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India Today, June 7, 1999
June 7, 1999

FIFTH COLUMN
All Roads Lead to Rome

why candidate Sonia may relax but PM Sonia never will.

By Tavleen Singh

Poor Sonia Gandhi. Even as someone implacably opposed to India having an Italian prime minister, my heart went out to her as she stood before that clamorous, undisciplined bunch that is the All India Congress Committee (AICC) and defended her deshbhakti. Why she needed to do this was puzzling since nobody has accused her of being unpatriotic. Only of being Italian, which is really not her fault at all.

It is a problem though for those of us Indians who feel deeply the humiliation of our oldest political party being unable to offer us an Indian prime minister. To quote from the letter that resulted in Sharad Pawar, Purno Sangma and Tariq Anwar being expelled from the Congress, "It is not possible that a country of 980 million, with a wealth of education, competence and ability, can have anyone other than an Indian, born of Indian soil, as head of its government." That is basically it.

Had she been a proper politician and not merely a politician by marriage, Sonia would have handled the problem with more sensitivity and sophistication than she has shown. The questions raised in the letter were valid ones and could have been discussed and voted on within the Congress. Pawar, Sangma and Anwar would have been silenced because nobody would have dared vote with them -- and the matter would have ended there. Instead, the whole country has been reminded once more of the ugliness of "Congress culture". We saw it on full display outside Sonia's house for a whole week. It is a culture based entirely on sycophancy. So we had Congress chief ministers declaring themselves orphans because she had resigned and flaunting their own resignation letters as medals of honour, as if their primary duty was to Sonia and not to the people who elected them.

It is clearly sycophancy that she wants, as can be seen from the fact that she allowed the hysteria and sycophantic weeping and wailing to build up for a week before she graciously agreed to continue being Congress president. She also made it abundantly clear in her speech to the AICC that she would tolerate no further dissent. "I want a Congress that is with me. Anyone who disagrees can find their own road."

This is another characteristic of Congress culture that causes concern mainly because it once led to a Congress president becoming India's first dictator. That other Mrs Gandhi led a party of giants, compared with the pygmies in Sonia's flock, yet not a single one of them opposed her when she decided to put a temporary end to democracy in India. Since her daughter-in-law shares her distaste for dissent, it is quite frightening to think what she (Sonia) would do if a similar situation were to arise in the future. Even more frightening is the fact that it could so easily arise.

If Sonia had one friend among the bunch of sycophants surrounding her, that friend would warn her of the serious problems that will come into being on the day she takes over as prime minister. Think for a minute what it could be like and you will realise that there is almost nothing she will be able to do without being instantly under fire.

Say, for instance, she decides to begin with further economic liberalisation, which with Manmohan Singh on board is almost a certainty. The next phase of reforms will have to include selling some of our non-profitable, non-functional government utilities, like those in power distribution.

State governments owe thousands of crores to government power companies like the National Thermal Power Corporation (NTPC) and the only solution according to NTPC Chairman Rajendra Singh is to privatise distribution. There is a price though. Privatisation will put an instant end to caste-based reservations and trade unions will be up in arms. A prime minister who is Indian by birth would have a hard enough time handling this. A foreigner would be immediately accused of "selling the country".

The same sort of arguments will come into play if Sonia as prime minister decided that it was time for friendship with Pakistan. It is time. But could she stand up before an audience in Lahore, as Atal Bihari Vajpayee did, and tell them that there had been enough enmity and we now needed to give friendship a chance? Would she not immediately face accusations of "selling the country"?

What of signing the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT)? There is no reason why India should not sign. It is, in fact, in our interest to sign. But could she do it without that famous "foreign hand" returning to haunt her? So the only way really for her to be prime minister is to do nothing at all during her tenure. Can we afford this at a time when three successive governments have been rendered virtually non-functional on account of political instability?

So when Sonia Gandhi dismisses the issue of her foreignness as being irrelevant she needs to think again. She may discover that the three men whom she expelled were warning her of very real dangers ahead. Dangers none of the sycophants in her inner circle would dream of warning her about for exactly the reasons they failed to warn Indira Gandhi that the Emergency would end up harming her.

It is not "Congress culture" to challenge the authority of the supreme leader, as party spokesman Ajit Jogi described her. But in the end the biggest victim of such a political culture is the supreme leader. Because in a proper political party there should be no room for this kind of potentate.

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