“We are unlikely to see anything so gross even in dictatorships such as North Korea,” fumed then Indian Express columnist A Surya Prakash in a 2009 rant aimed at the ubiquity of the Nehru-Gandhi brand. At the time, 450 central and state government programmes, projects and national and state level institutions had been baptised in the name of the Father, Daughter, and the Holy Grandson in what Prakash described as a “blatant attempt to package and market government programmes run on public money as munificent offerings from a single family.”
His unhappiness was unexpectedly shared by the Cabinet Secretary KM Chandrashekhar who issued a cease and desist notice to Central ministers: “A number of programmes under execution in the country are named after leaders, particularly Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi, the former prime ministers. The practice has become widespread and indiscriminate. “The reason for concern: brand dilution. The penchant of sycophantic state leaders to slap on the Gandhi moniker on every potholed road, failed drinking water scheme, and educational institution of dubious repute was proving hazardous to the First Family name. The Rajiv Gandhi Gramin Vikas Yojana is all very well, but a Rajiv Gandhi creche, not so much.
That was four years ago, when both the UPA and the First Family were still flying high. In 2013, the Nehru-Gandhi brand is running on empty, and the overkill now serves as a unwelcome reminder of the same. What is striking today, Santosh Desai argues in the Times of India, is not the ubiquity of the name but “how ineffective these attempts to build the family brand has been in spite of all the investment that backs it.”
Naming institutions or running ads is a sign of power, not significance. Memory by itself has no value if it contains nothing inside; India is full of M G Roads without the Mahatma anywhere in sight. It is truly ironical that too much remembrance, most of it shallow and insincere has made the Nehru-Gandhi brand appear as an interloper into history rather than as a legitimate resident. The family name is everywhere, but there is a little sense of the meaning that the name provides. The current disenchantment with the government and the dynasty is also rubbing off retrospectively on its earlier members.
If this is so, the onus of blame rests undoubtedly on the current inheritors of the dynastic mantle, Sonia and Rahul Gandhi. But let’s note first that they’ve received great assistance from at least two other factors. There is the contribution of the ferocious anti-Sonia brigade led by Modi/BJP supporters and free market cheerleaders. As former Outlook editor Vinod Mehta writes:
Her critics, starting from Jagdish Bhagwati (will the Nobel committee quickly give him the prize Amartya Sen got so that he can resume normal work?) and his domestic followers, want us to believe that the mismanagement of Team Manmohan is directly attributable to the lady in 10, Janpath. She pulls the strings to promote her crazy schemes and the PM capitulates leaving behind all the good economics he learnt at Oxbridge…
Every problem the republic faces, from resuming talks with Pakistan to the fiscal deficit, is all the fault of the jholawallahs in the NAC and her. For the Davoswallahs then, it is open season on Sonia Gandhi and the politics she represents. Whatever the validity of the charges made by the Davoswallahs, I have not in the last ten years at least, witnessed one individual being subjected to this kind of concerted assault. Politicians of all hues make blunders — the dismal science can trip up the best and the brightest. However, this brutal targeting of one politician is unprecedented.
This vituperative rage — while disquieting — is also a sign of a rapidly changing socio-economic milieu which has made us less feudal as a society, in spirit if not in fact. Not everyone hates Sonia Gandhi, or holds as low an opinion of her policies or her character as her over-loud critics. But even the poorest among us are less grateful for those goodies distributed in the name of aristocratic noblesse oblige, Indira Awas Yojana, be damned. Even the Oliver Twists in family fiefdoms like Amethi and Rae Barreily now ask for more.
Neither social change nor oppositional rage would be sufficient to dent a dynastic brand built on the shoulders of three prime ministers — and very different ones, at that. Where Nehru epitomised a high-minded (and many argue, blinkered) socialism, the daughter evokes the memory of untrammeled power. Rajiv cuts, in comparison, a far paler figure, notable only for his charm, youth and enthusiasm for change. Yet what they shared was a hallowed legitimacy of authority, the kind which allowed Indira Gandhi to return to power despite having engineered the nation’s dalliance with dictatorship.
This then is what Sonia & Son have destroyed. Desai writes, “The Nehru-Gandhi label offers an unwitting mirror to the Indian public, where it is increasingly able to see the absurdity of its infatuation with a family brand” — and also the absurdity of their self-appointed right to secure power for their children.
Whatever good Sonia achieved in leading her party to victory in two national elections, in playing the social conscience of the UPA government has been entirely undone by her maternal ambition. Every woe of UPA II — corruption scandals, eroding governance, flailing economy — can be traced to this single-minded and damaging focus on the ascension of Rahul. All the more damaging given Rahul’s blithe refusal to take responsibility of the immense destruction wreaked in his cause.
The Nehru-Gandhi brand is now an empty marker of presumptuous privilege. A privilege that will one day disappear leaving behind little more than a name dangling off an airport, road, or park.
