 "Varun Gandhi")
Stillness strikes me as an especially apt title for Varun Gandhi's new book of poems when I enter his home in upscale Jor Bagh in Delhi, which is unusually hushed for an Indian politician's abode. This 35-year-old's large living room, with its wooden floors, subdued lighting, brass lamps and carpets with Persian designs is the classic upper-class Delhi drawing room, but with extra helpings of A-list art. When Varun enters, I am peering at a huge canvas with vivid geometrical shapes, and trying to figure out if it is a Raza. And yes, of course it is.
When I ask for an art tour, Varun takes me, with the air of one offering a treat, into an inner room and shows me a Rabindranath Tagore painting inherited by him, featuring Nehru and Gandhi together. "You don't know this one?" he exclaims, when I ask a few questions. "Gandhiji gave it to Panditji when he became prime minister." He then walks me from canvas to canvas in his living room, calling out names: Hussain, Souza, Jogen Chowdhury, another Tagore, Arpita Singh, J Swaminathan, Ram Kumar, A Ramachandran...
As we sit down, I ask him how he happens to have such a large art collection. "I collect, and this is only a small part of it," he says, adding expansively. "You must visit my farm, I have about 2,000 paintings, I rotate them on my walls."
The lunch laid out on a low table in his art-heavy drawing room could pass for an art installation: a smallish round plate containing a bowl of tomato ketchup with four triangular sandwiches arranged around it, two cup-cakes, two crumbly triangles of cake and two bowls of namkeen. I find myself strangely loath to upset its minimalist symmetry, and fortunately, Varun, far from pressing me to eat, barely glances at the food. He holds forth instead, with barely a pause, as I sip my tea.
Varun, whom I have met once before, can be great fun to listen to, even if self-absorbed. He is chatty, opinionated, sound on the intricate politics of Uttar Pradesh (UP) and startlingly frank. With my phone's voice recorder turned on, though, he is more circumspect. He declares aunt Sonia and cousin Rahul off-limits, and responds cautiously - though not effusively - when I ask him how his party has done in its first year back in power. "I think things have been put into motion," he says, "but a lot more needs to be done to communicate the good work that the government is doing and to put permanent systems and institutions into place. Individuals can falter, it is institutions that will save this country."
When I ask him about UP, which will hold an election in 2017, he seems to hint at a leadership vacuum when he says, "Increasingly elections are becoming presidential, whether it is the Centre or the state, you do need a credible face." Does he see himself as the face, as his mother once tried to suggest? "It's too early," he says carefully, "for any one person or group to force the pace or be seen as the rightful inheritors".
I did my homework by flicking through Varun's book of short, terse poems, with titles like "Control", "Requiem" and" Release", and bleak observations like "I lie in a patchwork of the impossible present and the invisible future", lavishly interspersed with photographs of brooding landscapes. However, I face the difficultly that reporters might have done while interviewing Kapil Sibal a few years ago, that it is very hard to ask good questions about the effusions of poet-politicians. So, I just ask Varun why his poems are so sad. He corrects me, calling them introspective, and adds: "I think that both sadness and happiness exist implicationally, and the presence of sadness implies hope, just as light implies darkness." Stumped for a follow-up, I turn to a prosaic question: who would advertise a book of poems on the pricey front page of The Times of India? Unlike every other writer I have ever met, Varun seems to imply his publisher has a lavish marketing budget. "This is a question Harper Collins must answer," he says. "I had nothing to do with it."
For all his apparent geniality, Varun, I discover, can quickly turn prickly. When he praises the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) for having been "essentially meritocratic in nature", and given him chances, I wonder aloud if his famous surname helped. "Madam," he says, getting all stiff with me, "I have won two Lok Sabha elections with massive margins. Everything cannot be attributed to a last name." Yet when I ask if he sees himself as a member of a dynasty, he looks stung and expostulates: "I am a member of the dynasty. How can I not see myself... what should I see myself as, as a member of... what an absurd question...?"
Varun explains to me at some length that "stillness remains his highest goal, much higher than any accomplishment or accolade". What he comes across as, though, during our no-lunch lunch, is someone trying to craft a new public persona in an uncertain environment. He came to prominence early, not just because of his lineage, but by being appointed to the powerful post of party general secretary in his early thirties. Today, however, the estranged cousin of Rahul and Priyanka Gandhi is a back-bencher MP, with a low profile in Parliament. When BJP President Amit Shah dropped Varun as general secretary last year, the official reason given was that his mother being a Cabinet minister, this violated the one-family-one-post rule. But as a Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) functionary from UP put it to me expressively: "The RSS and BJP were, once upon a time, taken with the idea of building Varun up, to revive their fortunes in UP. But Modi and Shah have no time for him, they noted that he barely invoked Modi's name in his election campaign. His graph is down."
Tellingly, when Varun called upon MPs from adjoining constituencies to follow him in donating his salary to farmers, some MPs from the BJP responded dismissively in the Hindi press, among them ambitious Hindutva hardliner Yogi Adityanath, who called Varun a drumbeater who infrequently visited his constituency. When I ask Varun about this, he hits back: "Mr Adityanath's politics is a very defined kind of politics, my kind of politics is a liberal, centrist, aspirational politics, there is no place for emotional violence in it."
Is this indeed the same Varun Gandhi whom millions saw on their TV screens making incendiary anti-Muslim speeches during the 2009 election? Varun flatly denies he ever said a word out of line, citing the fact that he was acquitted by a court. When I murmur something about witnesses turning hostile, he walks up and down and explains at great length why this is "absolutely untrue".
As we finish off, though, he is once again all amiability, chatting about world cinema and American TV. As I leave him in his dim room amid vibrant canvases and wilting sandwiches, he calls out a parting remark: "I hope you are not going to say I am down and out."
