Sister Act

ON SEPTEMBER 4, 1999, Priyanka Gandhi gave what is considered her first TV interview. In it, she resembled her late grandmother Indira Gandhi in her demeanour and communication and the late Diana, Princess of Wales, in her height, haircut and coy gaze. She told NDTV’s Nupur Basu that she would “have to wait for a long, long time” to see her entry into politics.

It did take Priyanka Gandhi another 20 years to make a formal entry into Congress’ organisational politics, taking over as the party’s general secretary in-charge of eastern Uttar Pradesh (UP) ahead of the Lok Sabha election of 2019. Now, it has taken five more years for her to make an electoral debut, choosing to contest from the Wayanad Lok Sabha seat in Kerala, vacated by her brother Rahul who had won from there as well as Rae Bareli in Uttar Pradesh by huge margins.

While political opponents have called it an extension of dynastic rule to yet another family-turf-in-the-making, this time in the south, Congress is thrilled at the goodwill and charisma that Priyanka Gandhi will bring to parliamentary politics when the party has just improved its tally in Lok Sabha compared to the last two occasions. Congress is still languishing at its third-lowest tally, and yet there are anticipations within the party of a comeback.

V Muralidharan, a senior leader of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) from Kerala, who was a minister in the last Modi government, tells Open, “Like Rae Bareli and Amethi (in Uttar Pradesh), Wayanad (in Kerala) is also being converted into a family pocket borough. Why did Congress not field a leader from Kerala there? Congress has become the property of the Nehru-Gandhi family, with no democratic values. Rahul Gandhi did not disclose he would fight from Rae Bareli till after the Wayanad election. This is a betrayal of the voters of Wayanad, and taking Kerala for granted.”

But Priyanka Gandhi’s choice to step forward assertively into the limelight has left a mark, feel some analysts. For his part, Rasheed Kidwai, journalist and author who has watched Congress closely for long, avers that the “bhai-behen ki jodi (brother-sister duo)” is going to provide a lot of heft to the Congress campaign in the poll-bound states of Haryana, Maharashtra, Jammu & Kashmir, and Jharkhand where Assembly elections are due this year. “In Priyanka Gandhi, Congress has a powerful campaigner, an Ahmed Patel like-crisis manager, and a listening post. The Opposition, having a credible presence in Lok Sabha, would have a double-barrel line of attack in the form of Rahul and Priyanka against the government,” Kidwai asserts.

Priyanka Gandhi herself looked pleased.

“I am happy to be able to represent Wayanad, and I will not let them feel his (Rahul Gandhi’s) absence. I will work hard and try my best to make everyone happy and be a good representative,” she said about her forthcoming contest from Wayanad.

Some people feel Priyanka Gandhi has taken the plunge this year because it is “now or never” for Congress, which is seen as making a resurgence of sorts compared with the depths it had plunged to in the past two General Elections, winning 44 and 52 seats respectively to Lok Sabha in 2014 and 2019. This time round it won 99 seats on counting day.

Sudhir Panwar of Lucknow University, a leader of the Samajwadi Party (SP) which fought the recent elections in a tie-up with Congress and won handsomely in UP, says it was a foregone conclusion that Priyanka Gandhi was going to make an electoral foray sooner or later. “It has taken her a long time to contest elections. I think she is being pitched from Wayanad because Congress feels the constituency stood by Rahul in a time of need and now it cannot be abandoned. Which is why Priyanka, his sister, is contesting from there. There is also a question of opportu­nity that works here,” he says, emphasising that since 2012 Congress’ poll fortunes have been on a slide and now is the time for her to make an entry. Panwar adds, “I don’t think, however, that her entry is going to vastly change poll dynamics at the national level.”

A SECTION OF PUNDITS, meanwhile, contends that her entry into national politics will strengthen Congress at a time when there is competition for women’s votes. BJP has fiercely wooed women voters through its schemes that include the distribution of cooking gas connec­tions and measures to ensure women’s safety. The party has campaigned aggressively on Modi offering dignity to the poor, farmers and women. The saffron party continues to be at it.

It has taken Priyanka a long time to reach this decision. As she said in 1999, “a long, long time”.

Jad Adams, author of The Dynasty: The Nehru- Gandhi Story who also worked on an eponymous BBC series, had told Open in an interview (‘Enter Priyanka: Can She Save the Day for Rahul?’, Febru­ary 4, 2019) that Priyanka was always tipped for a political career when she was a child. “The only surprise to me is how long this has taken. Her father Rajiv used to compare her to his mother Indira for her strong will—that trait which Indira’s opponents would call her stubbornness,” he had said.

Priyanka Gandhi has been a forceful campaigner for her par­ty in the recent elections. Even in the unsuccessful campaign of 2019 and the elections to various states held later, including the 2022 UP Assembly polls, despite the reverses, Congress insiders say that Priyanka has been a quintessential behind-the-scenes strategist, assisting her mother and brother. They also talk about the tragedies her family has endured—losing her grandmother in 1984 and her father Rajiv Gandhi in 1991 to assassinations— which made her acquire nerves of steel even after her per­sonal grief took her out of the public eye for long stretches and into Buddhism and Vipassana meditation. She displayed her inner courage in 2008 when she met Nalini, a conspirator in the Rajiv Gandhi assassination case, in Vellore Central Jail and later said that she had forgiven her father’s killers.

In the 2024 polls, she was indeed a force to reckon with in UP and endeared herself to her partymen. Party workers and sympathisers in Rae Bareli wanted her to fight polls this time round.

Hours before the deadline for filing nominations to the Rae Bareli Lok Sabha seat in this year’s election on May 3, Congress workers stood waiting, holding posters that had images of Rahul and Priyanka Gandhi. The grapevine had it till the night before that Priyanka Gandhi could make her electoral debut from the seat, a Nehru-Gandhi family pocket borough. More popular than her elder brother because of “the way she speaks” as several locals put it, and given Rahul’s image being “smeared” by their oppo­nents, enthusiasm about Priyanka contesting from the seat was palpable. The last-minute announcement that Rahul Gandhi, who had lost to BJP’s Smriti Irani in Amethi in 2019, would contest from Rae Bareli came as a surprise. It was speculated then that Priyanka was disinclined to contest.

True, the two Gandhis entering the fray would give BJP more ammunition to target Congress further with its “dynasty” charge. It did, as soon as the announcement of Priyanka Gandhi being fielded from Wayanad came. Adams had always viewed this phe­nomenon differently. “Some people sneer at this dynastic mode in subcontinental politics as being evidence of an Asian inability to achieve democracy and point not just at the Nehru-Gandhis but the Bhuttos in Pakistan and the Bandaranaikes in Sri Lanka. Are the people hankering after a royal family? I think differently. I see it as unremarkable that many members of the same family go into the same occupation. Tradesmen, farmers and doctors may go for many generations working in the same field. There is some level of nepotism but mainly it is learned behaviour,” he says.

Even though Priyanka did not contest from either Rae Bareli or Amethi, she was at the forefront of the campaign in both seats, relentlessly taking on BJP and galvanising her party workers. In Amethi, where she canvassed for the Gandhi family’s close associate Kishori Lal Sharma, she is credited with managing to turn the tide against Irani who was hoping for a second term on the former Congress turf. In her speeches, she said Irani’s only intention in coming to Amethi was to defeat her brother, not to ensure the welfare of the people in the constituency. On the last day of campaigning, she sat atop a vehicle, along with Sharma, waving to the crowds all through the roadshow. In several unscripted instances, she stepped off her vehicle and began interacting informally with villagers while they thronged to take selfies with her even if they were holding up BJP flags.

In Rae Bareli, where she started campaigning even before Rahul Gandhi hit the trail, she under­scored the century-old connection of the Gandhis to the people of the constituency, recalling the 1921 Munshiganj massacre when Jawaharlal Nehru had stood by the farmers.

This time round in UP, Congress, in alliance with Akhilesh Yadav’s SP, won six of the 17 seats it contested in the state, against the sole seat it won in Rae Bareli in 2019 when Sonia Gandhi was the candidate. The party’s vote share in the state, the most populous in the country, rose from 6.36 per cent in 2019 to 9.46 per cent in 2024. While Rahul Gandhi and Yadav held joint rallies in several places, Priyanka and Mainpuri MP and Yadav’s wife Dimple Yadav held a joint rally in Varanasi. In the 2022 Assembly polls, however, when Priyanka was leading the campaign, Con­gress managed to win just two of the 399 seats it fought in an election that had become a face-off between BJP and SP. Faced with an existential cri­sis, Congress now sees a chance at consolidation.

Once Priyanka enters Lok Sabha, it will be the first time that three Congress members of the Nehru-Gandhi family—Sonia, Rahul, and Priyanka Gandhi—will be MPs. Of the three, Sonia Gandhi is a member of Rajya Sabha, while the other two will be in Lok Sabha. Besides Sonia and Rahul Gandhi, Indira Gandhi’s young­er daughter-in-law Maneka Gandhi and her son Varun were in the last Lok Sabha, but they were on the other side of the political aisle. This time, Maneka Gandhi lost the election from Sultanpur while Varun Gandhi was not given a ticket by BJP.

For the Opposition, more formidable by its bigger nu­merical strength this time, the presence of Priyanka Gandhi, a spirited speaker, as an elected representative could prove to be invigorating. At the same time, she is also likely to become the prime target of the ruling side, which had so far been training its guns mainly on Rahul Gandhi.

To accusation of Rahul Gandhi contesting from two seats and then “betraying” the people of Wayanad, Congress’ Shama Mohamed says, “The Wayanad District Congress Committee has passed a resolution welcoming her. Priyanka Gandhi has campaigned across the country. ” She also argues that many BJP leaders had contested from more than one seat in the past. Meanwhile, the ruling Left in Kerala continues to be miffed at the Gandhis for not investing all their energies in fighting BJP, and instead taking on I.N.D.I.A. bloc members.

Given her charm and relatability as a senior leader, Priyanka, 52, won’t find it difficult to make good in electoral politics. Which also means being under greater scrutiny as a public figure.

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