 "It's Gandhi vs Gandhi in political soap opera")
At a rally after filing his nomination in Sultanpur on Tuesday, Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) General-Secretary Varun Gandhi said: “I concede I am here because my surname is Gandhi. Consider me your son, not a leader. It will not benefit us if we speak ill about our opponents.”
Recently, in Amethi, he had talked admiringly of some schemes launched by Congress vice-president and cousin Rahul Gandhi. The BJP candidate from Amethi, Smriti Irani, was quick to contradict him, before complaining to party leaders that if her colleague praised her rival (and that of the party), she might as well give up contesting the elections even before starting her campaign.
Rahul could have made Varun’s endorsement of his schemes a political issue. After all, how many BJP MPs praise development in a Congress MP’s constituency? But he didn’t, obviously squeamish about raking up the issue of past rejections.
It was Rahul’s sister Priyanka who did. “He is definitely from my family; he is my brother,” she told voters in Sultanpur. “But he has gone astray. When a young one in the family chooses the wrong path, the elders show him the right path, the right way. I urge all of you to show my brother the right path.” That she broke her resolve of not campaigning for anyone but her mother and brother (none have heard from Amita Singh, the Congress candidate from Sultanpur), suggests Priyanka doesn’t hold the same world view as Rahul. And, family or not, she isn’t afraid to call a spade a spade. “This is not a family tea party,” she said of Varun’s campaign of filial affection. “This is an ideological war.”
In a signed statement on Tuesday, Varun responded, “My inherent decency and large-heartedness should not be seen as weakness.” He said he had never crossed the Lakshman rekha of decency. “I have always viewed other’s respect as my own, whether it is a member of my family or a senior leader from any party,” said his press release.
“There has been talk of my path. I have always considered the nation’s path as more important than my own. In my lifetime, if I am able to constructively contribute towards nation-building, I will consider my life meaningful…It is my request to all that instead of personal attacks, we debate unemployment, corruption, poverty, illiteracy.”
In October 2005, when the BBC had asked him why he supported the BJP, not the Congress, Varun had said: “It was not so much a party as a set of ideologies that my family stood for, and I abide by those values. In recent times, the BJP has come to represent those values of nationalism, and even secularism.”
Varun has not used the picture of Narendra Modi, the party’s prime ministerial candidate during the campaigning. Also, he frequently mentioned his father, Sanjay Gandhi, who died in a plane crash in 1980, when Varun was just a few months old. Soon, his mother, Maneka, had to leave the family residence.
Varun is a practical politician. In the 2012 Uttar Pradesh Assembly elections, he suggested the names of about 30 candidates, whom he shortlisted on the basis of caste combinations; now, 24 of them are members of the Legislative Assembly.
The family dispute, meanwhile, leaves us with a subtext: Who’s the real Gandhi?