Fifth column: When it comes to Sonia Gandhi’s political legacy, there is less to admire

Former Congress president Sonia Gandhi

If I could avoid writing about the retirement of Sonia Gandhi, I would. As one of a handful of political columnists who dared criticise her, I have long been labelled a ‘Sonia-baiter’ by her fans, and fellow travellers. But since she has been president of our oldest political party for the longest tenure ever, it is impossible to ignore her announcement last week that “my only job now is to retire”.

Before analysing her political legacy, let me say that on a personal level what she has achieved is remarkable. You need real courage to enter politics in a country so foreign that you hesitated to become its citizen until it was absolutely necessary. You need real courage to take charge of the political party that led India’s freedom movement and guide it with an iron hand for nearly two decades. You need real courage to enter politics at all when your husband and mother-in-law have been assassinated for their politics.

Alas, when it comes to Sonia’s political legacy, there is less to admire. The first role she played in Indian politics was as the Prime Minister’s wife. It was in that time a Swedish radio station broke the news that Bofors AB paid bribes to high Indian officials to sell its guns. Some of this bribe money was eventually traced (thanks to some excellent investigative journalism by my friend Chitra Subramaniam) to Swiss accounts belonging to Sonia’s closest friends, Mr and Mrs Ottavio Quattrocchi. She has never explained why an armaments company would bribe a fertiliser salesman and his wife unless they helped sell some guns. Instead of answering this question, Sonia has worked actively to get the governments she controlled to help her friends. P V Narasimha Rao allowed the Quattrocchis to make a midnight escape the day those bank accounts were found. And Dr Manmohan Singh unfroze their London accounts in the last days of his first term.

No surprise then that under the two prime ministers Sonia appointed, corruption in government spread vertically and horizontally in spectacular fashion. Since the early nineties, it has been abundantly clear to the average Indian that the quickest way to make easy money is through somehow wangling a job in politics.

Sonia would not have had a career in Indian politics if she had not married a scion of our oldest political dynasty, so she showed early on that she approved of dynastic democracy. Under her aegis, the easiest way to get a Congress ticket to contest elections was if you came from a political family. It was the other Mrs Gandhi who began the process of transforming the Congress from a political party into a family firm, but it was under Sonia that the process was completed.Other political parties have copied cheerfully, and today all our regional parties are really just private limited companies. Would this have happened if the Congress had not set the trend? Hard to say, but what is clear is that people who want to enter politics from a sense of public service are often denied entry because some heir has privileged access. What is even clearer is that this has been bad for Indian democracy.

And, speaking of which, it is important to remember that it is thanks to Sonia Gandhi that we have seen how it is possible to have immeasurable political power without a shred of accountability. In his second term, the good Dr Manmohan Singh was Prime Minister in name only. Every minister in his Cabinet knew who the real boss was and many had no hesitation in sending government files to the Congress president instead of the Prime Minister. Everyone also knew that her kitchen cabinet of NGO do-gooders was more powerful than the real cabinet. It is on account of their well-intentioned but woolly-headed interventions that in the 10 years that Sonia ruled, we spent most of our money on MGNREGA-type schemes instead of on what Indians need most: schools, hospitals, roads, electricity, clean water and real jobs.

If under Sonia Gandhi the Congress party reached its lowest point in a century of existence, it was because ordinary voters discovered that India had become a country in which they could never hope for more than a few scraps from the high table. Now that her son becomes the sixth member of the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty to become president of the Congress party, will he be able to reverse some of the things Mummyji did? All that can be said at this point is that it will not be easy, but as a first step he would do well to rid himself of the little court of sycophants that surrounds him in Delhi. As long as they continue to guard the gates, they will make sure that he never gets around to making the Congress a real political party once more.