Priyanka Vadra at Rajiv Gandhi’s samadhi in Delhi. File picture

April 15: When it comes to expressing emotions, Priyanka Vadra has always been different from her reticent mother and brother. So her frank admission about the meeting with Nalini hardly came as a surprise.

In the years immediately after Rajiv’s 1991 assassination, Priyanka, then in her early 20s, was often seen at Delhi’s Vigyan Bhavan, listening attentively and taking copious notes as the J.S. Verma Commission inquired into the causes of the murder.

She also attended meetings of the M.C. Jain Commission, which looked into the conspiracy angle. Priyanka was always inquisitive about the LTTE’s role, particularly about an alleged meeting between Rajiv and a top Tamil Tiger leader in March 1991.

Priyanka was a key figure in the closed-door discussions at 10 Janpath in November 1999 that preceded Sonia Gandhi’s visit to the then President, K.R. Narayanan, with an unusual request. The Congress president told a stunned Narayanan that she and her children wanted to plead for mercy for Nalini.

Her argument: another child should not be orphaned. Nalini had an eight-year-old daughter.

Sources said that during the painful discussions, Priyanka had forcefully argued that no child should suffer the misery of being orphaned by an act of the state. Rahul agreed completely.

Priyanka had brought the subject up with her mother after reading a report about Nalini’s execution. She felt the execution would not bring the Gandhi family any solace. Rahul added that the gesture might highlight the futility of taking human lives, which terrorist attacks do.

Nalini’s family had by then given up hope and the executioner had begun lubricating the iron trapdoors of the Vellore jail gallows.

As with Priyanka’s trip to meet Nalini, 10 Janpath had tried to keep the clemency plea under wraps. But word got out after Sonia told Mohini Giri, former chairperson of the National Commission for Women, about the meeting with Narayanan.

Giri had called on Sonia to gauge her mind on a mercy petition filed by the Guild of Service, an NGO that had Narayanan as its patron-in-chief. It had demanded reprieve for all the four on death row for Rajiv’s assassination.

Priyanka’s forthrightness in admitting she met Nalini to come to terms with the loss of her father is characteristic.

Her plain-speaking at her mother’s election campaigns has been credited with helping secure the huge victory margins. Her sharp comments have sent Sonia’s political opponents running for cover. Her influence over her mother and brother has always been evident.

The Congress had hoped and prayed for years that she would join the party and lead it one day. But whenever she was asked, Priyanka would point to her “more meaningful” role as a mother raising two young children.