Living Politics: What India has taught me

Excerpts from the Nexus Lecture delivered by Congress President and UPA Chairperson Sonia Gandhi at the Nexus Institute, the Hague last week.

MY COUNTRY: I was born in Europe, but was soon claimed by another world more diverse and more ancient. Mine was a middle-class family from a provincial town in the north of Italy.

I first met Rajiv when I was enroled in a language school in Cambridge. It was very soon evident to both of us that we would spend our lives together. Two years later, I came to India to marry him. That was almost forty years ago. Not in my wildest dreams could I have imagined then the course my destiny would take.

Though his mother Indira Gandhi headed the government, and we lived in the Prime Minister’s house, the life that we made together was essentially private. Yet it was a life permeated by the turbulence of politics.

Natural leader

My mother-in-law was regarded as a strong, rather formidable personality. Indeed, she had the calm authority of a natural leader.

She had come a long way from the shy and agonised young woman she had been. But I knew her also as a sensitive, intuitive person with a love for the arts and for the conservation of nature, a sense of humour and the ability to laugh at herself.

Over the years we drew closer together. She shared her experiences about her personal life, her loneliness as a child with her mother ailing and her father imprisoned, of her involvement from her childhood in the freedom movement, of the values that took shape in those formative years. I watched her deal with crises and triumphs.

My first political classroom thus echoed to momentous unfolding events. Two stand out in my memory. The first was the 1971 crisis which transformed Mrs Gandhi into a statesman.

Following a crackdown by the Pakistan military in what was then East Pakistan, more than 10 million refugees flooded into India from across the border that is, about two-thirds of today’s population of the Netherlands.

Another memory I have of her as a political leader is of her steely determination to raise India out of the cycle of famine and dependency on imports of foodgrains. She took tough decisions which laid the foundations of the Green Revolution that transformed our economy.

Political twists

With all the political twists and reversals that formed the background of our first thirteen years of marriage, our domestic life had remained relatively tranquil. Then suddenly our world was devastated by a succession of tragedies.

In June 1980, my husband’s only brother died in an air-crash. My mother-in-law was shattered. Her younger son had been active in public life. She now turned to my husband for support.

He was tormented by the choice he had to make, between protecting the life he had chosen and stepping forward to his mother’s side when she needed him most.

Months elapsed before I could bring myself to accept that if he felt such a strong sense of duty to his mother, I would stand by his decision. In 1981 he was elected to Parliament.

Four years later came the event that shook our nation and forever altered the destiny of our family. My mother-in-law, the pivot of our lives, was assassinated by her own bodyguards in our home.

Within hours of her death, the Congress party asked my husband to take over the leadership of the party and government. Even as I pleaded with him not to accept, I realised that he had no option.

One month later, he led the Congress Party to a landslide victory in the General Elections. He was 40 years old when he became Prime Minister.

I accompanied Rajiv on his travels to the remotest and poorest parts of the country. We were welcomed into people’s huts and homes. They opened their hearts to him, speaking of their sufferings, as well as their hopes and aspirations.

I came to understand and share his feelings for them, to see what it was that drove him to work as he did with so much energy, enthusiasm and attention to detail. But the time given to him by Fate was all too short.

My husband remained Prime Minister for five years. Soon after came the moment I had been dreading since the trauma of my mother-in-law’s death. On May 21, 1991, while campaigning in the national elections, he was assassinated by terrorists.

The Congress Party asked me to become its leader in his place; I declined, instinctively recoiling from a political milieu that had so devastated my life and that of my children.

Turbulence

For the next several years I withdrew into myself. I drew comfort and strength from the thousands of people who shared our grief, cherished my husband’s memory, and offered my children and me their love and their support. We set up a foundation to take forward some of the initiatives closest to his heart.

The years that followed saw change and turbulence in India. The Congress Party was being buffeted by these currents.

This was the party that had fought for India’s independence and nurtured its infant democracy till it became a robust institution. It now found itself in the midst of uncertainty and turmoil. In 1996 it lost the national elections.

Could I stand aside and watch as the forces of bigotry continued in their campaigns to spread division and discord? Could I ignore my own commitment to the values and principles of the family I had married into, values and principles for which they lived and died?

Could I betray that legacy and turn away from it? I knew my own limitations, but I could no longer stand aside. Such were the circumstances under which the life of politics chose me.

At times people refer to the Nehru-Gandhi ‘dynasty’. What this word fails to signify is two crucial elements: one is the sovereignty of the people.

Through the democratic process, they have repeatedly vested their expectations in one or another member, and equally on other occasions, they have chosen to withdraw their support.

The other essential factor, one that lies at the heart of this relationship, is not the exercise of power but the affirmation of a sacred trust.

It is this love and faith that imposes its own responsibility and obligations, that has inspired even a reluctant politician such as myself to enter the public domain.

Success in the 2004 national elections came after six years of political work. I was unanimously elected as my party’s leader in Parliament.

The next step was to form the government. But I always knew in my heart that if I ever found myself in that position, I would decline the post of Prime Minister of India. I have often been asked why I turned it down.

In trying to explain that choice to my colleagues in the party, I described it as dictated by my “inner voice.”

Wisest guide

Indeed, that voice has been my wisest guide in political life. The plain fact is that power for itself has never held any attraction for me.

My aim in politics has always been to do whatever I can in my own way to defend the secular, democratic foundations of our country, and to address the concerns and aspirations of the many whose voice often remains unheard.

Practical considerations aside, I have tried to see that, as far as possible, the significant political decisions of my life flow out of the inner experience of emotion and belief, and of the need to be true to myself.

The India to which I belong can aptly be likened to a mosaic in which each element retains its distinct identity but as part of a unified whole.

No doubt it is flawed by cracks and fissures, some old and some new. Yet, it holds together with unmatched beauty because of our people’s deeply ingrained commitment to it.

Indeed, it can be difficult to comprehend the great mosaic that is India which is home to no fewer than 22 major languages, more than 400 dialects and 4,635 distinct communities.

It is a land that has given rise to four of the world’s major religions. It is home to the world’s second largest Muslim population. It welcomed Christianity long before Europe embraced it.

It offered refuge to people fleeing from religious persecution, whether they be Jews or Zoroastrians. It is a land comprising different ecological and cultural regions, each with its own distinctive history.

Against all odds, our country has remained united and moved ahead. In a world where nations are increasingly founded on the basis of common faith and common language, as we have seen in many of the new countries in Europe, the Indian experiment is a glorious example that unity can also be based on the values of pluralism and multiculturalism.

The driving spirit of our country is its liberal and inclusive ethos. India has never sought uniformity or homogeneity. It seeks to integrate, rather than assimilate.

Indira Gandhi had once memorably remarked that everything said of India, and its opposite, are equally true. This is a land of both magnificent diversities and painful contrasts, a land where poverty and prosperity co-exist, where perpetual struggles co-habit with burgeoning opportunities.

This is a land where tradition and modernity go together, where science and spirituality intermingle. What appear as contradictions to the external world, are seen by us as two sides of the same coin.

My life in India has been one of continuous learning. But being a direct participant in the rough and tumble of politics has been a whole new process of discovery. I am convinced that India can flourish only as a centrist democracy.

Over half a century of elections and democratic governance have clearly demonstrated that no government can last if it is seen to pursue narrow interests and is insensitive to the concerns of all sections of our society.

There are some who argue that faster growth will in the long run solve problems of social inequality and poverty and narrow the gap between rich and the poor.

This argument has been made in the context of other economies as well, including European ones where migrant communities are yet to be integrated fully. People constantly demand that the government respond to their basic needs.

Politics may be the art of the possible, but it must be anchored in truth. In India, we are fortunate to have the example of Mahatma Gandhi so clearly before us: a visionary who shunned expedient strategies, who frequently chose the most difficult way because it was the right way. For him, the means had to be worthy of the ends.

Goals

Mindful of this history, I believe that politics must have at its heart one guiding principle — to achieve its goals through just and ethical means. It is my conviction that coercion, expediency and the cynical manipulation of popular sentiment and public opinion to attain one’s ends, no matter how worthy they are, can never be justified.

It is not easy, in the space of a single lecture, to distil all that India has taught me. It has taught me above all else that politics is not just the art of the possible; it can also be the art of the impossible.

Politics everywhere is an exacting mistress, nowhere more so than in India, with its multiplicity of political parties and ideologies pulling in different directions.

Its sheer size, diversity and variety, the huge development tasks it is undertaking in a framework of open democracy, the growing aspirations of over a billion people, all make it a formidable mission.

The exuberance and vitality of our people, especially our youth, gives me the confidence that India will continue to push the boundaries of the possible, for its own well-being and for that of the world.

My journey from the placid backwaters of a contented domestic life to the maelstrom of public life has not been an easy one. Yet, despite its sorrows and difficulties, I have found in my new existence both fulfilment and a larger sense of purpose.

The family to which I first pledged my fidelity was in the confines of a home. Today my loyalty embraces a wider family India, my country, whose people have so generously welcomed me to become one of them.

Courtesy - Outlook