(Mani Shankar Aiyar is a Congress MP in the Rajya Sabha)As a convinced atheist, I do not believe in reincarnation. But as I sat in Talkatora Stadium listening to Rahul Gandhi, it was difficult not to believe that Rajiv had reincarnated himself in Rahul's soul. For it was Rajiv's voice I heard in the words that emerged from Rahul's tongue. I had had a similar experience with Rajiv.
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For a speech on disarmament at an international conference to mark the commencement of Jawaharlal Nehru's birth centenary, I drafted a text jam-packed with quotations from Nehru's numerous, eloquent and impassioned statements on the imperative of ending the nuclear arms race and moving towards a world without nuclear weapons.
As I read out the text to him, I saw his eyes widening. When I finished, he asked me to come out on the lawn for a quiet word. "But the guy says exactly what I have been saying!" he exclaimed. "On the contrary, Sir," I replied, "you have been saying exactly what he had been saying!" I asked where he had picked it all up - at family meals? Rajiv laughed and said the only family meals were breakfast when Nehru was in town and Nehru had laid down a family rule that at table you could speak only in Hindi. And, anyway, continued Rajiv, he had been sent to boarding school when he was eleven, so where was the possibility of his discussing his Nana's views on disarmament? That is when I realized that in political families, there is a kind of osmotic process that transfers thought from one generation to another.
And it is this that I heard from the podium yesterday - the osmotic transmission of a thought process that bore an uncanny resemblance to the speeches I had heard Rajiv deliver over six years of maturing reflection on India's democracy; the absence of democracy in the party; the capture of the party in a "net of avarice" by the "brokers of power"; the imperative of empowering people at the grassroots to allow them to build their own lives by dint of their own effort through their own elected representatives; and the inescapable need to move the party from the coteries that had captured it to a system based on full participation of ordinary Congress workers by ceding to them the right to elect their leaders from block through Pradesh to Central level.
My mind revved back to 28 December 1985 and Rajiv Gandhi's Presidential Address to the centenary celebrations of the founding of the Congress. My mind raced through from there to Rajiv's speech in the Lok Sabha on 15 May 1989 introducing his Constitutional amendments on Panchayat Raj and took in on the way another speech at about the same time on the political empowerment of women to ensure their social and personal liberation. Then I thought of Rajiv's extempore dissertation on the essence of Nehru's philosophy to a gathering of college students in Mysore where he described that essence as lying in Nehru's crusade to end the "Quest for Dominance" that had been the leitmotif of international relations since the beginning of time.
All those themes were resurrected in Rahul's voice as it came booming off the stage. The same deep voice, the same clear enunciation, the same ability to calibrate different thoughts to different pitches of emotion. And the same dimpled smile that I had thought was the father's copyright.
PV Narasimha Rao once remarked that when Rajiv became PM, the question of the leadership of the Congress had been settled for the next 25 years. No one then knew that a cruel fate was going to cut down that life a bare six years later. Since then there has been something of a hiatus. Yesterday, I was convinced that the thread had been picked up again and that Rahul would not need the remaining 19 years to realise Rajiv's dreams; he could do it in 19 months.
The election battle of 2014 has been joined. We are going on to the battlefield armed with the fundamental principles and beliefs of our 128-year old Congress: the widening and deepening of democracy in governance through the genuine empowerment of the 32 lakh representatives the people of India have elected of their volition to the panchayats and nagarpalikas; the mobilization of at least ten lakh elected Congress representatives at the very grassroots by guaranteeing their participation in all party matters; the drafting of the Congress manifesto through widespread consultation with every segment of Congress opinion; the commitment to secularism as the bonding adhesive of our nationhood; priority to the poor in a 21stcentury version of Congress Socialism (a word not heard in a Congress forum for over two decades until uttered from the podium yesterday by the mover of the session's Resolution, Ghulam Nabi Azad); and self-confident independence in foreign affairs. (And, oh yes, before I forget, three more gas cylinders a year for the infinitely suffering home-maker!)
A Congress that seemed down and out appeared rejuvenated at Talkatora. I recall that it was in this month of January 2004 that, just after a spectacular run of victories in State assembly elections, Atal Bihari Vajpayee decided to bring forward the Lok Sabha election from October to May. The BJP/NDA lost decisively. It was a bad decision from the BJP's point of view because they had allowed themselves to be misled by overthrowing Digvijaya in Madhya Pradesh, Ajit Jogi in Chhattisgarh and Gehlot in Rajasthan into believing that the national wind was blowing in their direction. State assembly elections are no guide to national results. We might yet overcome!
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