In the wake of the election, on 25 July 2017, of Ram Nath Kovind, a little-known former member of the Rajya Sabha and the then governor of Bihar, as the fourteenth president of India, the election also fell due for the office of the vice president of India, just vacated by Hamid Ansari who had done that office proud over two five-year terms.
I was driving up to my class at Ashoka University in Sonepat, where, thanks to the generous invitation of its first vice chancellor and now chancellor, the historian Professor Rudrangshu Mukherjee, I had been teaching a course on the civilizations of India, when Sonia Gandhi rang on my mobile phone to ask if I would agree to be the combined opposition’s candidate for that office. I asked her for a little time to consult my wife, my sister, and brother. ‘Of course,’ she said and indicated that the time left for me to decide was something like an hour. The entire opposition was in conclave at that very time and was waiting for my response, she said. An hour!
Tara asked if I had any chance of winning, and I said none, none at all, zero, and that the ruling party had the numbers and its candidate will sail in. In that case, why? she asked. Why, indeed, I said rhetorically but then added there is something to be said for ‘a good, strong, symbolic contest’. After speaking to my sister and brother—all within the same hour—I decided I would wait to see what ‘the combined opposition’ was about.
Sure enough, during the course of the class, my phone, which I had put on ‘silent’, vibrated. I took my students’ permission to step out of the class to take the call, saying it was something urgent. Every major opposition party, then in conclave, ‘spoke’ to me in that one call—Ghulam Nabi Azad from the Congress, Derek O’Brien from the Trinamool, and Sitaram Yechury from the CPI(M), among others. A more galactic formation could not have been imagined. I conveyed my acceptance to their collective happiness.
The call over, I spent about five minutes staring into the open lawn in front of me, reflecting on what I had led myself into before returning to my class. I had barely repositioned myself at the lectern when a student sitting in the middle of the rows said, ‘Congratulations, professor. You are going to be the opposition’s candidate for vice president.’ I could have been in good Wodehouse-style, ‘knocked down by a feather’. The young man then explained that social media had been speculating for much of that morning about the candidate and that around the time I got my call, instead of attending to my lecture, he had been surfing the net and lo, even as I was ruminating for those five minutes, the meeting had announced my acceptance and he had heard it before I had fully absorbed it.
Ashoka University’s vice-chancellor at the time, Pratap Bhanu Mehta, most graciously said I could take it that the university had no objection to my contesting and that while he would like me to succeed, the university would be ready and happy to see me return to the faculty after the contest!
The next few days were tumultuous for me, various persons and parties swamping my phone with felicitatory calls and ‘we know you are up against the NDA’s bigger numbers…. But it is important to take a stand…you may not win, but you would have made a point….’ and so on. There were also those who said I was being made a sacrificial goat.
But most interestingly, missiles were suddenly manufactured and hurled at me for having joined, several weeks earlier, many public figures and legal luminaries in urging President Mukherjee to commute the death sentence on the 1993 Mumbai serial blast convict, Yakub Memon. Predictably, the word ‘traitor’ was flung at me, reminding me at once and vividly, of JP’s letter to me of 28 October 1964 in which he had said, ‘When abuses were being hurled from every side and the word “traitor” was being thrown into the face, your letter, the letter of a fine…’
At a press conference held outside Parliament House immediately after I filed my nomination papers, I was again asked about this, and I said I was, on a point of principle, against capital punishment and had written, in the same vein, to the president of Pakistan to not execute Kulbhushan Jadhav, the Indian held captive there.
The NDA took more time than I would have expected to announce its candidate—the seasoned BJP veteran Venkaiah Naidu. Some Congressmen promptly got some data to accuse him of corrupt practice—something which was totally unacceptable to me, and I rang Rahul Gandhi to ask him to have the thing stopped. To my relief, he agreed at once, and no one heard anything more on the subject.
Nitish Kumar’s JDU, which had joined the opposition’s identification of me for the candidature, did a somersault midway into the election season, switching from UPA to NDA, but the Bihar chief minister told me in no uncertain terms himself over the phone that the alliance switch would make no difference to his and his party’s support of my candidature. And he remained true to his word, except for three of his MPs marking the ballot paper wrong so that they had to be deemed invalid. Naveen Patnaik, chief minister of Odisha, announced his and his party’s support to me as well.
Election day, 5 August 2017, was an experience. As a candidate, I was allowed access, up to a point, to the election venue in Parliament House and saw a good number of the MPs from both camps filing in to vote. Home Minister Rajnath Singh was particularly cordial as he was brought up to where I stood by Ananth Kumar, a BJP MP I had long known.
Two MPs nominated to the Rajya Sabha in UPA times and hence, presumably, voting for me I saw but could not meet: Sachin Tendulkar came in, walking briskly, and I looked forward to a handshake with the great cricketer, but he turned into one of the circular corridors before I could do that. Another was the glamour diva of the Hindi screen, Rekha. She wafted in like a cool breeze in summer, wearing sunglasses though indoors, so none could see her eyes or see what her eyes were seeing; unsmiling, expressionless, she slid into and out of the voting chamber after voting, as I hoped, for me. But I will never know.
Two other MPs from the world of cinema who spoke long and warmly with me were Jaya Bachchan, who not only voted for me but was vocal in support from the Samajwadi Party and Hema Malini of the BJP, who, of course, voted for Venkaiah Naidu, was amazingly cordial. I spoke to the popular actress in the language our mothers were born into—Tamil.
GG: Namaskaram. Yen peyar Gopalkrishna Gandhi (Namaskaram, I am Gopalkrishna Gandhi)
HM: Oh...Neenga Tamil pesarangala…. Eppadi? (Oh…You speak Tamil…how come?)
GG: Aamaam, adhu yen thaiyin mozhi (That is so, it is my mother’s language…)
HM: Adhu eppadi? (How is that?)
GG: Ninga Rajajiyin peyar kettirpinga.... (You might have heard the name Rajaji)
HM: Aamaam…. (Yes….)
GG: Avar yen Ammaavin Appa aavaar (He was my mother’s father….)
Hema Malini was altogether disarming. I will always remember that pleasant banter.
A rock-solid friend, Sitaram Yechury, stood by my side throughout as MPs moved in and out, all very pleasant to each other, whatever be their politics. This was democracy, India’s democracy, at work. As the votes were counted, I could see the tray holding my opponent’s ballot papers climb from base to slope to summit, while mine laboured up to a very modest base camp, with the tray for invalid votes getting not a few ballots—surprising for each voter was an MP expected to know how to mark the ballot.
Venkaiah Naidu won the election with 516 votes against my tally of 244. I rang him to offer felicitations. ‘Sir,’ he said, ‘I have long been an admirer of your grandfather, Rajaji… I will call on you in Chennai.’
(Excerpted from Gopalkrishna Gandhi's The Undying Light: A Personal History of Independent India with permission from Aleph Books)