The reporters outside Parliament met an unusually belligerentSonia Gandhi on Friday when the Congress president, in a rare display of aggression, accused External Affairs MinisterSushma Swaraj of theatrics for her emotional explanation on helping Lalit Modi’s wife obtain a travel document from the British government. “Would Sonia Gandhi have left her to die?” Sushma had asked.
“Sushmaji is an expert in theatrics,” Sonia slammed that remark on Friday morning, adding she may have helped the ailing lady but not by breaking the law. “No, Soniaji would not have done the same,” countered her son and Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi, accusing Sushma of taking money from the Modi family . The exact word Rahul used was “stealing”.
Is there something about the Gandhis’ anger when it comes to Sushma Swaraj? Is it more than just political opposition that rattled Sonia on Friday? From the India Today Archive: Birth pangs
Well, there might be. And asking this question means going a decade back and revisiting what followed the Congress’s stunning victory in the 2004 Lok Sabha elections under the leadership of Sonia Gandhi. Her party wanted her to become the country’s prime minister while her reluctance was haunted by the assassination of two former prime ministers in the family – her husband Rajiv Gandhi in 1991 and her mother-in-law Indira Gandhi in 1984.
In a number of memoirs since that victory, insiders have written about the massive internal conflict that Sonia went through in deciding whether she should take up the position. Meanwhile, it was the BJP’s Sushma Swaraj – nursing a five-year-old wound over her defeat by Sonia from the Congress bastion of Bellary in Karnataka – who led an infamous protest against any possibility of the Congress chief becoming the prime minister.
In a heavily-publicised and emotionally-charged episode, the then 52-year-old BJP leader threatened to shave her head, don a white saree and eat gram all her life if the Italian-born Sonia became the prime minister. The protest having a highly regressive reference to a lifetime of mourning by a Hindu widow as prescribed in the religious scriptures was not lost on her critics.
Though Sonia never reacted to Sushma’s resistance, in an act hailed as a rare gesture by a mainstream politician, she ignored the clamour within her party and never became the prime minister, offering the post instead to economist-turned-politician Manmohan Singh, who stayed in the office for a decade, until he was ousted by Narendra Modi in 2014. A famous magazine called her a saint for rejecting the coveted post, most powerful in a parliamentary democracy, while her stature as a politician riding on the 2004 victory rose considerably.
A 33-year-old greenhorn MP, Rahul, had then watched her mother transition from a reluctant politician to the leader of the ruling party at the Centre. The question is: is it really unfair to ask if the “saint” Sonia had that controversial episode from 2004 in mind when she called Sushma an expert in theatrics?