Ba, Beti aur Bahu

"I will contest from Rae Bareli and am not prepared to get beaten by the opposition campaign against me." – Sonia Gandhi
Uma Bharti is to put up a candidate against Sonia in Rae Bareli; defeating her is a "national issue" for

which she has sought the support of the BJP that has expelled her.

Mother India is watching silently as one more tamasha unfolds.

There is a great deal of cynicism about Sonia Gandhi’s resignation from the National Advisory Council on the ‘office of profit’* issue and fresh attempt to re-contest the election. The same scepticism is not being expressed regarding Uma Bharti.

The fact is that both women are playing games with their respective parties.

Sonia resigned without consulting her allies or party members.
Uma, after being expelled from the BJP, just decided she wanted to start her own party.

Uma Bharti may not shake Sonia Gandhi’s citadel, but she has more aces up her sleeve than the ‘ghulams’ Ms. Gandhi has in her durbar.

It’s no sacrifice

Sonia thunders, "Today every stone is being thrown at me, every arrow shot at me and every bullet fired at me."

And she lives to tell the tale? What happens is a bit simpler than that. Jaya Bachchan is asked to resign from the Rajya Sabha because of some office of profit she holds; it is clearly a small little feud and Mrs. Bachchan is not a biggie in politics for anyone to notice, except of course the family loyalist Amar Singh. So, he starts a campaign to tell the world that even Soniaji heads some organisation that makes money.

Soniaji calls a Parliamentary meeting – no, not the real one but the one that comprises her children -- and takes the decision to quit her post. Her backup plan, Rahul, is there to stand behind mummy.

Mummy then goes to Rae Bareili to check on the mummification. "I have emotional bonds with Rae Bareili stretching over five generations right from the days of Motilal Nehru. I have come here like one who would like to share his feelings with his own family members," she says.

“Sonia tumhara yeh balidaan, yaad karega Hindustan,”choruses the crowd. They do not even know she has resigned!

Uma Bharti’s sacrifice does not need too many emotional outbursts. She is dressed the part. As a sanyasin in Indian politics it is assumed that having given up material and physical pleasures the person is channelising energy towards more constructive activity. She herself admitted that this is an advantage because there are not too many things to distract her, and it brings clarity of thought.

Sonia Gandhi too could have used this renunciation card. But between trick and treat, she chose treat.

Married to and harried by The Mob?

"My family has always been on the target of the opposition -- be it Jawaharlal Nehru, Indira Gandhi or Rajiv Gandhi -- each one was targeted with equal vehemence. They were not merely prime ministers but great leaders, therefore unmindful of the opposition they continued to serve the nation."

While Nehru and IG were clearly power-hungry politicians, let us get this clear: Both, Mrs. Indira Gandhi’s and Rajiv’s sacrifices were really about dying due to unfortunate circumstances. Their governments fell clearly because of dastardly/corrupt acts on their part.

If Sonia wants to regurgitate history, the least she can do is to choose it well. As this was an ‘office of profit’ issue, she should have steered clear of the Family. The courts may have cleared Rajiv of some cases, but it is a known fact that the Congress took the concept of ‘paisa vasool’ to an altogether new dimension.

Besides, when she starts out declaiming, "Today they are out to blame Sonia Gandhi for everything under the sun -- even if it were thunder, rain or lightning – none other than Sonia Gandhi is to blame" does the irony of farmers’ suicides not hit her?

Sonia Gandhi is trapped between living fossilised dreams and not being able to innovate, for she is a suspect candidate.

Uma Bharti has no family ties she can flaunt. “Hanuman is my elder brother,” she states. That is very smart. Now, anyone who wants to either be a Ram avatar or build a Ram temple or speak up for Lord Ram will have to deal with this ‘chaste’ Sita.

Instead of quietly enjoying the verdant environs of the banwaas, Uma Bharti has chosen to test her own mettle. She will walk on a bed of burning coals and perform her own agni pariksha. And for that she is opting for a religious symbol for her proposed new party -- either the sun or Nandi the bull, which was the mascot of Lord Shiva, the destroyer. After all, she has stated categorically that her “enemy number one” is the BJP.

Only a fool would believe her.

She was doing a ‘Walk the Talk’ (a TV programme) the other day and she told the interviewer that it was the second-rung leadership that was the problem; she had said that to Vajpayee and Advani. She stood there, her orange robes fluttering in the breeze, with the temple as the backdrop facing the calm river. “I am saying this standing near the Narmada. I won’t lie.”

Gosh, this sounded like a scene from some ‘Ganga ki Saugandh’ film.

Uma Bharti is putting on the loner act for only one reason – to save the BJP’s top rung. Her favourite leaders remain Advaniji and Atalji. They are her godfathers. And she is speaking their language. She is under their spell. They are her Svengalis.

A Svengali is defined as “one who attempts, usually with evil intentions, to persuade or force another to do his bidding”. I prefer the layers of George du Maurier’s novel where his protagonist, Trilby, transforms into Svengali’s “hypno-tool”. As his assistant Gecko analyses, “...I will tell you a secret. There were two Trilbys. There was the Trilby you knew...But all at once—pr-r-r-out! presto! augenblick!...with one wave of his hand over her—with one look of his eye—with a word—Svengali could turn her into the other Trilby, his Trilby, and make her do whatever he liked...you might have run a red-hot needle into her and she would not have felt it...”

The real loner here is Sonia. Her godfathers are ghosts.

Are both of them “mind-controlled victims”?

Are all Samsons bald?

If they are being used or forced to echo old thoughts, then they have learned to play the coy feminine role well. At a time when most women in ‘tough’ positions are accused of mimicking men (remember the comment about how white women of the working class were used to "pussy whip" prisoners at Abu Ghraib?), from the Iron lady to Ms. Virgin Ironpants, both Uma and Sonia have demasculinised themselves. While talking about stree shakti, what they are really doing is pretending they have been wronged.

Of course, politics for Uma Bharti is not just a playground for suppressed emotions; it is a serious arena for catharsis. She may become extremely powerful but the tragedy is that like most before her, she has become crabby, spoilt and ends up elevating the subspecies that she claims to have disowned.

She may not be enshrined in the Indian Constitution as the sexy sanyasin and she may publicly not endorse such epithets, but the lady knows coquetry as much as she is aware of her other talents. Her words are the equivalent of the fluttering of lashes and her pauses have as much significance as a woman wetting her lips before uttering another sigh.

She is Delilah. Like the Biblical character, she knows the secret of Samson/Hindutva’s strength. Her fake attempts to kill him/it only serve to reinstate and reinforce her identity.

Sonia Gandhi needs just one strand of the precious Samson hair to forge a link. So, what kind of a bahu was she?

One would never suspect that Sonia, poised and in command, would ever give in to tantrums, but she often did. For a household that laid a premium on maintaining a facade (Indira did not divorce Feroze Gandhi) the threat of a bahu to go back ’home’ was lethal. Besides, Sonia ruled in other subtle ways -- her kind of food was cooked, her family members made their money from the India connection, her sisters even lived in Delhi, she retained her Italian citizenship for a long time.

And the moment she realised that Maneka, her sister-in-law, was getting politically savvy, Sonia did what everyone insisted she hated -- pushed her husband in the lap of politics and his mother. She may have genuinely hated the brutishness of politics, but Rajiv would surely have been secretly pleased that she gave him back his mother. It was way past competition time for the two women. Sonia was too well-ensconced to be worried about that and Indira wanted not just to ensure a fiefdom, but also a yes-man who would not obviously appear to be one.

The genesis of Sonia as politician started from there.

Where is the ideology?

Most women in subcontinental politics are forced into the mother role, given the nature of the men in it. This becomes their credo. While male politicians bay for blood, women in the profession lovingly collect and display congealed globules.

Uma and Sonia have inherited beliefs. When asked what her ideology was, Uma Bharti had said, “To serve people.” Her new party will have the word “Bharatiya” in it. This is not about Bharat, but continuing the BJP legacy. The RSS is with her and she is merely working on a parallel track to widen the Hindutva scope. At the same time, she is extracting all she can for her “tapasya”.

While she shamelessly markets her sacrifice, like a typical beti in her parents’ house threatened by the arrival of a bahu, she had said that Sonia Gandhi rejecting the prime ministership was, “not a sacrifice, but a ruse ... for wielding the actual power”.

Modern-day czarinas are not born into royalty, but their rule is so regal simply because they have perfected the art of looking down their noses.

Indira Gandhi was such an empress, but she came with a double baggage -- a populist father and a populist son. Nationalising banks and declaring Emergency were both insecure acts. She did not quite know whether she ought to continue to be Papa’s little princess with the Swiss finishing school demeanour or the dominatrix-matriarch fiercely protective of everything around her and, as a consequence, her own position.

Sonia Gandhi has successfully combined the roles of empress and hen. With utter disdain for propriety she goes about clearing the way for the continuance of the dynasty. This is her ideology – eat it or lump it.

She knows that even if her being ‘different’ is sought to isolate her it could still work to her advantage. After all, the best view you can get of murky waters and distant shores is from an island.