There's something in the Gandhi name. On the occasions it is invoked these days, it invariably raises deep, and sometimes extreme, emotions - both in the bearers of the hallowed surname and the world they come in contact with.
And there has been some commotion of late, all of a sudden, in the cool, placid waters of Gandhiana. First, the senseless commodification of the original Mahatma Gandhi in a petty, publicity seeking New York auction; then the appearance of his benign visage on African National Congress poll posters to woo Indian voters in South Africa. But if that was travesty, what followed must count as high treason, enough to send shivers down the spine of those who remember the man who gave the world the doctrine of non-violence.
A podgy, 28-year-old called Varun Gandhi - a fourth generation recipient of the Mahatma's name, but not by blood ties - has run an election campaign so vitriolic that it momentarily stunned even his hyperbolic, right-wing party. A sting video of his speeches at a rally in a remote north Indian constituency caught him threatening Muslims of the area in a language so derogatory and violent that it's difficult to be uttered in a civilized environment.
Suffice it to say that the audiovisual clip showed up references to circumcision, al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and a call for saza-e-maut - capital punishment - to be delivered wholesale. All this from a young great grandson of Jawaharlal Nehru, India's first prime minister from 1947 to 1964, and an icon of genteel liberalism.
First, a little background. Varun Gandhi comes from a branch estranged from the main line of the Nehru-Gandhi family - how the two names came to be a compound surname is itself testimony to the family's sure touch with big-ticket symbolism. Nehru's daughter, the redoubtable Indira who was premier from 1967 to 1977 and 1980 to 1984, had married a Parsi lawyer-politician named Feroze Shah Ghandy, no relation to the Mahatma. In an unlit passage of events illumined now only by arcane biographies, the name became identical with that of the genuine article. The story is that Gandhi was Indira's godfather, and he adopted and lent his name to the young lawyer to facilitate the inter-religious marriage.
This re-christening was at the core of the strange pull Indira Gandhi exerted over the rural Indian populace in her time. In the decades after independence, Mahatma Gandhi had been stripped of any real political value, to become a harmless canonized figure, the smiling Father of the Nation. And by tacit, magical implication - without it ever being stated - Indira became the Daughter of India, appropriating the value for her lineage for all time to come. The lineup includes her son Rajiv Gandhi, prime minister from 1984 to 1989, his Italian-born widow and current regent of the Congress party Sonia Gandhi, and their son Rahul Gandhi, now 38 and in apprenticeship for the top job.
Varun is Rahul's first cousin, born to Indira's other son Sanjay, who had a brief, meteoric political career in the 1970s. Before dying in a glider accident (some say it was no accident), Sanjay Gandhi had earned no mean notoriety with a brattish, swashbuckling and violent approach, especially during the infamous Emergency, and is generally credited with the "thuggification" of Indian politics.
It is this hugely flawed legacy of muscle-driven street politics, updated with Hindutva rhetoric, that the son - by playing, in part rabble-rouser, juvenile delinquent and ingenue - is seeking to reclaim. It's almost like a vile cartoon version of Korak, son of Tarzan, except that it could be very dangerous before a general election next month being fought on razor-thin margins.
A perturbed Election Commission (EC) of India agreed with that view. After Varun Gandhi's atrocious campaign video surfaced on television channels, with the chopping of hands as the refrain of his speech, the EC put aside its pressing poll duties to first get criminal cases registered against him and then severely censured him.
Worried that the hatespeak could inspire similar unbridled campaigning and kick up a spiral of communal violence between the Hindu and Muslim communities in the volatile state of Uttar Pradesh and elsewhere, it took the unprecedented step of advising the opposition Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) not to nominate him for the elections. "He does not deserve to be a candidate," the three-member poll panel noted.
This has now sparked another row on the legality of the EC's intervention. The BJP is challenging the commission's right to mentor it on who could and who could not be its candidate. To be sure, the EC cannot directly debar a candidate from elections unless he or she has been convicted of a certain grade of crime. Varun's case tests the limits of the EC's jurisdiction.
For one, the video is still technically in the realm of allegation - Varun has from the beginning stoutly defended himself, saying it has been tampered with. Anyway, prima facie, it can be said to violate only the model code of conduct, a quasi-legal directive. Serious action under this, like the countermanding of an election, is a rarity and a last resort - and the EC certainly is in a legal grey area if it takes recourse to moral blandishments to tell a party to drop a candidate.
Now, the Muslim vote matters even to the BJP - keen as it is to position itself in the "center" - and certainly to its many allies. A marauding speechmaker is hardly the recipe for a party mainstreaming itself. Appropriately, the BJP took some time to recover from its initial, nervous flip-flop, but has now decided not to flinch from backing Varun, deploying its legal expertise to fight back.
Emboldened, Varun countered the EC decision, "They have acted in haste, displaying a political bias," he said, implying the hand of the ruling Congress in the EC's censure. Also, he was not allowed to defend himself, Varun added, calling himself the victim of a pre-judged verdict. He claims the video has been "doctored, distorted and morphed". Sources close to him say he and his lawyers have detected 16 editing cuts. However, the EC is having none of this. Even with the alleged interpolations, the video has enough to prove Varun was on a Hindutva high, rousing his audience with communally surcharged slogans and crude innuendo.
To politically complicate matters, Varun's charismatic cousin Priyanka Gandhi virtually called Varun a blot on the Gandhi name - sneaking in a bit of Hindu symbolism herself. In the midst of electioneering for her mother Sonia and brother Rahul's constituencies in Uttar Pradesh, she strategically placed herself before a temple with a garland of red hibiscus (used in prayers for Kali, the goddess of fearsome aspect), she advised her "misguided" younger cousin to read the Bhagavad Gita instead of using the Hindu philosophical text to invoke hatred among communities.
Varun, getting it from all sides, staunchly upholds his Hindu identity (the irony is, he is half-Sikh and a quarter Parsi), leaving little doubt about his indoctrination by the right-wing party he joined out of sheer compulsion. Varun's side of the family has long been disowned by the Congress - to cut a long story short, his mother Maneka "walked out" on Indira with tiny Varun in tow after her husband's glider-crash death. It was political ambition that drove a wedge in the family. Although controversial, Sanjay Gandhi was known to be Indira's favorite, but after his untimely death she chose to project the apolitical Rajiv - not Sanjay's widow - as her successor.
Having lost his father, Varun was fully delinked from the family holdings - especially the Congress party - after Maneka literally forced him to hobnob with the ideological opposite pole, the BJP. It was the party Maneka aligned with in her attempt to chart out a separate political identity, distinct from the Nehru-Gandhis. The consequences could not have been more ironical - Varun is now steeped in a political view that sustains itself by negating the idea of India as conceived by Mahatma Gandhi and shaped by, among others, his own great grandfather Nehru.
If Gandhi had adopted Varun's Parsi grandfather Feroze Shah to help him marry Nehru's young and beautiful daughter Indira, Nehru had adopted secularism with a near-religious fervor so as to refute arch-rival Mohammed Ali Jinnah's two-nation theory. Nearly 75 years later, Varun seems to have made a mockery of both.
From calling his nearest rival in the Pilibhit constituency (where a defiant BJP has retained him as the candidate) "Osama Bin Laden", threatening to chop off the hands of Muslims and making jokes out of their names, Varun has ran amok. In his debutante's eagerness to win from a constituency he has inherited from his mother Maneka, he has blurred the distinctions between what is constitutionally acceptable and what is not. Political observers say he could have won the seat on the strength of the work his mother has done in Pilibhit without denigrating himself and Indian elections in the process.
For many who know Varun from his days in the London School of Economics and later as a budding poet, this appears to be a Kafkaesque metamorphosis. A close friend of his insists the soft-spoken, thin-voiced boy is incapable of uttering such crude language befitting a seasoned right-wing rabble-rouser. But, something fits: Varun seems to have consciously lifted portions from a controversial speech of his father Sanjay Gandhi, which had made the front pages during the Emergency in the mid-1970s, around the time he became known for undertaking forceful sterilization of Muslim men as a method of family planning. Varun, in one of the tapes submitted to the Election Commission, repeats the sterilization threat.
Much like the pathetic Oswald Alving in Henrik Ibsen's 1881 play Ghosts, the 28-year-old Varun seems to be weighed down by the burden of inheritance - coping with the worst possible self-inflicted wound, and half loving the attention. As Ibsen's play had shown, the ghosts of history have strange ways of catching up with you.
Now that he has decisively "outed' in his enthusiasm to make it to parliament, Google registers over 1,00,000 hits on Varun and Sanjay Gandhi, with everyone - from new-age blogger to age-old political analyst - making the father-son comparison. The less-than-palatable legacy of the Emergency, to which ironically BJP leaders then stood steadfastly opposed, stands revived.
Clearly, Varun's trips to the Nagpur HQ of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh - the BJP's mother organization - have had its impact on the young mind. The BJP's careful, qualified endorsement of his concocted communal rage suggests he may not be entirely without godfathers in the saffron fold. For one who gave the impression of being a hopelessly lost young man, spending much of the past four years praising his powerful, estranged aunt Sonia and banging his head at the BJP headquarters for a ticket to parliament, the script is crackling into life. His "arrival" also comes with a certificate from another extreme right-wing leader, Bal Thackeray of the Shiv Sena.
"Varun has spoken the truth. We like this Gandhi," Thackeray wrote in his party's mouthpiece, Saamna. This leaves no scope for escape for the young Varun - politically, he has been "framed" in a certain cast. If the BJP tapped the young mind, Thackeray has trapped him in his past. "In Varun," he gushingly wrote, "one gets an impression that Sanjay Gandhi has had a rebirth. When Varun speaks, we get an impression that Sanjay Gandhi is speaking." Thackeray has been barred from contesting elections for inciting communal passions in a similar manner in the 1990s.
It was said the induction of new-age candidates in the political fray would bring an end to all the ills afflicting the Indian political system. From the day the elections were announced, reams have been written on the 170 million young voters and the young politicos who together will determine the fate of the polity and restore pristine values.
Alas, all this muck has hit the fan thanks to the alleged indiscretion of one of the young candidates. And a Gandhi to boot.
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