| |
This book is a political story. It is not a conventional biography. It is a narrative about Sonia Gandhi the politician and before that, Sonia Gandhi the political entity around whose silence the Congress party and its politics revolved.
While Sonia Gandhi is central to this work, it is the events and episodes, which have guided and created politics in India over the last decade and a half. Naturally it is hard to argue that without the cause of Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination and subsequent decline in the Congress Party’s fortunes’ there might not have been the effect of Sonia Gandhi taking to politics in the first place.
Thus, the book begins on a note of detachment the start of a new, more right wing Congress Party that had little in common with the Congress of Nehru or his ‘National Consensus’, they are the beginnings of a new Congress, a recollection of a phase. Without this phase, this break from the Congress of the past, there would have been no vacuum or requirement for Sonia Gandhi to enter politics. ‘This book also describes, in great detail the state of the Nation and the social and economic mileu of India, within which its politics functioned throughout the 1990’s. Factors that played a role are all mentioned and argued about in this part of the book, including; ‘The New Economic Policy’ (NEP), the Babri crises and its social and political consequences, the pulls and pressures of inner-party politics, issues such as corruption, rise of regional politics and electoral fortunes are all covered here. There is considerable attention paid to the individuals and personalities who directed and participated in the events of the time, both within the Congress and outside it.
An agent whose arrival was required for all the preceding events covered in former chapters. It is a part that settles her into the role she personifies today as the grand matriarch of the Indian National Congress. It covers the initial jubilation, flanked by the minor disenchantment of other entrenched leaders in the party, her attempts to change and alter the party system and culture into her own vision, her relationship with figures of the time, across the political spectrum and the chastening electoral defeat of 1999.
It is a very dynamic component of the book since it relives the processes of becoming Sonia Gandhi, of transforming, first, her own persona and then the aura around and within her party. It portrays also the discrepancies and shortcomings, personally and in a corporate sense which led to the failure to win the 1999 General Election, and pre-sets the stage for later recovery.
She surmounts great difficulties, within her own party and within the polity to continue on as the leader of a group that is increasingly seen as beyond remedy. Beyond her own problems is the portrayal of greater and much larger occurrences, the Gujarat riots, the death of senior colleagues, the implications of successive electoral defeats and the creation of a national mood against her and her party. This part of the book narrates how she responds to these challenges, her mistakes as well as determination to go through and sets the stage for the final battle.
It also gives an inside account of the manner in which the Congress party and the Central government function today. There are no assumptions here.
|
| |
|