For Sonia, we natives must remain grateful to Dynasty
Author: Kanchan Gupta
But as Gujarat shows, unwashed Indians have come a long way from the days when they were held in thralldom by the twice-born Nehru-Gandhis
The idea of Dynasty as representative of a maai-baap sarkar, whether we like it or not, retains a certain appeal among the under-classes, more so in far-flung areas where people lead isolated lives and are still dependent, if they can afford it, on Doordarshan and All India Radio for information. Many do without even that; concerns of the chattering classes are irrelevant for the under-classes. That’s how the Congress has willed it for more than six decades, creating a vast vote-bank of impoverished masses whose ignorance is converted into political capital at the time of elections.
And so it was that Congress president Sonia Gandhi chose to address an election rally in a tribal-dominated area of Gujarat on Friday, speaking down to the gathered masses as the patron-in-chief of the underprivileged. Such has been the callous neglect of this region during decades of Congress rule in Gujarat that concerted efforts over the past decade to integrate tribals into the ‘Gujarat Story’ have just about begun to show results. That malign neglect is conveniently forgotten by the Congress and its holding company, the Nehru-Gandhi Dynasty, at the time of elections when the underclasses are exhorted to remember on voting day the great ‘deeds’ (and ‘sacrifices’) of Jawaharlal Nehru, Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi; selective amnesia is a game at which the Darbar and its supine darbaris excel.
Balasaheb Thackeray had once rudely described Sonia Gandhi’s arms while waving at crowds during a rally as the wipers of a car stiffly gliding across the windscreen. The description was not far from the truth: She performs this gesture unsmilingly — an empress acknowledging the existence of bothersome subjects who need to be reminded every few years about the ‘Hand’ that feeds them lest they turn into ingrates and spurn their benefactor. That done, the speech follows, shrill and high-pitched, read-out from a text prepared by a speech-writer who often gets the facts wrong, confusing, say, Haryana with Gujarat. What remains constant is the emphasis on ‘we’ (the Dynasty) did this, but for ‘us’ you would not be around to listen to ‘me’. Be grateful for small mercies.
Exalted royalty, even when its blood is numerous shades far removed from blue, does not mention plebeians by name. Neither does Sonia Gandhi mention Narendra Modi’s name at her election rallies. Yet she heaps calumny on him while praising the Dynasty. In the process, she ends up contradicting herself and stands exposed; but then, royalty is never wrong. The credit for bringing Narmada’s water to Gujarat’s farmers goes to Jawaharlal Nehru, Sonia Gandhi tells her captive audience. At another rally, this time in water-scarce Saurashtra where irrigation canals have led to a tremendous increase in farm output in the past decade, she theatrically declares farmers are being denied water from Narmada. Indira Gandhi initiated Gujarat’s economic growth and Rajiv Gandhi took those initiatives to fruition, she claims. Later, on the same day at another venue, she denounces Gujarat for lagging in economic growth! She flies in on a helicopter and finds faults with Gujarat’s roads that are easily the best in the entire country, a fact admitted even by Modi’s worst critics. And then, at a different place, says Gujarat owes its roads to the Congress-led UPA Government’s Prime Minister’s Gram Sadak Yojana! Thus an NDA initiative becomes, through a sleight of speech, a UPA gift. She doesn’t add her name to the list of those to whom the natives should be eternally grateful; she doesn’t need to. That job is left to a darbari who will not only demand that people genuflect to her but also Rahul Gandhi.
Unerringly Sonia Gandhi also makes it a point to mention, not once but several times over, that Gujarat — and by extension six crore Gujaratis — is a beneficiary of Central funds, largesse of the Delhi Darbar. It would seem she wants the people to believe that her personal munshi sends money from the royal treasury, of which she is the keeper, to the States. This is not money to which Gujarat and Gujaratis have a rightful claim but charity doled out at the sweet will of the Dynasty. Where does the money go, she asks tauntingly. If only Sonia Gandhi knew, which she clearly doesn’t, or perhaps chooses not to know so that she can continue to believe that the Dynasty is not only the owner of the Congress but also the public exchequer, that Gujarat contributes more than `60,000 crore in taxes to the Union Government and gets back a piffling few thousand crores of rupees as its ‘share’, she would have possibly thought twice before making this absurd claim. The States of the Union owe nothing to the Union Government; if anything, the Union Government owes its very existence, including the opulent luxury and comfort afforded to Sonia Gandhi and her darbaris, to the States.
Nor does India owe a farthing to the Dynasty. Sonia Gandhi is welcome to believe, and preach, that but for Jawaharlal Nehru, Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi this would be a nation of beggars, that native effort has contributed nothing to India’s growth and development, and, that the road to salvation does not lie through enterprise but entitlement. But that can at best fetch diminishing returns. For evidence, travel through Gujarat where the vast overwhelming majority now sees the state as an enabler, not a provider. Strangely, for all her sophistry, Sonia Gandhi fails to realise and accept that the days when the Dyasty held voters in thralldom are over. Election after election to State Assemblies has demonstrated that voters are no longer persuaded by the professed munificence of the Dynasty, or the alleged charity of the Delhi Darbar. Contrary to the propaganda of jholawallahs who are appalled by economic growth and its concomitant social development, there’s something edifying about prosperity that serves to push the masses closer to the classes, reducing the gulf that enabled the latter to rule over the former with impunity for the past many decades.
There’s a newfound sense of dignity, a discovery of faith in the individual’s potential to excel and break free of the shackles of poverty. The neo-middle class, motivated by unbridled aspiration, is here and it will determine, to a large measure, the nature of governance in the coming years. Driving through the hinterland of Gujarat, that’s what struck me the most on Friday. Critics are free to cavil at Modi for imagined and manufactured lapses. But that isn’t going to change the reality. He has succeeded where most leaders have failed: In instilling a sense of pride among all Gujaratis. That’s at once admirable and enviable. It should comes as no surprise to Sonia Gandhi that glorification of the Dynasty, and the restricted list of do-gooders that she tauntingly flaunts, cuts little or no ice. In Gujarat, elections are truly a mega festival of democracy where the object of adulation and veneration is not a Nehru-Gandhi but a man of the masses called Narendra Modi. If Sonia Gandhi finds that distressing, so be it.
Kanchan Gupta is Editorial Director of NiTi Digital. During a break from journalism he served in the PMO as an aide to Atal Bihari Vajpayee and as Director of Maulana Azad Centre in Cairo. His blog, Agent Provocateur, reflects his political views. Among the blogs he keenly follows is Usual Suspects. His Twitter handle is twitter.com/KanchanGuptaWebsite: kanchangupta.blogspot.com (The writer is a senior journalist based in Delhi)
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