THE INDIRA GANDHI MEMORIAL MUSEUM, at the family bungalow at 1 Safdarjung Road in the heart of colonial New Delhi, commemorates a clan bound to India first by a tradition of service, and then by martyrdom. Pilgrims wind through modest parlor rooms filled with photographs and news clippings and then are routed to the family quarters in the back where Rahul and his younger sister, Priyanka, lived with their parents -- Rajiv and Sonia -- and their grandmother Indira, who served as India's prime minister from 1966 to 1977 and then again from 1980 until her assassination in 1984. A blown-up photograph shows a pudgy 12-year-old Rahul burying his face in his father's chest after the cremation ceremony for Indira, murdered by Sikhs enraged at her decision to crush a Sikh separatist movement. The tour leads past the lawn where Rahul and Priyanka played to the garden where Indira was killed. In a recent speech, Rahul recalled that, in the high-security protective bubble that was 1 Safdarjung, he used to play badminton with two of Indira's Sikh guards; they were, he thought, his friends. In fact, they were the men who murdered his grandmother.
Another photograph shows an older Rahul lighting the pyre for Rajiv, also assassinated, also the Congress leader. This was in 1991, when Rajiv was killed by Tamil separatists. Rahul has said that he pledged to enter politics when the train carrying his father's ashes reached the northern city of Allahabad and he saw a vast crowd assembled to meet it. Such a vow, in such a family, carries dire overtones of fatalism.
It is the awful twinning of dynastic politics and premature death that, as with his father, ushered Rahul to the center of the Indian stage. First, Rajiv was forced into politics when his younger brother, Sanjay, died in a plane crash in 1980. Then, after Indira's assassination, Rajiv was sworn in as her successor, as if India really were a constitutional monarchy rather than a parliamentary democracy. Rajiv was turned out of office in 1989, and then murdered in 1991. The Gandhis found themselves without power, or even heirs. A non-Gandhi Congress government ruled India from 1991 to 1996, but when it lost the next elections, the party rapidly dissolved into squabbling factions, some of which allied themselves with Rajiv's Italian-born widow, Sonia. The Congress party decided it could not survive without the Gandhis; in 1998, Sonia was installed as party president in a sort of putsch that only reinforced the impression of the family's inherited right to rule. In 2004, when Congress returned to power after eight years in the wilderness, Sonia shocked India and dismayed the party by declining to serve as prime minister. Instead she picked Singh, a respected economist and party loyalist who could be counted on to do her bidding.
Rahul, meanwhile, was out of India during this period. He had gone off to America, where he graduated from Rollins College in Florida, and then got an M.Phil. from Trinity College at Cambridge University and worked at a consulting firm in London before returning home in 2002. But he was always the heir apparent, and while his mother has ruled the party over the last 15 years, few believe she has done so with anything other than him in mind.
Still, there's no question that Rahul's life has been scarred by all this tragedy and the resulting isolation. He has been surrounded by a security cordon since he was a boy; the black-suited guards of the Special Protection Group were thick on the ground at his headquarters when I visited. He has never married, prompting endless speculation. He recently explained, "If I get married and have children, then I will become a status quoist and will be concerned about bequeathing my position to my children." That sounded very close to saying that he cannot cure the dynastic problem unless he ends the dynasty. However it ends up, Rahul's reticence is existential. He stands apart, from those around him and even from his own party. "He's not in the middle of us," says Sandeep Dikshit, a member of Parliament and Congress spokesman. "He's not meeting with us all the time. He doesn't give himself up to our fancies."
Surveying this epic family sweep, Jaswant Singh, an erudite opposition stalwart, says, "I am reminded of the late Mughal period," when generations of dynastic rule began to disintegrate in the form of the hapless Shah Alam II, humiliated by his enemies and effectively displaced by the British. "I wonder," murmurs Singh, "if we are fit for democracy."
The analogy is a little harsh on India, which has the most solidly founded democracy among major countries in the emerging world. The military sticks to its own business, and conflict among the country's innumerable ethnic, religious, and language groups is mediated for the most part through politics rather than violence. The signal achievement of Jawaharlal Nehru, India's founding prime minister and Rahul's great-grandfather, was binding up a subcontinent that in its diversity resembled pre-modern Europe into a single highly elastic union. Ever since, a grateful nation has viewed the family as India's great secular institution. As Sachin Pilot, a 35-year-old minister in the Singh government and a member of Rahul's inner circle, told me, "Only the Gandhis don't have a religious definition, a geographical definition, a class definition. They are symbolic of the Indian state."
But that, of course, is also the central paradox of the Gandhis: A system in which national legitimacy belongs to a family and is passed down through inheritance is more likely to undermine than to fortify democratic governance. Nehru died nearly 50 years ago, and the family record hasn't been so great since. Indira responded to growing opposition by declaring emergency rule in 1975, suspending democracy for the only time in the history of free India. And while Indira did not inherit her father's tolerance for opposition, she did absorb his faith in socialism and the centrally planned economy. Her great electoral slogan was garibi hatao ("abolish poverty"), but she wasn't able to transform the lives of India's peasantry as long as the so-called "Hindu rate of growth" -- 3.5 percent -- obtained. Rajiv, who worked as a pilot for Indian Airlines before joining the family business, was a modernizer who shared neither his mother's imperiousness nor her attachment to party tradition. One senior planning official from that time has written that Rajiv "wanted us to plan for the construction of autobahns, airfields, speedy trains, shopping malls," and the like. "We were," he recalled, "shocked into silence." But Rajiv lost power before he could build those autobahns.
Sandro Tucci/Liaison via Getty Images
Robert Nickelsberg/Liaison via Getty Images
SUBJECTS:
