PROPAGANDA BIG TIME
http://www.outlookindia.com/full.asp?fodna...F%29&sid=1&pn=1
T. Narayan
PROFILE
The Quiet Italian
From a non-entity to a skilful manager of power and responsibility, the Gandhi bahu has come into her own
VIR SANGHVI on Sonia Gandhi
Think back if you can to that week in 1995 when the first issue of Outlook appeared. The big story of the dayâan Outlook exclusiveâwas that India's prime minister, Narasimha Rao, wrote dirty books in his spare time. The magazine had procured a manuscript of Narasimha Rao's novel and proceeded to carry the more salacious bits.
Narasimha Rao was embarrassed, the nation amused, and when the book finally did appear (as The Insider), the naughty passages had been excised. But even as Delhi's political circles giggled at the thought of the apparently erudite prime minister hitching up his dhoti and proceeding to churn out porn, nobody thought of the woman who had installed Rao at Race Course Road.
By 1995, Sonia Gandhi was something of a political non-entity.
Why did Sonia change her mind? Cynics say she couldn't see her fiefdom slipping away. But her own version...
In just four years, she had gone from being kingmaker to being regarded as a holdover from another era.
It could have been different, of course. In 1991, when Rajiv Gandhi was assassinated, the Congress party's Pavlovian reflex was to offer the leadership to his widow.
But Sonia was in no mood for politics. She had been opposed to Indira Gandhi's decision to induct Rajiv into the Congress and when in 1984, he told her that he was going to accept the prime ministership, she begged him to refuse. "They will kill you," she said. "They will kill me anyway," he responded.
Now, her worst fears had come true. There was no way she was going to follow her husband into the world that had taken his life, just as it had taken his mother's. As Congressmen begged and pleaded, she first suggested vice-president Shankar Dayal Sharma as prime minister and then, when he turned the job down, advised the party to select the elderly Narasimha Rao, a man so evidently frail that he had refused to contest the election on grounds of ill-health.
As Rao settled into Race Course Road, Sonia withdrew from the political world.
"I went through a very bad patch emotionally after my husband's death," she told me in an interview in 1998. She concentrated on producing a picture book about Rajiv and worked hard for the Rajiv Gandhi Foundation.
This suited Rao just fine. He had, it soon emerged,
...She didn't want it said that a party her family had served went down because she thought she was too refined for it.
never liked Rajiv much anyway. He preferred to see himself as successor to Indira Gandhi, airbrushing the last seven years out of history. His aides made it clear that even if Sonia had played some role in his selection, Rao was now his own man, content to live by his wits and free of the shadow of dynasty.
Oddly enough, Sonia didn't seem to mind. She had no interest in politics, still saw it as the cause of the two greatest tragedies in her life, and didn't really care that, by 1995, she had become a political irrelevance, content to stick to a small circle of very close friends and to make virtually no public appearances.
My guess is that things would have remained that way had Sonia and Rao not clashed over the only thing that mattered to her. After Rajiv's assassination, Sonia became increasingly bitter about the government's cold-blooded decision to scale down his security. When the report of the Verma Commission concluded that Rajiv could have been saved had adequate security been provided, she framed the pages of the report, highlighted the significant bits and put them up on the walls of the Rajiv Gandhi Foundation.
The next step was to find out who was behind the assassination and why. She took an almost obsessive interest in the investigation and was familiar with the minute details of the case. It was not, she said, that she necessarily suspected a conspiracy; more that she felt that India had a duty to posterity to discover the complete truth about the assassination of a former prime minister.
Rao didn't see it that way.
http://www.outlookindia.com/full.asp?fodna...F%29&sid=1&pn=1
T. Narayan
PROFILE
The Quiet Italian
From a non-entity to a skilful manager of power and responsibility, the Gandhi bahu has come into her own
VIR SANGHVI on Sonia Gandhi
Think back if you can to that week in 1995 when the first issue of Outlook appeared. The big story of the dayâan Outlook exclusiveâwas that India's prime minister, Narasimha Rao, wrote dirty books in his spare time. The magazine had procured a manuscript of Narasimha Rao's novel and proceeded to carry the more salacious bits.
Narasimha Rao was embarrassed, the nation amused, and when the book finally did appear (as The Insider), the naughty passages had been excised. But even as Delhi's political circles giggled at the thought of the apparently erudite prime minister hitching up his dhoti and proceeding to churn out porn, nobody thought of the woman who had installed Rao at Race Course Road.
By 1995, Sonia Gandhi was something of a political non-entity.
Why did Sonia change her mind? Cynics say she couldn't see her fiefdom slipping away. But her own version...
In just four years, she had gone from being kingmaker to being regarded as a holdover from another era.
It could have been different, of course. In 1991, when Rajiv Gandhi was assassinated, the Congress party's Pavlovian reflex was to offer the leadership to his widow.
But Sonia was in no mood for politics. She had been opposed to Indira Gandhi's decision to induct Rajiv into the Congress and when in 1984, he told her that he was going to accept the prime ministership, she begged him to refuse. "They will kill you," she said. "They will kill me anyway," he responded.
Now, her worst fears had come true. There was no way she was going to follow her husband into the world that had taken his life, just as it had taken his mother's. As Congressmen begged and pleaded, she first suggested vice-president Shankar Dayal Sharma as prime minister and then, when he turned the job down, advised the party to select the elderly Narasimha Rao, a man so evidently frail that he had refused to contest the election on grounds of ill-health.
As Rao settled into Race Course Road, Sonia withdrew from the political world.
"I went through a very bad patch emotionally after my husband's death," she told me in an interview in 1998. She concentrated on producing a picture book about Rajiv and worked hard for the Rajiv Gandhi Foundation.
This suited Rao just fine. He had, it soon emerged,
...She didn't want it said that a party her family had served went down because she thought she was too refined for it.
never liked Rajiv much anyway. He preferred to see himself as successor to Indira Gandhi, airbrushing the last seven years out of history. His aides made it clear that even if Sonia had played some role in his selection, Rao was now his own man, content to live by his wits and free of the shadow of dynasty.
Oddly enough, Sonia didn't seem to mind. She had no interest in politics, still saw it as the cause of the two greatest tragedies in her life, and didn't really care that, by 1995, she had become a political irrelevance, content to stick to a small circle of very close friends and to make virtually no public appearances.
My guess is that things would have remained that way had Sonia and Rao not clashed over the only thing that mattered to her. After Rajiv's assassination, Sonia became increasingly bitter about the government's cold-blooded decision to scale down his security. When the report of the Verma Commission concluded that Rajiv could have been saved had adequate security been provided, she framed the pages of the report, highlighted the significant bits and put them up on the walls of the Rajiv Gandhi Foundation.
The next step was to find out who was behind the assassination and why. She took an almost obsessive interest in the investigation and was familiar with the minute details of the case. It was not, she said, that she necessarily suspected a conspiracy; more that she felt that India had a duty to posterity to discover the complete truth about the assassination of a former prime minister.
Rao didn't see it that way.