Opinion Public lives are public property
If the attitude of the Indian media to Sonia Gandhi were to be summed up in one word,that word would be reverence....
If the attitude of the Indian media to Sonia Gandhi were to be summed up in one word,that word would be reverence. In my long years of covering Indian politics,I can think of no other politician who has been treated with such reverence and forgiven so much. She is the most powerful politician in India but is not held accountable for anything. If things go well,she gets the credit and if they go badly,the Prime Minister takes the blame.
Lesser politicians are hounded if there is the smallest whiff of corruption in their vicinity,but not Soniaji. She helped her ex-best friend,Ottavio Quattrocchi,get access to sealed bank accounts and the mighty Indian media smiled and looked the other way. The Prime Minister admitted at his recent press conference that he consults Soniaji every week and takes important decisions only after consulting her. We do not see anything extra-constitutional about this. We know that the Prime Minister has his job at her pleasure and we behave as if this were an ordinary democratic practice. In the old days,when your humble columnist objected openly to an Italian Prime Minister of India,I was a voice in the wilderness. I withdrew my objections once the people of India made it clear that they had no problem with Madames foreign origins.
It is perhaps because of the unstinted reverence that she evokes in India that Soniaji sees Javier Moros unofficial biography as defamatory. He,poor man,has protested that if anything,his book can be criticised for being a hagiography,but this is not how the Congress Party sees it. Abhishek Manu Singhvi said last week that you cannot write books about the life of a living person without their consent. He appears not to have noticed that you can in other democratic countries if they are public figures.
From the extracts of Moros book carried in this newspaper,its hard to see what Soniaji has found objectionable. He speaks of her modest background and this is something that the Congress Partys official websites take pride in. He says she was born Edvige Antonia Albina Maino in a modest home in the village of Lusiana and although her real name may come as a surprise to most Indians,the information is available on Wikipedia.
So why is the Congress Party risking Indias reputation as a vibrant democracy to make such a noise about a book that has been in print in French,Spanish and Italian for two years? Surely it will do no harm to Sonia Gandhi who has achieved a position in Indian public life that is unassailable. She has been in politics for just over ten years and in this time has proved that she is a better politician than any of our native leaders. She has rebuilt the Congress Party and taken it from its lowest ebb to its highest since Rajiv Gandhi won that massive mandate in 1984. She is counted among the most powerful women in the world. Why should she need to worry about the books and films her fascinating story inspires?
The bigger issue here is whether it is not time for India to start behaving like a mature democracy. Why do we continue to get hysterical over books and films as if we were a totalitarian state and not a democratic one? In more mature democracies,the lives of public figures are public. They come under constant scrutiny,hundreds of books and films get made about living people in public life and this is how it should be in India. There can be no democracy without freedom of speech and expression and it is worrying that the Congress Party tries to curtail this so often these days. A film on Jawaharlal Nehru was stopped because the script hinted at an affair between him and Edwina Mountbatten. More recently there has been a huge fuss over the film Rajniti and now we have this drama over Moros book. But then,as I said at the very beginning of this piece,perhaps the fault lies with us in the media. Why do we treat Sonia Gandhi with such reverence? Why do we not hold her more accountable for the very important role that she plays in this government?
Thanks to our indulgence,she has become today the only major political leader in the world who wields huge power without responsibility. It is an unhealthy precedent. Now that Soniaji is reviving her own private Cabinet in the form of the National Advisory Council,we must hold her personally accountable for at least those policies that she is directly responsible for. Meanwhile,she needs to remember what Harry Truman said about public life. If you cant take the heat,get out of the kitchen.
Follow Tavleen Singh on Twitter @ tavleen_singh
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