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CONGRESS: LEADER Life of the Party Despite injecting a different touch to the Gandhi charisma, Sonia remains the Congress' best bet. By Sumit Mitra
As president of India's oldest party and a prime ministerial aspirant, Sonia Gandhi appears more handicapped than any Gandhi-Nehru before her. Jawaharlal Nehru had the appeal of a patriot, the style of a patrician and the aura of an internationalist. Indira Gandhi combined charisma with her ruthless realpolitik. Even Rajiv Gandhi had an impish charm that fitted in with the abiding attraction of the first family. Sonia wears the Gandhi badge with difficulty. Being an intensely private person, she lacks Rajiv's openness. Nor does she have the steely purposefulness of Indira. One day she pronounced the Rabri Devi Government had lost its "moral authority" to rule Bihar. The next day she got her party to vote against the Rabri Government's dismissal. In autumn she is in no hurry to grab power. Come spring and she is charging out of Rashtrapati Bhavan to announce before the TV cameras, "I have 272", the required majority support to form a government. Add to that Sonia's ivory-tower existence at 10 Janpath; her refusal to take anyone into confidence except daughter Priyanka and a handful of non-political friends; her ingrained loathing of coalitions ("We'll support no third front, no fourth front"); and her over-dependence on speechwriters that makes her appear to be linguistically challenged. In the electoral stakes, she doesn't seem the type to quicken the bookmaker's pulse. There is a catch though. If leadership were embedded in the leader's persona alone, Sonia would not have got a whale-jaw grip on the Congress. Nor would the party have stayed in the race after sliding down a steep gradient in 1996. The fact is that despite the revolt of the Sharad Pawar-P.A. Sangma-Tariq Anwar trio in May, the Congress under Sonia is much less ridden with despair and dissidence than it was under P.V. Narasimha Rao and Sitaram Kesri. Congressmen think that Sonia has put a brake on the fall. "We'd have only got 70 to 80 seats if Sonia hadn't campaigned in 1998," says Congress foreign relations cell chief K. Natwar Singh. That may be a convenient hypothesis, but it was confirmed when, as Congress president, she led the party to victory in assembly elections in Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Delhi and Goa. "No Congress president has been accepted by the party without a proven record of bringing votes," says a Congress Working Committee member. Acceptance spawns authority. Since Rajiv, the office of the Congress chief had been lacking in authority. In Rao's time, Arjun Singh bombarded him with insulting letters before quitting the party. Fights among his ministerial colleagues were the staple of headlines. Kesri's authority was in question from the day he withdrew support to the H.D. Deve Gowda government. "When Sonia decided to pull down the BJP government," says party spokesman Ajit Jogi, "there wasn't a murmur of protest even from Pawar." The Pawar revolt, of course, hit the party a few weeks later, but it struck at the periphery, not the core. Sonia survived this first challenge to her authority because her partymen felt that the damage caused by Pawar's rebellion, however large in the party's old stronghold of Maharashtra, was containable. Says AICC General Secretary Sushil Kumar Shinde: "In 1996, with Pawar and without Sonia Gandhi, we won 15 seats in the state. In 1998, with both Pawar and Sonia Gandhi, we won 33. It is her leadership that caused the difference." The party is hoping she'll turn the tide elsewhere too. Says spokesman Kapil Sibal: "Of the 221 seats in the six main Hindi-speaking states we could win only 34 in 1998. I have no doubt in October the party will at least double its tally. We're also a lot better placed in the south. We're on a comeback trail." Expectations have also been aroused by the aggressive trait in Sonia's political responses. Like accusing Atal Bihari Vajpayee of "lying"in her 1998 campaign meeting in Delhi, goading party MPs to block Parliament proceedings before pulling down the government, or bailing out Bansi Lal's government in Haryana, but withdrawing support later. Sonia's friends say her aggression doesn't stem from her temperament but because "she puts things upfront". They explain that Bansi Lal, while seeking her support, had indeed accepted her condition that he'd recommend the assembly's dissolution but welshed on it after being bailed out. Bansi Lal perhaps didn't play with a straight bat but not all of Sonia's aggressive flourishes are born of righteous indignation. Many of these bear the hallmark of Indira's cunning. Till the end of 1998, when J. Jayalalitha hadn't signalled that she might withdraw support to the Vajpayee government, Sonia gave the impression that she would not go out of her way to pull it down. "The BJP government will come down under the weight of its own contradictions," she kept saying. Jayalalitha was a weighty contradiction but, as later events showed, it was Sonia who remote-controlled her all the way along the path of confrontation. However, aggression works in the Congressman's psyche. In the party's collective memory, Indira looms larger than Nehru because of the brazenness -- as distinct from correctness -- of her acts. When Sonia doggedly refused to support a non-BJP government after Vajpayee's fall, most anti-BJP party leaders were stunned. "It was obnoxious behaviour," says Samajwadi Party General Secretary Amar Singh. But Congressmen were happy. The Congress, by playing second fiddle to a United Front (UF)-type government after doing it to the governments of Deve Gowda and I.K. Gujral, would have bartered away its remaining support bases. The Third Front governments had cost the Congress its Muslim and Dalit support in Uttar Pradesh. Sonia didn't want it to be repeated and the party thought it was fair. "To support the UF government in 1996 was incorrect. The decision to form our own government or go to polls was correct," says Jogi. Despite her tantrums and U-turns, Sonia has been a caring president, putting the party's interest uppermost. "She treats it like her family," says a member of her inner circle. The "family" was in obvious disarray when she took charge. Now she is restructuring it. Relatively young partymen have come into prominence: Digvijay Singh, Ashok Gehlot, Y. Rajashekhar Reddy, Rajesh Pilot and Salman Khurshid. She sought to restore decency and middle-class values by removing J.B. Patnaik after the Staines' murders and by setting up an Ethics Committee. She attempted to recapture the social coalition that the Congress represented till the '70s by reserving a third of seats for women at all levels and another 20 per cent for Dalits, OBCs and minorities. She also institutionalised decision-making, something the Congress has been unused to for decades. Sonia is a conundrum. She's no orator, yet communicates well to the party. She isn't a natural born Indian, but the party has accepted her as its prime ministerial candidate. And she has the guile and grit that the Congress expects of its leader. For Vajpayee, she's a more formidable challenger than any other leader on the horizon. SONIA'S INNERMOST CIRCLE Priyanka Gandhi Suman Dubey Vincent George Shekhar Raha Natwar Singh THE SONIA FORMULA Weaknesses Opportunities Threats |
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