Sonia's silent power

Persuasive Politics

The impressive victory of the Congress party in the recent parliamentary elections is mostly attributed to Rahul Gandhi’s adventurous politics. His calculated moves in the Uttar Pradesh, his all India tours and appeal are said to have paid off. The allies, who turned down the pre-poll alliance with the Congress, are now willing to give unconditional support to the Congress.
After getting badly rubbed up in the election, Mulayam Singh Yadav, Lalu Prasad and Ramvilas Paswan have rushed to offer their unconditional support to the Congress — a strange approach indeed. Mayawati also has done that with the fear that on one pretext or the other her government could be dismissed by the UPA government at the Centre. But the real mover behind the party power steering and one who keeps the government machinery moving is, Sonia Gandhi.
Why and how has Sonia Gandhi become so powerful in the country? She has not walked into power politics with any long drawn suffering. After her husband’s death she took eight years to come out of her mourning. She would have straight become the Congress president and the prime minister after Rajiv Gandhi’s death. But she allowed the party to pass it on to P V Narasimha Rao, who was a toothless follower of the family, when Rajiv was alive.
After Nehru, Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi, Narasimha Rao enjoyed the power of being the party presidentship and as well as prime ministership and slowly and silently he ignored Sonia Gandhi because he too hated her for being a woman of foreign origin and of Christian background. We know that he was the ‘Hindu Chanakya’ of modern times. Even leaders like Sharad Pawar and Sangma brought up that foreign origin theory and left the Congress.
Sonia adopted a nun like approach towards the change of her own self and also of the politics in India. After all, she has a Catholic family training to work, as a nun or a mission school teacher or a nurse. She came from a humble background of a cafeteria waitress at the Cambridge. For long, she remained a dutiful Indian housewife.
While being part of Indira Gandhi’s family, she might have disliked Indian politics. But the marriage and the circumstances that followed thereafter forced her to play the role that she is playing today. She must have taken it as God’s own assignment to her. But playing that role in a country like India without involving in criminal activities is rather difficult.  
When she took over the party presidentship with a lot of reluctance in 1998,   nobody thought that she would be able to pull the party out of its mess. Nobody thought that she would be able to overcome that foreigner tag. The BJP imagined that her Christian background would be a boon for them. They made that attempt in Kandhamal (Orissa) and also in Karnataka. But the whole Christian world and the democratic forces of India brought them to their knees in this election.
More than anything, the 2009 elections --- particularly that of Orissa --- have shown them that they need to lick their wounds if they continue attacks of that sort. Sonia Gandhi knows how to make others---her aides in the party—to speak her mind. But she remains largely silent. That needs a lot of patience and endurance. She cultivated that quality quite carefully and now it has worked in her favour.

Political support

When the Christians of Orissa and the Muslims of Gujarat were attacked, Sonia Gandhi silently communicated to them that she would stand by them spiritually and politically. She was willing to ask for pardon from the Sikhs who suffered in the anti-Sikh riots after Indira Gandhi’s death. She deliberately chose Manmohan Singh to be the country’s prime minister. With that master stroke she won the confidence of the entire Sikh population. Look at the way Sikhs voted for Congress in Delhi and Punjab.
She also does not let her children be what Sanjay Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi were. In fact she restrained Rajiv quite a lot from entering into politics. After Sanjay Gandhi’s death, her mother-in-law forced Rajiv to come into politics. But Sonia on her own was willing to leave that field to Sanjay Gandhi and she seems to have been content with her husband’s pilot job.
Of course, they had no problems on the financial front. I don’t think she was pushing Rajiv to compete with his brother who earned enough bad name during the Emergency and before. That seems to be the reason why she doesn’t want Rahul Gandhi also to become the prime minister in a hurry without gaining enough experience of handling the murky Indian politics. That is definitely a good sign.
Along with the question of religion, if she also handles the caste issue carefully, she would transform the Indian political system—if not the social system—quite significantly.