Parliament, where the numbers game wins, is familiar with double whammies. This time, the Congress will have a triple whammy when Priyanka Gandhi enters the Lok Sabha as a member from South India. For the first time in parliamentary history, the party’s holy trinity will rule the filial faithful: materfamilias Sonia Gandhi and her boisterous brood Rahul and Priyanka. An entire family playing discrete roles in the establishment is normally found in a monarchy or a dictatorship. This time, the unique troika has only one role in democracy: take on Narendra Modi’s BJP in parliament.
Though MP families are legion, the Gandhis are an institution of inheritance as their party’s political face and ideological soul. Its organisational hierarchy being symbolic, the words of the three Gandhis are the unwritten law. The legislative role of the triple timocrats is the current conversation among the party’s timorous trucklers. By precedent, it is clear each Gandhi will have an unambiguous role that defines their role and rule.
* Saint Sonia: Canonised by personal tragedy and professional longevity, silence is her most powerful weapon. She will stay away from day-to-day politics. The 77-year-old leading lady has been politically active for the past 26 years, portraying herself as Joan of Arc against the BJP and Modi. She keeps the non-BJP parties together without making mutual personal attacks, unlike some Congress netas do. Though local leaders in West Bengal, Delhi and Kerala wax vitriolic against Mamata Banerjee, Arvind Kejriwal and Pinarayi Vijayan, personal mudslinging is not her habit.
Because of her perceived neutrality and sobriety, her acceptability as UPA and Congress Parliamentary Party chairperson is supreme. Her hagiographic halo is derived from her self-denial of prime ministership in 2004 to keep the opposition united and installing a 16-party UPA coalition that ran the country for a decade.
After Mandate Modi, she has confined herself to being a facilitator and problem panacea. Her humane side was evident at a Lok Sabha session when her wrathful allies rushed to the well of the House, though prominent Congress MPs Shashi Tharoor and Karti Chidambaram kept to their seats. DMK MPs complained. She told them with a smile, “I will come to the well of the House.” It was her maiden walk of fame with Tharoor and Karti in tow.
While saints are placid peacekeepers, they are warriors too. At a party meeting during the last session of parliament, she declared, “No longer can and should parliament be bulldozed like it has been for a decade now. No longer will the writ of the ruling establishment be permitted to disrupt parliament, whimsically mistreat members or push through legislation without due and proper consideration and debate. No longer can and should parliamentary committees be ignored or bypassed like they have been since 2014. No longer will parliament be muzzled and stifled as it has been over the past 10 years.”
When she joined active politics in 1998, she began with a bang—unceremoniously ousting the then Congress president Sitaram Kesri to take the chair herself. Her active involvement won’t be visible, but she will be conspicuous by her omnipresence as a mentor of the party and the mother of her children.
* Radical Rahul: The 54-year-old five-term MP wears many khadi caps. A certified scuba diver, former party general secretary, ex-vice president and president of the Congress, and now the Leader of the Opposition in Lok Sabha, Rahul is a rabble-rouser hawking a radical economic and social model for India. He has consistently stuck to caste-based policy formulations and restricting monopolisation of business and commerce.
He is the first Congress leader to undertake two marathon padayatras covering India from East to West and South to North. Picking a page from the history when Nehru and Indira were accused of promoting a Tata-Birla raj, Rahul repurposed the slogan by charging the Modi government of patronising an Ambani-Adani axis. Addressing the National Press Club in the US recently, he claimed, “Out of the top 200 businesses in India, there is almost no ownership of 90 per cent of the population of India. In the highest courts of the country, there is almost no participation of 90 per cent of India. In media, there is zero participation of lower castes, OBCs, Dalits.”
The Congress website advertises his vision thus: “Rahul Gandhi fiercely believes that governments ought to be accountable and must serve the people. He believes that policy making should focus on equitable distribution of resources, it should help bridge the widening economic divide, it must protect and provide for India’s farmers, the youth, workers, women, and marginalised communities.”
As long as his mother is the UPA chairperson, Rahul would stay away from alliance-forging. However, in the making is a Rahul Congress packed with followers of his choice and philosophy. As the leader of the opposition, he is going to be much more belligerent with his provocative political philippic aimed at the prime minister. His advisors have already drawn a roadmap for his four-year term as the LoP.
* Pugnacious Priyanka: This 52-year-old mother and Vipassana practitioner would be making her maiden entry into the Lok Sabha once she is elected from Wayanad, a seat Rahul vacated and is a safe launchpad from Kerala. Projected as her mother’s political conscience-keeper, Gandhi.3 would be the party’s softer face. The Congress will promote her as its woman visage, after her mother.
So far, Priyanka has refrained from identifying with any faction. Her major assignment is to amplify Rahul’s attacks on Modi since she is acerbically aggressive in defending her brother or taking on Modi. When Modi called Rahul ‘shahzada’, she retorted at an election rally in Gujarat, “They call my brother shahzada. I want to tell them how this shahzada walked 4,000 km from Kanyakumari to Kashmir to listen to your problems… He met my sisters, brothers, farmers and labourers and asked them what problems they have… On the other side is your shahenshah, Narendra Modi, who lives in a palace. Have you watched him on television... Not a single speck of dust is visible on his face... How can he understand your problems?”
She may not get a seat in the front row of the opposition benches, but her objective would be to amplify the messages and sermons delivered by her brother in the House.
The family has finessed positioning as Lutyens legionnaires, politically muddied on electoral and legal battlefields. The salubrious spaces of the former colonial heart of the capital are their playground of pedigree, parties, parleys, political punches and putsches. They don’t own a house of their own in town like Modi, but occupy stately homes allotted by the government. Their deadly diatribes against the PM had cost them their official residences during the decade-long Gandhis-Modi standoff.
Modi wages a war of words and moves against the three musketeers. In tandem, the triple thrust will be against the one and only Modi in parliament. Ideology vs alternative ideology is passé; it is now three against one.
Prabhu Chawla
prabhuchawla@newindianexpress.com
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