A line often quoted by columnists, and attributed to the British politician and writer, Enoch Powell, is this: 'All political lives end in failure.' The full form of the Powell quote actually reads: "All political lives, unless they are cut off in midstream at a happy juncture, end in failure, because that is the nature of politics and of human affairs."
The abbreviated form of the quote applies forcefully to four former prime ministers of India: Jawaharlal Nehru, P.V. Narasimha Rao, Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Manmohan Singh. They were all politicians of considerable achievement. Nehru was an icon of the freedom struggle, who, after 1947, played a key role in establishing multi-party democracy in India, and in giving the country a scientific and technological base. As prime minister, Rao helped bring about economic liberalization while also crafting a new, multi-layered, foreign policy. Vajpayee was a charismatic Opposition leader and dynamic foreign minister; later, as prime minister, he led the first non-Congress government to enjoy a full five-year term in office. Singh supervised the liberalization process as finance minister and oversaw a decade of robust economic growth as prime minister. Yet, the political lives of this quartet of prime ministers all ended in failure. Over Nehru hung the shadow of the China war; Rao was virtually thrown out of his own party; Vajpayee lost an election he was supposed to comfortably win; Singh left amidst a blaze of negative publicity following the exposure of widespread corruption by his cabinet ministers.
Sonia Gandhi was never prime minister; but for a full 10 years, she was the most powerful politician in India. Now, after the Uttar Pradesh elections, and the almost total wipe-out of her party, she is at the very margins of political life. In fact, after one roadshow in Varanasi where she fell and badly injured herself, Sonia Gandhi did not campaign in this last round of assembly elections. Shortly before counting began, she left for medical treatment overseas. In the event, her party suffered a humiliating defeat in India's largest state, the state where she and all other members of her family had themselves fought and won elections. Her political life has now effectively ended; and it might therefore be appropriate to assess her career as a whole, its highs and its lows, its successes and its failures.
It is now almost 20 years since Sonia Gandhi entered party politics - and at the very top, as the president of the Congress party. At first, few took her seriously. She was dismissed as a goongi gudiya, just as Indira Gandhi had been when she unexpectedly became prime minister in 1966. The second Mrs Gandhi was an indifferent speaker; her Hindi, while grammatical enough, heavily betraying her Italian origins. Yet she attracted crowds and, in time, attention. Soon, scepticism and contempt turned to a grudging appreciation, as the Congress, apparently headed for terminal decline when she took over as president in 1998, began to win a spate of assembly elections in large, important, states such as Karnataka, Rajasthan, Maharashtra and Andhra Pradesh.
Sonia Gandhi's early successes owed themselves to three factors. There was a fair deal of public sympathy for her; for she had seen her mother-in-law murdered before her eyes, and seen her beloved husband assassinated too. And yet she had put those tragedies aside, and herself entered the hard, hostile, unforgiving world of Indian politics. Back in the late 1990s, when Sonia Gandhi became Congress president, the Nehru-Gandhi name still had some mystique; some voters still remembered Nehru, many more, Indira and Rajiv. Finally, Sonia Gandhi was also extremely hardworking, travelling to all parts of India and campaigning round the clock, and while in Delhi meeting with political workers.
Sonia Gandhi's persistence finally led to the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance's surprising victory in the general elections of 2004. Five years later, the Congress and the UPA increased their seat tally, comfortably winning the re-election at a national level. The Indian media tend to judge political success through the narrow prism of electoral victories. By this token alone, Sonia Gandhi was extremely successful in her first decade in politics. But she also made other important contributions to public affairs: as in her stewardship of the Right to Information Act and the National Rural Employment Guarantee programme, the former bringing at least some element of transparency to a notoriously opaque and secretive government, the latter providing a safety net to the rural poor.
Sonia Gandhi's successes in Indian politics were counter-intuitive and altogether unexpected. The year, 2009, was veritably the high-point of her career which, thereafter, began to slide slowly downwards. The corruption scandals associated with the Commonwealth Games began the slide; followed by the exposé of even bigger scandals involving telecom and mining rights. Her silence, once a source of wonder and mystique, now began to be seen as a sign of complicity, as she would not answer the charges laid against her government by an increasingly vocal media and by the popular movement of which Anna Hazare was a symbol. Then came Narendra Modi's dramatic and triumphant election campaign of 2014, and the reduction of the Congress to a mere 44 seats. The series of electoral defeats that have since followed in Congress-ruled states such as Haryana, Maharashtra and Assam deepened the descent; and with the humiliation in UP it has reached its very nadir.
As with Sonia Gandhi's political rise, her political decline also owes itself to a number of factors. One is that she brought back the High Command culture into the Congress, whereby advisers of the party president in New Delhi were trusted more than major regional leaders and state chief ministers. Over time, this led to growing disenchantment in the state units and a loss of morale among the cadre. Furthering this process was the cult of the First Family that Sonia Gandhi sought to promote. When it would have made far more political sense to name prestigious projects after important Congressmen from the state where the project was located, they were inevitably named after a member of the Nehru-Gandhi family. Two examples are the sea link in Mumbai, named after Rajiv Gandhi when it could have more sensibly been named after Y.B. Chavan; and the Hyderabad airport, named (again) after Rajiv Gandhi when it could have been named after P.V. Narasimha Rao.
The history of the Congress is deep and also truly pan-Indian. A leader more alert to this rich and complex history would have promoted major Congress leaders, dead or alive, from all parts of the country. Tragically, Sonia Gandhi's obsession with her family, her equation of the history of her party with her family, extended not just backwards into the past but also forwards into the future. Thus the elevation of her son Rahul, although he lacked the energy and the ambition to be a successful political leader, and was manifestly inferior in both respects to Congress leaders of his own generation.
Sonia Gandhi is still a member of Parliament. She is still president of the Congress. But it is fair to say that after the general elections of 2014 and the UP elections of 2017, it is impossible for her to ever regain an important place in Indian politics. Hence this column, which has provided a provisional assessment of her two decades in political life. It remains only to say that in its overall trajectory, Sonia Gandhi's political career strikingly resembles the political careers of three other members of her family. Nehru enjoyed stunning political success for many years, but from 1959 his fortunes started declining. Between 1969 and 1975, Indira Gandhi was hugely and massively admired across India for her economic and military policies; but from Emergency onwards, her record and reputation became more mixed. In the first few years of his prime ministership, Rajiv Gandhi won plaudits for forging accords with secessionists and for promoting cutting-edge technologies; then came the successive appeasement of Muslim and Hindu fundamentalists and the Bofors scandal. Sonia Gandhi's political life has mirrored all of these; in experiencing success and achievement in its first phase, but decline and failure in the second.
There is thus a markedly family feel to the arc of Sonia Gandhi's life in Indian politics. However, her son, Rahul, may prove an exception to the rule; in being the first Nehru-Gandhi never to know political success at all.
