Why it is difficult to appreciate the Congress and the Gandhi family (Part 1)

There are two things I have not been able to acknowledge about the Congress and the Gandhi family, till as recently as the Bharat Jodo Yatra by Rahul Gandhi. I am not into electoral politics, I am not a Congress party member or anything, and I wish to put these two things down as a concerned citizen, nothing more.

The first, the dynasty thing. I was 14 when Indira Gandhi was killed, and a final year undergraduate when Rajeev Gandhi was killed — 20 or so. At that time, and for a very long time afterwards, I did not appreciate what it must have taken Sonia, Priyanka and Rahul to stay on in Politics in India after two of their family members were so brutally assassinated for being in politics within a few years.

I think I did not appreciate this because after both deaths when the Congress won elections I heard adults talk about ‘sympathy waves’, and how those deaths benefitted the party, and not about what it meant to lose a family member to murder. Or they criticized how things were imperfect during the Congress regime. I was too young to be concerned about any of this on my own — my thoughts were more in the direction of my career, boys, and my growing intererest in ecology and philosophy, and both politics and death were pretty remote things. Also I think I did not appreciate the emotional cost of losing a family member because I was an abused child for whom family was the greatest danger that could be in the world. So I slid easily into the lazy view of the adults around me — that all politicians are corrupt and politics is a ‘tamasha’ (useless drama) that I had better ignore. I never thought of politicians as human beings in those days — simply as vague distant figures who delivered or failed to.

I grew genuinely interested, not in politics but in policy, after I started writing about environmental issues and started witnessing first hand how policy was destroying the lives of the poor, the nature dependent populations and the natural world. The sheer injustice of it all inspired me to participate in activist work, support groups fighting for justice for nature. But again I never thought of politicians as human beings.

And I also had a lot of anger at the acquisition of tribal and agricultural land for corporate benefit, and the connected violence against vulnerable people I saw first hand. I worked for years among triblas thrown out of their ancestral lands and the poverty, uprooting and horrors they suffered as a result, and I couldn’t believe in governments that let that happened.

I did not want the BJPEE to win in 2014 — I knew they would be far worse than the Congress not just because of their communal agenda but because I had seen in MP how they treated indigenous tribals. But I did not have empathy for the Congress, much less for the Gandhi family.

It was only after hearing Rahul’s speeches during the BJY about how it was for him to receive the phone calls announcing the deaths of his grand mother and father that I could appreciate the immense courage it must have taken for the family to even stay on in India, let alone stay in politics. They are a wealthy family, they could easily have moved away to a foreign country and lived good lives as private citizens, and it would have been OK for them to do that after everything that they has been through. But they chose to stay. The only popular view I had heard from emotionally numb adults is that they stayed because of the lust for power. It is only today that I am able to think — really? Is it at all possible for people to choose lust for power when the prospect of actual death looms large?

When Rahul Gandhi entered politics there was a lot of talk about why Priyanka should have been the one to do so, how she is better than Rahul at politics, how the party is being patriarchal by not supporting her and supporting the dud son instead. After the Congress lost miserably in 2014 these thoughts even appeared in the press.

I did not have an opinion about all this then. I was just pissed that the BJPEE had grabbed power and worried about where that would lead.

But today I think — Priyanka HAS CHILDREN. Is the family really at fault for protecting her for their sake? AFTER what they had to go through?

And Rahul has proved to be not such a dud afterall. He has brought his party back from near anhilation, and united the opposition — imperfectly, with cracks, but he has done it — and given the only real hope that the country has had since 2014 that the BJPEE and Sangh can be dislodged — that there is a real alternative. He has done things we did not imagine possible till even two years back.

And lately I saw the financial figures — the BJPEE’S bank account has 3596 crore, while the Congress has 162 crore. What does it take to fight with these odds? And everything is against them — the family has seen ED attacks, Rahul had to fight off a prison sentence. And they have pulled all of this off while dealing with all that. They might beat the BJPEE for all you know.

What more do you want from ONE family which saw its members brutally murdered TWICE? Yes, they have taken time to get out of the existential crisis the Congress had slid into post those two violent deaths. BUT HOW COULD THEY HAVE NOT TAKEN THAT TIME? It would not have been human.

I honestly can’t believe now that this family is into politics for greed or lust for power. When violent death becomes a real possibility, greed and lust for power pale in the background. What has to be dealt with first is FEAR. And I can’t believe this family did not have to fight a tremendous amount of fear to still be at the forefront of this country’s politics. Doesn’t have to fight it each day. And when you fight that levels of fear, it can’t be for petty reasons.

(…..to be continued. Views are personal)