India (12 page)

The level of anarchic violence in the 1998 election was substantial. In the southern industrial city of Coimbatore, dozens of bombs were detonated, killing thirty-six people, but nobody claimed responsibility. Polling day in Bihar was savage. There was widespread booth capturing, which involved a gang of men arriving at a polling station, disabling the police guard, stuffing the ballot boxes with voting papers marked in favour of their own party and delivering the boxes to the local returning officer. Across the state, bombs were set off and rival groups shot each other with home-made guns. After the first day of voting, the
Hindustan Times
had this front page headline:

After Rajiv’s assassination, Sonia Gandhi had retreated from the world, seeing only her mother and sisters and a few close friends. Occasionally she would make public appearances or receive important foreign dignitaries, but most of her external contact was handled by intermediaries. In New Delhi, she became an object of fascination—the Sphinx, Jackie Kennedy,
Mona Lisa. Her house was turned into a shrine to her husband’s memory, and she edited a moving and surprisingly revealing book about him,
Rajiv
, which contained a selection of his photographs. Initially derided as an uneducated outsider, an “Italian au pair,” Sonia proved a canny political operator. Many who knew her well found it hard to believe what she was doing, having always thought of her as apolitical. In her book
Rajiv
, there is indeed little sense of her future strategic talent. Lines such as “Rajiv drove through most villages and towns in his jeep. Wherever people were waiting, we would stop. If we were delayed they would stand by patiently, to see him, to talk to him” appear naïve, and could have been written by the wife of almost any Third World leader who was sure to be received with rapture.
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Over time, Sonia Gandhi would become an exceptionally commanding politician, exerting her unspoken will over the Congress party. Once again, the men in white khadi were afraid of “Madam.”

I went to one of her first public rallies. Not far from Delhi’s Red Fort, where the Mughal emperors once lived in state surrounded by half-naked eunuchs, lies Ram Lila Ground. People were streaming towards it, wearing Congress badges, Congress rosettes, sun shades and hair bands, chanting and jumping, shouting slogans, some barefoot in dhotis, some in shirts and ties. An auto-rickshaw passed, a pair of bell-shaped speakers attached to its roof, a man in the back blaring the injunction: “Aaj teen bajay sooniye Bharat ki ik lauti bahu, Sonia Gandhi”—“Today at 3 o’clock, listen to India’s one and only daughter-in-law, Sonia Gandhi.” Around 80,000 of us waited for five hours while a qawwal, singing as if from the heart, entertained the crowd. Up on the podium stood fabulously tall cutouts of Rajiv Gandhi, striding forward with his arm in the air, and beside him a giant Sonia, doing namaste.

When Mrs. Gandhi arrived, the crowd pushed forward against the bamboo barriers. Police shoved screaming people this way and that, and beat some of them with sticks. Dozens of Special Protection Group agents barked into walkie-talkies and cricked their necks as they listened to their earpieces. Head down, mouth set tightly, no time to waste, Sonia Gandhi scurried up to the front of the platform, wearing a man’s watch like her late mother-in-law. Behind her came her daughter, Priyanka, and son, Rahul, both now in their mid-twenties, waving and smiling. Mrs. Gandhi began reading her speech in a woeful voice, in heavily accented Hindi, telling the story of her life and how she had sacrificed her husband for India. Beside me an old man with a long yellowing beard and a strong nose was sobbing, tears running down his pitted face. A middle-aged woman, huddled into
her sari, dabbed at her eyes with a pink tissue, shaking her head. Sonia had arrived in India with a return ticket, “but Delhi was the place of my second birth and the ticket, like my past, was lost in the mists of time” (which ignored the fact that she and Rajiv almost quit the country for Italy during the Emergency). She concluded her speech with a line of unadulterated cinema. “Dar gaye,” she rasped in her Italian accent, “ek aurat se dar gaye hain”—“The opposition are scared, scared of a woman.”

Nothing in Sonia Gandhi’s upbringing hinted at a political career. Born Antonia Maino, she grew up in the poor industrial suburb of Orbassano on the outskirts of Turin. Her father, Stephano, was a successful builder who had fought alongside the Wehrmacht against the Russians on the Eastern Front (he gave each of his daughters a Russian pet name, hence Sonia) and her mother, Paola, was a traditional housewife. Stephano remained an unrepentant fascist until his death, like many of his generation of Italian men, and kept a leather-bound edition of Mussolini’s speeches in his front room.
¹⁶
The Mainos were a strict Roman Catholic family. The girls were not permitted to go out unchaperoned, and it must have been with trepidation that he allowed his attractive eighteen-year-old daughter to attend a language school in England.

Sonia stayed with a British family as a paying guest but felt homesick. One lunchtime at the Varsity restaurant in Cambridge, a mutual friend introduced her to Rajiv Gandhi. Sonia wrote later: “As our eyes met for the first time I could feel my heart pounding. We greeted each other and, as far as I was concerned, it was love at first sight.”
¹⁷
The friend, Chris von Stieglitz, called it “pure, simple, personal magnetism. It never disappeared. Three months before his death I remember her sitting on his knee; they were still acting like teenage lovers.”
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After the marriage, which took place against the wishes of Sonia’s father, they lived a carefree life in Delhi, away from politics, spending days with friends and going on picnics and excursions. Relations with Sanjay and Maneka were tense but detached. Sonia fulfilled the role of the faithful bahu, or daughter-in-law, buying impeccable clothes for Indira Gandhi and cooking her favourite dishes; in some respects, traditional family life in India and Italy was similar. Rajiv was a contented airline pilot, flying a Fokker Friendship and later a DC-3 on the domestic sector. Sonia Gandhi could never have anticipated how the untimely death of her brother-in-law followed by the murder of her mother-in-law would lead to her husband becoming prime minister, and how his assassination would in turn leave her with few alternatives but to become a politician herself.

During the 1998 election campaign, it was apparent that Sonia Gandhi
was creating a popular reaction, but unclear whether this meant she could overcome the view that she was an outsider who had no business to be involved in Indian politics. Her opponents called her “Italy ki Maharani,” the “queen of Italy,” and Bal Thackeray, leader of the BJP’s chauvinist ally the Shiv Sena, asked, “How is it that when we ask one white skin to quit India, you are welcoming another white skin? … Our ancestors, who fought for freedom, overthrew the British.”
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Her Catholic religious background offered another line of attack: Narendra Modi said she might be in league with the election commissioner, who came from a Christian family in Meghalaya in the north-east. “Has James Michael Lyngdoh come from Italy?” he wondered. “I don’t have his janam patri [horoscope], I will have to ask Sonia Gandhi. Do they meet in church?”
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These jibes continued for several years, but it seemed from early on they had little genuine resonance with voters. I watched her visit the constituency of Medak in Andhra Pradesh, which had been Indira Gandhi’s seat at the time of her death. Voters here were predominantly Telugu-speaking agricultural labourers, living in poor conditions. When she flew into Medak in an orange and white helicopter to speak to a cheering crowd of over 100,000 people, she represented some distant ideal, a deracinated image unconnected to the reality of cropping sugar-cane by hand for twelve hours a day. A local revolutionary outfit, the People’s War Group, had ordered a boycott of her rally, but this was ignored. Some people came to see Sonia because they were paid by local village leaders, but most came voluntarily. One old man told me he had ridden four miles from Lingsanpally on his bicycle. “I have attended meetings of Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi, so let me see how Rajiv’s wife looks.” Unlike in Delhi, where outfits varied, all the women here wore saris and bangles and all the men had a dhoti and vest, except a handful of hard-faced local Congress leaders who wore slacks—and owned shoes.

As the crowd streamed towards the road, I spoke to Kondraopalli Pochamma, an agricultural labourer in her early forties with rings on her toes, poor teeth and a thin yellow sari. She earned about $20 a month, when she could find work. She had come to the political rally to see Sonia “and receive her message,” she told me, speaking in Telugu. “But I couldn’t follow a damn thing. Sonia’s accent wasn’t like Indira Gandhi’s.” All the same, she would vote for Congress. “Who else is there? Only the family has a soft corner and a wish to help the poor, especially women. I belong to a weaker [lower-caste] section. Our only hope is Sonia—we trust her, because she too has suffered.” Nobody I spoke to there was concerned about her foreign
origins. “She married into an Indian family and so we consider her as one among us,” said Kondraopalli Pochamma firmly. “She is Indira Gandhi’s daughter-in-law.” In traditional Indian culture, the daughter-in-law is subsumed into the husband’s family, so for a Medak voter she was not much more alien than a Bengali or a Kashmiri.

Sonia Gandhi’s appeal rested in part on iconography. She had a transcendent ability to project herself as an Indian everywoman who shared the suffering of the huddled masses: she was the incarnation of a dynasty but also a tragic widow who tied back her hair and dressed in muted colours as a good widow should. Foreigners are notorious in India for looking foolish in a sari—six yards of cloth tucked into a petticoat and pleated over a blouse—but Sonia wore hers impeccably, and avoided Western clothes. Despite Bal Thackeray’s jibes, most voters did not see her as a “white skin”; with her dark hair and light brown Italian complexion, she looked as if she might be from a similar ethnic background to the Nehrus, high-caste north Indians. Had she been of blond northern European or black African origin, she would never have been credible as an Indian leader. In a country where skin tone is noticed, this was part of her allure. It helped too that she was called Sonia—it was a name, like Natasha, which had become popular in the 1960s during India’s love-in with Russia, and did not mark her as an outsider.

When the votes were counted in 1998, Congress and its allies had won 166 seats, an increase of twenty-eight from the previous election, and the BJP was short of a majority. The party had been rescued from oblivion. It still had some distance to go if it was to return to health and power, and it was at this point that Sonia Gandhi’s skills as a leader began to appear. She made some blunders, learning as she went. Unlike her late husband, she kept her friends separate from her professional career and did not allow politicians to advance any further than the office at the back of her house. Her private, culturally diverse home life with her children was kept hidden from public view, and her close friends took a tacit vow of
omertà
. Priyanka got married and had two children, while Rahul went to college in the United States and Britain, and bucked family tradition by gaining qualifications. He developed the art of being discreet and unobtrusive, studying under an assumed name and avoiding any public profile. In his absence, the Indian press made up stories: his real name was reported to be Raol and his sister’s was Bianca, and he had been arrested at Boston airport carrying wads of cash (in fact he had been spotted reading a flight manual a few days after 9/11—when questioned at Logan, he applied the precepts of secularism by refusing to say whether he was Hindu or Muslim, and when it became clear
the problem was not going away, asked his questioners to call a contact at the FBI, who set matters straight).
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The mother and children were a strong unit, and unlike most politicians, Sonia Gandhi was not held back by family members with possible ambitions of their own. As she was an outsider, a European who had married into an Indian family, other politicians never knew quite how to handle the new Mrs. Gandhi. Where necessary, she could act detached and “Western.” Her weapon of choice was repudiation. When three of her most senior colleagues suggested only someone born on Indian soil should head any future government, she resigned her post, saying her loyalty to her country (meaning India) was so great that she did not want to cause controversy. They went; she stayed. She built alliances with regional, caste-based and communist parties and avoided being identified with particular policies, except for nebulous ones like concern for the poor and secular values. Any Congress official who became too powerful was cut adrift, such as her husband’s long-time secretary V. George. Mrs. Gandhi gave no one a second chance. In meetings she usually remained formal and aloof, using long silences to exert authority.

Despite this, Congress still had ambitious and qualified men who regarded themselves as potential prime ministers. Since Mrs. Gandhi had no experience of administration at any level, some wanted her to be kicked upstairs to a ceremonial post. She remained in a precarious and isolated position—people joked about her inability to speak Hindi well, and referred to her by her mother-in-law’s nickname, “goongi gudiya,” or “dumb doll.” In 1999 she sat for one of the only interviews she has ever done, on Star TV. The unedited tape makes astonishing viewing. Mrs. Gandhi giggles nervously at the first question, stops herself and says, “I’m sorry, I just don’t know how to face a camera.” There are two more false starts; it is apparent she has had no media training. Blinking and swallowing, her upper lip perspiring, she finally gets into her stride, talking about bureaucracy, politics and her family tragedy. When the interviewer mentions that people mock her Italian accent, she says, “I don’t blame them for making fun of it. I feel Indian. I don’t feel one bit Italian.”
²²
By the end of the conversation, she looks ready to collapse.