What ingratitude, my God

Actually, I am just contemptuous. After all, I held power for longer than all non-Nehru-Gandhi family prime ministers put together. I did a better job in my five years than Rajiv to whose widow’s pallu my partymen are hanging on with such fond hopes. What a mess Rajiv made of a majority of 413 in a House of 545? He lost nearly half his seats, became a lame duck in his last two years, complicated Punjab, Kashmir and Sri Lanka and left his party and the family permanently blighted by Bofors. It is a cruel thing to say and would make Mani Shankar Aiyar angrier, but if Rajiv had not been assassinated midway through the 1991 campaign, the party’s final tally would not have been much better than what I bagged in 1996.

What is the point reminding my fellow Congressmen now that I gave them a stable five years even though I inherited a minority stricken with treachery and intrigue. I started economic reforms, shielded Manmohan Singh from the securities scam, and generally left the economy in much better health than Rajiv. Yet, if none of my partymen showed the conviction to make reform an election issue, what can I do?

I know the media and even my partymen have often claimed that my worst enemy is my silence, my diffidence, my lack of articulation. They made fun of my pout. But would they ever pause to think if they were better off under me or that big-mouth Rajiv? The time, however, has come for me to throw the veneer of modesty and assess my own years in power politics dispassionately.

Indira, in her first avatar, I can’t say. But could Rajiv ever have steered India with half as much skill through the end of the Cold War? Alright, I bungled with the odd hasty statement like the one during the Soviet coup, but by and large, I figured out the new Russia, contained Robin Raphel and that other upstart Benazir Bhutto, sorted out Punjab and even controlled Kashmir. That Abdul Kalam is such a quiet, discreet fellow… I am not sure he will ever open his mouth on this. But somebody please try asking him if all his achievements and now Bharat Ratna would have been possible if I had not manipulated both Moscow and Washington to ensure he carried on unhindered.

God, emotion indeed is the mother of indiscretion. How can I, the wily old fox, be so careless as to begin talking of secrets that should remain in my belly for ever? And don’t at least my senior Cabinet colleagues know what I am talking about? Just why is it that they would never give me the credit for anything? Or, can’t I also rightfully ask why is it that they would never hold the dynasty responsible for all its blunders — not my holding operation of five years — which have brought the party to such a pass today?

Nothing amuses me more than the talk that the party suffered because I ran the most venal government in India’s history. First of all, such claims are unfair to people like my Socialist friend from Ballia. Second, who made the money after all? Look at the more celebrated cases: Sheila Kaul is Rajiv’s own aunt. Satish Sharma, his bosom pal, until not so long ago the guardian of the family silver.Jagdish Tytler, Ghani Khan Chowdhury… whose loyalists were they? And Buta Singh, I did not even have him in my Cabinet. Yes, I did not particularly bother about my Cabinet colleagues who built fortunes but I also did not expect that they themselves would make corruption an election issue against me, their own leader. All right, some members of my extended family may have made money on the side. But look at my plight: koyee kehta hai murgi churai, koi kehta hai murgi ke ande (somebody says I stole the hen, somebody says I stole its eggs). Either way, I was called a thief. Now if even Sonia fails to work the magic they will probably blame me for Bofors as well.

Allegations of thievery do not hurt me as much as the canard that I was a closet saffronite, the khakhi-chaddi (shorts)-under-the-dhoti campaign. Would the man who made this allegation most vociferously, Rangarajan Kumaramangalam, now bother to check under his own trousers? I did miscalculate in trusting the BJP too much on Ayodhya but wasn’t it Rajiv who allowed the shilanyas and launched the 1989 campaign from Ayodhya with a call for Ram Rajya? Who will give me credit for the way I isolated, and at least for two years, marginalised the BJP after Ayodhya?

My friends ask me why am I whining now on being sidelined by Sonia when I spent half a century happily serving the dynasty. There is some truth in that. But those days were different. Just as a party like the Congress needs its Chandraguptas, it also needs its Chanakyas. But today if Sonia wouldn’t even see the value in my famed Kautilyan skills it is because of the one crucial mistake I made in believing, in 1991, that the days of the dynasty were over and that the party now had to be rebuilt to survive in the post-Gandhi era.

I did take my position as the prime minister far too seriously and even resisted pressures from 10, Janpath and its retainers. I saw through the Jain Commission tamasha and tried to block it. I thought it doesn’t look good if an elected prime minister gets daily instructions from the durbar of the dowager queen. I thought national interest demanded change and that my party would appreciate what was good for India. I failed to see how two decades of sycophancy had emasculated my partymen who will see someone like me as no more than a stop-gap distraction, an eminently forgettable blip in the history of the dynasty. I can now see why the Congress party’s official historians will give me even less space than Gulzari Lal Nanda.

This is a figment of this writer’s imagination and does not purport to be an excerpt from Rao’s forthcoming novel `The Insider’ which, after all, is merely a work of fiction.