The idea of Sonia Gandhi as PM

It was difficult to imagine at that moment what, precisely, she was planning to do with that legacy, apart from being family memorialist, meeting foreign dignitaries and editing attractive volumes from the Nehru-Gandhi archives. After all, five years of a Rao government — that had sought to reinvent the Congress and break the Nehru-Gandhi mould in which the party had been cast thus far — had passed. Sitaram Kesri was Congress president, and a United Front government, headed by I.K. Gujral, was in place.

That evening some of us went across to the AICC office at 24, Akbar Road. Lorry loads of people had been transported to its lawns. We spoke to them as they ate the puri and sabzi party functionaries had doled out to them. That was when the possibility of Sonia Gandhi stirring out of 10, Janpath as a political activist first presented itself, although the bahu herself did not make an appearance that evening. It was also the first time that a familiar argument was aired. When we asked people whether an Italian-born could lead the party, the response was unvarying and consistent. One Mongolpuri resident, Kishen Singh, put it this way: “Daughters have no nation but that of their husbands. She is our bahu. Besides, she had borne Rajiv Gandhi two children. If she leads the Congress, it will become top class again.” The response bypassed not just the limits of probability but the modern canon of individual — particularly women’s — rights. It militated against the metropolitan sensibility. It mirrored, in fact, a feudal, paraya dhan mindset that regarded women as mere add-ons to family establishments. Yet, make no mistake, it was this argument that saw Daughter-in-law Sonia emerge as Potential Prime Minister Sonia.

No one understood the power of this formulation more than Sonia Gandhi, and her image makers, of course. In each of the crucial moments of political and personal challenge that she has had to face, the family was all that Sonia Gandhi had evoked in her defence. Whether it was the point when she poured out her “vedna” in that first emotional outing in Amethi, or when the banner of revolt was raised by Sharad Pawar, P.A. Sangma and Tariq Anwar in May 1999, or when later that year the BJP painted her as a “security threat” during the post-Kargil general elections of 1999, when Jitendra Prasad challenged her to the post of Congress president, when Sushma Swaraj accused her of being ignorant of Indian traditions, it was the same response.

Once she embarked on the seemingly outrageous quest of a foreign born attempting to bring the Congress Party to power, it was the family and her duty towards it as daughter-in-law that provided her with the raison d’etre and shield. Even that step towards considering the project was inspired more by the portraits of Rajiv Gandhi and Indira Gandhi on the walls of her home, than the entreaties of Congress workers, as Sonia Gandhi recently observed in her Walk the Talk interview.

She has, in fact, never dwelt very long on her right — as a citizen of this country — to assume the highest office, one that was recognised by the Supreme Court when, in September 2001, it dismissed two election petitions on the grounds that “the respondent by virtue of the certificate granted to her under Section 5 (1) C of the Citizenship Act… is a citizen of India”. In fact, she has tended to dismiss the legal aspect as a mere “technicality”. Take, for instance, her response during the ’99 general election campaign to the question on why she took so long to acquire Indian citizenship: “Jis din main Indiraji ki ghar bahu ke roop aayi, usi din main Bharatiya bani. Baki sab technical hain” (the day I entered Indiraji’s home as daughter-in-law, I became an Indian. Everything else is technical).

Today, the Sangh Parivar hopes to pull itself from political oblivion of losing power by playing the ‘Rome card’ like they once did the ‘Ram’ card. It’s ironical that an entity that swears by essentialised Hindu values, that holds the “karva chauth” test as the acme of women’s position in society, finds itself now screaming for her dismissal on the grounds of modern citizenship requirements. Sonia Gandhi actually beat them at their own game of privileging culture and nurture by choosing the family route to power and touching a chord in vast numbers of ordinary people in the process.

The notion of “citizenship” is rooted in laws and constitutions, “individual identity”, however, is more flexible. Henri Tajfel, the founder of social identity theory, believes social identity works at the level of the individual and the collective and suggested that it is “the individual’s knowledge that he or she belongs to certain social groups together with some emotional or value significance to him or her of the group membership”. Sonia Gandhi’s legitimacy in the eyes of large numbers of people stems precisely from the fact that she is, and consciously projects herself as, part of an Indian family, one that has significant political and social resonance.

But it is also clear that this by itself would have been insufficient to open that last door to the highest office in the country if India was not possessed of one of the most liberal constitutions in the world today, one which has allowed the values and institutions of democracy to take strong root in this country, and which has a fairly impressive depth of social acceptance. She may have been forced to reject the option of becoming the prime minister. But this is not because of constitutional imperatives. Indeed, by mounting a shrill, retrogressive and xenophobic campaign against Sonia Gandhi’s foreign origins, the BJP and its leading lights stands guilty of undermining the spirit of the Constitution and appearing even more out of sync with the mindset of innumerable ordinary Indians.