The People’s Princess?

By M H Ahssan

Once upon a time there was a young woman who walked with kings but had the common touch. She was easy on the eye, had money, charitable instincts and delighted in being a mother. That was Diana, the late Princess of Wales. And you thought we were talking about Priyanka Vadra...

For years, she was seen as inheritor of the family crown. But Priyanka Gandhi Vadra has made it known that she would rather make cupcakes for her children than make political hay of her lineage.

Strange in a country that regards anyone bearing the Gandhi name as royalty? No, says Rizwan Qaiser of the department of history, Jamia Millia Islamia University, who has tracked Priyanka’s career for years. “She walks with kings and yet keeps in touch with the common people,” he says. Does that make her a “people’s princess” a la Princess Diana?

Image management expert Dilip Cherian says, “Diana’s focus was to make the monarchy more charity-oriented but Priyanka is a ‘people’s princess’ in a more political way. While Diana’s focus was distinctly outside the monarchy, Priyanka's focus is out and out political.”

Qaiser adds that “Diana was into charity without being political. Priyanka is into hard politcs without seeking power. They belong to different worlds, different contexts.”

But it is undeniable that Priyanka’s refusal to join active politics has added to media and public interest. Qaiser points out that “she has personal qualities that attract media attention, apart from her looks and resemblance to Indira Gandhi. She also tends to appear unconcerned about politics and that creates a mystery about her that keeps them guessing.”

Add to that the paradox of being Priyanka, “in politics and yet in a state of denial. It worked like magic for Mahatma Gandhi,” says Qaiser. The Congress party is seen to have realized the public response Priyanka evoked as she appeared in Rae Bareli and Amethi wearing Indira Gandhi’s saris. “She’s extremely articulate and very measured for her age. She holds a lot of potential for the Congress in her own right and not just as Rajiv Gandhi’s daughter,” says Qaiser.

But Cherian sees her as playing second fiddle right now. “She’s the archetypal image of one playing a supporting role and she does it impeccably. Her two props include, first, confining herself to the two constituencies in UP and second, when she’s there, harking back to the past, drawing upon the image of Indira Gandhi and providing a link to the previous generation.” That’s seems a long way off from the girl who wore “Janpath ke kapde”, remembers Kamal Aggarwal, a former Hindi professor from Delhi’s Jesus and Mary College, where Priyanka studied in the early 1990s. “She was a normal, well-behaved girl, with no pretense, sitting in the college canteen like everyone else, though her securitymen would get paranoid.”

Priyanka recently said she would be an ordinary person but for her family name. Qaiser see the confession as a sign that she is “conscious of what capacity she has while chatting with the media. She knows what works.”