa, be Our Lady of Salvation 8230; Mo-ther, lead us. Sonia Gandhi didn8217;t lead the Congress. The Congress was led by an idea called Sonia Gandhi.

What is this idea? Most obviously it is Dy-nastic, the Nehru-Ga-ndhi privilege. Once, her absence was the big-gest presence in the pa-rty. Her presence as the president of the party never failed to provide an equally visible abse-nce. For Sonia never looked complete, something was amiss, the le-ader was more felt than seen.She was the invitee8217;, and she behaved li-ke one. Even when she was there, as the oxygen supplier of an entire party apparatus, she was also elsewhere. In this respect, she symbolised an imperfect Dynasty. Was it because she was an invitee to the Dynasty as well? Was it because she could never take herself as one of them? The struggle between Sonia and Gandhi? An invited Sonia to play Gandhi for a lost party? But the party said the stage was as big as India.

Today the argument is about how In-dian is the idea itself, the idea of Sonia Gandhi. That is, Indian beyond the context of citizenship and nationality. Which doesn8217;t mean that Indianness as defined by the mythomaniacal section of the Sangh Parivar. You don8217;t have to be politically defensive or culturally incorrect or less cosmopolitan to come to terms with a manufactured Mother image, a live ficti-on. For, the immediacy of Gandhi couldn8217;t reduce the remoteness of the political Sonia. Her foreigness is not in the accent or the written script. It is inthe culture of the Sonia-struck Congress universe, wh-ere Sonia is nondebatable, almost a faith, a belief system in which passports are as disposable as Sharad Pawar.The new Congressism has totally depersonalised Sonia, independent of ancestry, nation, religion, dissent, and debate. Some kind of an energy field, something which exists only in terms of the pathology of the partymen. Sonia, on her part, reacted as if Italy didn8217;t exist, as if a passport could make someone less than foreign. She said India is dearer to her than her own life. That is a great sentiment, worth applauding, so poignant as it has nothing to do with cricket. Does that mean that India should not be interested in her life? Not an ordinary life, but a potential prime ministerial life. If the life looked so remote, so distant, so foreign despite the Gandhi, it was not because of the xenophobia of the misplaced Indian. The Congress and its leader kept that life inaccessible, they made it something purely utilitarian, an autonomouslife.

We have seen it before, the perversity of certain utilitarian ideas. Like Juan Dom-ingo Peron combing the hair of an embalmed Evita placed on the dining table. In the current melodrama on the Indian stage, there is only an idea to keep the orphaned alive. Of ideas we don8217;t know, we call them foreign. Excuse me.