Who is the fairest of them all?
Revisiting Sonia Gandhi
You know international political reporting has reached an all-time low when coverage of election results in the world’s largest democracy is reduced to a story about one person.In typical Bollywood movie irony, some 600 million people excercising their democratic right to vote got lost in the soft-focus close-up coverage of Sonia Gandhi, her foreign birth, and the Indian National Congress (INC) party’s self-proclaimed shift away from communal politics.
‘Communalism’ is the word applied in South Asia to inter-religious and racial conflict and violence. Since the British left in 1947, it has repeatedly ravaged parts of the country or entire communities for a series of complex contemporary and historical reasons.
I heard of only one Canadian journalist acknowledging his ignorance of Indian politics, and so Canadian reporting truly reverberated with memory loss of this and other significant truths about the country,with one exception.At least most journalists pointed out that Mohandas Gandhi—the Mahatma—is no relation to the Nehru-Gandhi clan.
Canadian coverage predictably supported Mrs.Gandhi’s assertion she is ‘Indian’—not ‘Italian’. Tossed under the shroud of Western political correctness were the realities of present-day India. Post the invasion of Iraq or the war on Afghanistan—to name just two places graced by Western efforts to spread democracy—the appalling irony of Western media proclaiming the ethical standard to judge a political party’s choice of leader in a sovereign third world democracy was rather lost on Western journalists, including Canadians. The other great irony surely is this: will any one reading this live to see, say, a black African-born Muslim woman, a naturalized Canadian, become prime minister of Canada? And what will Canadian journalists have to say about that?
But back to Sonia. She is not the first foreign born and ethnically non-Indian woman to be the president of the INC.Indeed both Annie Besant and Nellie Sengupta, freedom fighters in the movement to liberate India from British colonial rule, are former presidents.
So who really cared about Sonia’s citizenship (sought a long fifteen years after she married Rajiv)? Only the Hindhu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and even then, only to use as a weapon in its reactionary arsenal against her. What actually might have mattered was Sonia Gandhi’s place in the Nehru-Gandhi mythology and the INC’s history. Coming from a well-heeled Italian family and marrying into a well-heeled Indian one in 1968, what could she really know about life for Indian people, the vast majority of whom are neither upper nor middle class? But Sonia certainly does not lack political acumen. Through her own spinning, she worked the situation so that the Western press in particular focused on her fate—one ethnic European—as opposed to that of millions of largely poor ethnic Indians who elected her party. Who says colonialism is dead?
Yes, the election results were clearly a protest vote against the reactionary politics of the BJP. From the outset an extreme right-wing party that allied itself with the most fundamentalist Hindhu elements, the BJP has allegedly been directly involved in numerous situations where communal violence against religious minorities—particularly Muslims and Christians—has engulfed entire communities and regions. The Babri Masji mosque debacle and subsequent massacres that saw thousands of Muslims killed, as well as the communal riots in Gujarat, are just two examples that jump out. Considering the INC has governed India for all but about ten years since partition in 1947, the BJP has left an indelible stain after coming into office in 1998.
But subsequent to the death of Jawaharlal Nehru, the country’s first prime minister and INC leader, the party has its own troubled human rights record. During Nehru’s daughter’s first prime ministership, Indira Gandhi declared a state of emergency during which widespread repression, including mass forced sterilization, the curtailing of constitutional rights, and press censorship were the order of the day. Indira Gandhi repeatedly used the army against minorities and separatist movements, in 1984 using it to invade the Sikh’s holiest shrine in Amritsar, killing thousands of people. The armed forces were deployed by Rajiv Gandhi against Tamil separatists in southern India and Sri Lanka.
International human rights groups including Amnesty International loudly declaimed these situations, including the mass disappearances of young Sikh men in the 1980s.
Indeed it’s widely believed that Indira Gandhi and her son Rajiv’s assassinations came as a result of their policies—the former was murdered by her own Sikh bodyguards in 1984. That assassination led to a communal backlash against Sikhs with thousands brutally murdered and the authorities doing nothing to stop it.
When I visited the country in 1991 days after Rajiv’s assasination by a suicide bomber, it was fascinating to read all the speculation about the young woman responsible. Interestingly, many columnists speculated that she was one of thousands of women allegedly raped by Indian soldiers during their mission in Sri Lanka.
Yes, India’s election results were a triumph of its democracy with voters utterly confounding pollsters–they came nowhere near to predicting the result (sound familiar?). The people were eager to show how fed up they are with all politicians who use communal and other machinations to detract from addressing ongoing daily deficits: housing, sanitation, clean water, education, employment. But this was a choice of evils misunderstood on this side of the Atlantic in mainstream reporting.
While Canadian journalists and columnists widely praised Sonia for ‘doing the right thing,’ proving her ‘Indianness’ by declining the top job, her refusal is likely a sign of something far more Machiavellian. Controlling a situation from behind the scenes with little risk to herself would be child’s play for Sonia Gandhi, a woman whose political style already is widely compared to that of Indira Gandhi. That would leave the as yet widely respected and trusted Manmohan Singh, the country’s first Sikh prime minister, dangerously vulnerable as the government’s front man. As the first PM to come from a minority community, expectations of him to truly rid India of communalism’s ravages are enormous.
With even Sikh separatist leaders—sworn enemies of INC—giving him an approving nod, the expectation that he will have both the political commitment and spiritual motivation to begin shedding great beams of light on political parties’ involvement in communal violence is tremendous. At the same time, so far it is already evident just from invitations to visit foreign countries that the person in power is Sonia Gandhi.
Whether the coalition government will hold in the coming weeks and months remains to be seen. One sign will be whether Sonia Gandhi does what’s best for Indian democracy: let Manmohan Singh get on with redressing a long series of social and political deficits that India’s people have paid for with their blood.
— Molly Amoli K. Shinhat is an independent journalist based in Ottawa. Before coming to Canada, her family lived in India, Iraq and Britain.
Published in Embassy, July 7, 2004
‘Communalism’ is the word applied in South Asia to inter-religious and racial conflict and violence. Since the British left in 1947, it has repeatedly ravaged parts of the country or entire communities for a series of complex contemporary and historical reasons.
I heard of only one Canadian journalist acknowledging his ignorance of Indian politics, and so Canadian reporting truly reverberated with memory loss of this and other significant truths about the country,with one exception.At least most journalists pointed out that Mohandas Gandhi—the Mahatma—is no relation to the Nehru-Gandhi clan.
Canadian coverage predictably supported Mrs.Gandhi’s assertion she is ‘Indian’—not ‘Italian’. Tossed under the shroud of Western political correctness were the realities of present-day India. Post the invasion of Iraq or the war on Afghanistan—to name just two places graced by Western efforts to spread democracy—the appalling irony of Western media proclaiming the ethical standard to judge a political party’s choice of leader in a sovereign third world democracy was rather lost on Western journalists, including Canadians. The other great irony surely is this: will any one reading this live to see, say, a black African-born Muslim woman, a naturalized Canadian, become prime minister of Canada? And what will Canadian journalists have to say about that?
But back to Sonia. She is not the first foreign born and ethnically non-Indian woman to be the president of the INC.Indeed both Annie Besant and Nellie Sengupta, freedom fighters in the movement to liberate India from British colonial rule, are former presidents.
So who really cared about Sonia’s citizenship (sought a long fifteen years after she married Rajiv)? Only the Hindhu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and even then, only to use as a weapon in its reactionary arsenal against her. What actually might have mattered was Sonia Gandhi’s place in the Nehru-Gandhi mythology and the INC’s history. Coming from a well-heeled Italian family and marrying into a well-heeled Indian one in 1968, what could she really know about life for Indian people, the vast majority of whom are neither upper nor middle class? But Sonia certainly does not lack political acumen. Through her own spinning, she worked the situation so that the Western press in particular focused on her fate—one ethnic European—as opposed to that of millions of largely poor ethnic Indians who elected her party. Who says colonialism is dead?
Yes, the election results were clearly a protest vote against the reactionary politics of the BJP. From the outset an extreme right-wing party that allied itself with the most fundamentalist Hindhu elements, the BJP has allegedly been directly involved in numerous situations where communal violence against religious minorities—particularly Muslims and Christians—has engulfed entire communities and regions. The Babri Masji mosque debacle and subsequent massacres that saw thousands of Muslims killed, as well as the communal riots in Gujarat, are just two examples that jump out. Considering the INC has governed India for all but about ten years since partition in 1947, the BJP has left an indelible stain after coming into office in 1998.
But subsequent to the death of Jawaharlal Nehru, the country’s first prime minister and INC leader, the party has its own troubled human rights record. During Nehru’s daughter’s first prime ministership, Indira Gandhi declared a state of emergency during which widespread repression, including mass forced sterilization, the curtailing of constitutional rights, and press censorship were the order of the day. Indira Gandhi repeatedly used the army against minorities and separatist movements, in 1984 using it to invade the Sikh’s holiest shrine in Amritsar, killing thousands of people. The armed forces were deployed by Rajiv Gandhi against Tamil separatists in southern India and Sri Lanka.
International human rights groups including Amnesty International loudly declaimed these situations, including the mass disappearances of young Sikh men in the 1980s.
Indeed it’s widely believed that Indira Gandhi and her son Rajiv’s assassinations came as a result of their policies—the former was murdered by her own Sikh bodyguards in 1984. That assassination led to a communal backlash against Sikhs with thousands brutally murdered and the authorities doing nothing to stop it.
When I visited the country in 1991 days after Rajiv’s assasination by a suicide bomber, it was fascinating to read all the speculation about the young woman responsible. Interestingly, many columnists speculated that she was one of thousands of women allegedly raped by Indian soldiers during their mission in Sri Lanka.
Yes, India’s election results were a triumph of its democracy with voters utterly confounding pollsters–they came nowhere near to predicting the result (sound familiar?). The people were eager to show how fed up they are with all politicians who use communal and other machinations to detract from addressing ongoing daily deficits: housing, sanitation, clean water, education, employment. But this was a choice of evils misunderstood on this side of the Atlantic in mainstream reporting.
While Canadian journalists and columnists widely praised Sonia for ‘doing the right thing,’ proving her ‘Indianness’ by declining the top job, her refusal is likely a sign of something far more Machiavellian. Controlling a situation from behind the scenes with little risk to herself would be child’s play for Sonia Gandhi, a woman whose political style already is widely compared to that of Indira Gandhi. That would leave the as yet widely respected and trusted Manmohan Singh, the country’s first Sikh prime minister, dangerously vulnerable as the government’s front man. As the first PM to come from a minority community, expectations of him to truly rid India of communalism’s ravages are enormous.
With even Sikh separatist leaders—sworn enemies of INC—giving him an approving nod, the expectation that he will have both the political commitment and spiritual motivation to begin shedding great beams of light on political parties’ involvement in communal violence is tremendous. At the same time, so far it is already evident just from invitations to visit foreign countries that the person in power is Sonia Gandhi.
Whether the coalition government will hold in the coming weeks and months remains to be seen. One sign will be whether Sonia Gandhi does what’s best for Indian democracy: let Manmohan Singh get on with redressing a long series of social and political deficits that India’s people have paid for with their blood.
— Molly Amoli K. Shinhat is an independent journalist based in Ottawa. Before coming to Canada, her family lived in India, Iraq and Britain.
Published in Embassy, July 7, 2004
