Indira ji ki bahu: Sonia Gandhi considers herself above the law

‘Indira ji ki bahu hoon’: Why Sonia Gandhi believes she is above the law

Like her mother-in-law Indira, Sonia Gandhi is seen as above the law by her followers. There is no other explanation for the haste with which Congress workers arrived outside the ED office in Delhi and the arson they conducted inside the ED office in Bangalore. An old video quickly went viral on social media when Sonia Gandhi was travelling to the Enforcement Directorate’s summons. In the video, she can be heard shouting, “Main Indira ji ki bahu hoon, aur kisi se nahi darti!” in halting Hindi. (I have no fear since I’m Indira Gandhi’s daughter-in-law.)

There may not be a finer analogy to describe her political career. Given the layers that one sentence hides inside it, the entire thing has a quasi-literary quality to it. It brings to mind Indira ji’s favourite theme of the pervasive “foreign hand,” which she frequently exploited when she ran out of strong justifications to quiet her political adversaries and detractors. Please don’t infer that I’m talking about Sonia Gandhi’s Italian heritage in this context. She is not only Indira Ji’s wife, but also the nation’s daughter-in-law, according to the most popular myth circulated by the Congress.

Sonia Gandhi had, up until this time, excelled even her strong and cunning mother-in-law in one respect. Indira Gandhi had really been imprisoned; following her defeat in the post-Emergency elections, she had to endure torturous questioning sessions with many investigating organisations. But this is the first time Sonia Gandhi has ever faced up against a law enforcement body. Where credit is due. Given that Sonia Gandhi did not personally exert political power, some have argued that the way she controlled the Congress party and the UPA administration was more evil and autocratic than Indira Gandhi’s. The prime minister’s mother in law was. She was a parliamentarian with more authority than the prime minister.

This sinister manner of exercising political power is excellently explained by Ralph Waldo Emerson: “But the President has paid dearly for his White House. He frequently lost all of his peace of mind and his greatest masculine qualities as a result. He is happy to eat dust in front of the actual masters who stand tall behind the throne in order to maintain for a brief while such a prominent appearance before the world.

In fact, it is generally known that Sonia Gandhi picked up these techniques from Indira Gandhi but improved them with her own style. The autobiographies of Margaret Alva and former minister of external affairs Natwar Singh provide an insider’s view of how she made this happen. This has a historical component as well. In hindsight, Indira Gandhi’s strategies were ineffective.

Apart from hardcore politics, public discourse — especially the media — was a major area that reflected the shadowy imprint of Sonia Gandhi’s working style. In the pre-UPA era, even Congress-friendly publications carried pieces critical of Sonia Gandhi. However, barely into the third year of the first term of the UPA, a ghostly sort of omertà had crept into the media. The unwritten law of this omertà was a total ban against any criticism of Sonia Gandhi. You could freely criticise the prime minister and the Congress party and the UPA Government, you could uncover scams and unearth scandals but Sonia Gandhi was…err.. untouchable in a dictatorial sense. How this cynical intrigue worked in practice was narrated by a journalist in June 2013, a time when the UPA’s unpopularity was peaking at a feverish pace:

“Stories impacting Sonia’s image are carefully choreographed right at the top, at the level of promoters and editors who are on first-name terms with key Congress functionaries such as Ahmed Patel. But Patel, the consummate spin doctor, also has a line with beat reporters…a single ‘untutored’ line could damage the Congress President’s image… Patel gets to ensure that Sonia’s image remains unsullied…At the end of the day, if there was no ‘Ahmedbhai’, the Congress would have to invent him, if only to spin doctor the ‘news’. That’s because the party’s first family is an anachronism in the age of modern media. The Gandhis remain remote and inaccessible.”

Sonia Gandhi: The women who fears none

The remoteness and inaccessibility might have erected an aura of mystique, power, and invincibility but it was exactly that. An aura. A cocoon. An illusion. That the Nehru dynasty learned this bitter truth in a highly expensive and irretrievable fashion is now the stuff of the legends of contemporary political history of India.

But the lure and pull of illusions has an eternal quality to it. Bahadur Shah Zafar, “emperor only of the Red Fort” lived in denial till he was physically crushed. A hint of the play of cosmic forces is available in his incurable fascination for poetry — poetry as the consoling embrace that makes the loss of political power bearable; poetry as an enabler of delusion.  

Protests on road in support of the Gandhi family

A similar phenomenon is at play in the Sonia Gandhi episode as well. Over the last five years, the Congress as a party has become untouchable in the derogatory sense, even by its former allies. Even within the party itself, the loud whispers that Rahul Gandhi is presiding over its extinction have now become public broadcasts. The so-called “protests” outside the ED offices are actually demonstrations of this quality of eternity that illusion is endowed with.

As I mentioned earlier, there is indeed a quasi-literary quality to Sonia’s Gandhi’s proclamation that she is Indira ji’s bahu. That point actually merits a closer look. Recall some of the immediate things that Indira Gandhi did after returning to power in 1980. She destroyed every available copy of the Shah Commission Report, burned the film reels of Kissa Kursi Ka, and in general, annihilated each shred of official and unofficial record that was damning of her Emergency excesses.

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