A Profile in the Politics of Conviction

In decades a political leader emerges on the national political firmament who defines the era. Priyanka Gandhi appears one such political leader who shall define the Indian political scene for a long time to come. Although born in the first political family of the country, 52 years old Priyanka chose the quiet life of a home maker away from the pulls and pressures of the Indian political humdrum.

Even after her father’s unfortunate assassination in May 1991 Priyanka Gandhi was kept insulated from active politics by her mother, the Congress matriarch Mrs. Sonia Gandhi. However, since 2014 after emergence of Mr. Narendra Modi as the Prime Minister of India and the untiring efforts of the Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP) to marginalise the Indian National Congress and the Gandhi family in particular, it had become increasingly essential to impress Priyanka into the Congress political setup.

She would be a backup to her brother Rahul Gandhi and shore up the Party’s dwindling fortunes in a political arena lately defined by the BJP’s political theatre that has cultivated the Churchillian ‘ability to foretell what is going to happen tomorrow, next month, next year and to have the ability afterward to explain why it did not happen’. The timing of Priyanka’s entry into the active politics is also a testimonial to the political sagacity of Mrs. Sonia Gandhi. Priyanka Gandhi entered the Indian Parliament from Kerala’s Wayand Parliamentary Constituency in Nov 2024 with a whopping lead of over four lakh votes.

Self-effacing, polite, intelligent, and unostentatiously patriotic, articulate and thoughtful, and displaying political instinct of her grandmother the late Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, Priyanka’s maiden speech in the Indian Parliament on 13 December was a refreshing change from the extremely violent diatribes that have marked our Parliament for over a decade now. Her style was combative yet calm. Never raising her voice in her thirty-minute speech, she outlined with thorough conviction and cool composure the bedevilling challenges that face our nation today and the need for the polity to recognise those challenges.

She conveyed that recognising and addressing those challenges would help revert to the course that our founding fathers had laid out for the nation. She accused the present government of their alleged Machiavellian malfeasance to dismiss the Constitution, attempt to break ‘the suraksha kavatch’ of the unity, and of promoting business oligarchies and monopolies, besides creating fear and an atmosphere of intolerance and mistrust. She also lamented the government’s deliberate silence over the continuing violent impasse in Manipur, newer spots of discord like in Sambhal mosque issue, Unnao rape case, and similar incidents elsewhere in the country that are tearing at the basic fabric of the cultural and pluralistic coexistence of the nation. She dilated on the need for a nationwide cast census as well, an issue that generates considerable unease in the treasury benches. She also passionately touched on the need for continuing conversation among our religions in the spirit of our centuries old tradition to preserve our pluralistic heritage.

She ‘sort of’ resuscitated the legacy of her great grandfather, the first Prime Minister of India, the late Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru by stating that while her great-grandfather’s (Nehru’s) name could be removed from textbooks, his contributions to India’s independence and development remain ineradicable; she continued “our constitution laid the foundation of the economic justice, distributing land to farmers, the poor and the needy…… Nehru’s name is often used by them (BJP) to save themselves. Nehru created many PSUs and institutions such as HAL, BHEL, SAIL, ONGC, NTPC, Railways, IIT, IIM”. She demonstrated through her speech that she does not believe in sterile confrontation but a political conviction that touches the core issues enshrined in our Constitution that need to be prevailed and protected, and that she shall be prepared to defend those values with whatever it takes.

Her maiden speech indicated that she would not allow to be consigned to the myth of Sisyphus, as her brother has been for the past over a decade and will therefore not indulge in some vague middle ground, but by articulating peoples’ issues she would make the middle ground see those issues as she perceives them. Her subsequent bold visual articulation of issues in the Parliament, like the Israeli genocide of the Palestinians in the Gaza strip, and the brazen atrocities on the Hindus in Bangladesh are indicators of her worldview and her firm political convictions that cannot be cowed down or drawn under by the agency.

Her political rhetoric and her speech in the Lok Sabha on 13 December, some aspects of which I tried to analyse here, are a genuine contrast to the staid conventional wisdom that has doomed the Congress Party to stagnation and near oblivion. She will be a worthy value addition to the Congress Party’s political fortunes in the times ahead, and an intellectually sound parliamentarian enriching our great parliamentary culture. As the indomitable Suhel Seth put it; “while Rahul Gandhi is the political activist, Priyanka Gandhi is the politician”.

It will be interesting to watch Priyanka Gandhi’s evolution as a responsible and able politician on the Indian political scene as the time unfolds. It will depend how she deploys her innate capacity to make political and emotional connections even with the strident of political opponents and grow her strong ego network comprising of people from all walks of life that shall deliver her party the much-needed success. With her sharp political instincts and firm convictions, she is poised to muster sufficient political impetus to battle BJP’s ideological scripts, and thus plead a heavy schedule to the BJP in the times ahead.