Nehru and the Gandhis - Implosion: India's Tryst with Reality - page 153

yar said that was 'the ethos of these kids growing up'. Rahul tried to buck that trend and
not live up to the ethos, preferring to spend long and unaccounted-for time abroad and it
took a long time for his mother and others to rein him in. Eventually, in July 2012, making
a rare public appearance at an official function in Delhi, he announced: 'I will play a more
proactive role in the party and the government,' 19 which he eventually did six months later
when he became vice president of the Congress and official number two to Sonia. 20
Other members of the Nehru-Gandhi family could have bid for an active political life,
but none has done so, apart from Maneka Gandhi, Sanjay's widow, and her son, Feroze Var-
un Gandhi. Maneka and Sanjay had a stormy six-year marriage before his death. She did
not get on with her mother-in-law, who preferred the quieter and more cooperative Sonia,
and eventually Indira threw her out of the family home in March 1982. 21 A year later, I in-
terviewed Maneka for the FT on the first anniversary of her eviction. She had just founded
her own political party, the Rashtriya Sanjay Manch, and I asked the inevitable question
about her prime ministerial ambitions. She said it was 'a bit early to say “yes” at the age of
26', but when I tempted her further, she said (with hindsight, somewhat unrealistically), 'If
I've gone into something, I might as well make a success of it.' 22
She eventually became an MP in 1989, having merged her party with the then Janata
Dal, and held various ministerial posts, moving on after a spell as an independent to the
Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). She remains an MP but is no threat to the mainstream dyn-
asty, though she hopes that her son Varun, who became a BJP MP in 2009, will emerge as
a national figure. Feroze has adopted his father's hard-line approach to politics and trans-
formed himself during the 2009 election campaign from a soft-spoken young man to a rant-
ing Hindu nationalist speaker, delivering widely condemned tirades against Muslims. 23
This was said at the time to be a carefully planned and orchestrated strategy aimed at de-
veloping a distinct dynastic brand but, although he was elected to parliament, the BJP has
been slow in encouraging him to develop into a national figure.
To return to my initial question, the efforts of successive members of the family to per-
petuate the dynasty have been far more important to its survival than the course of events
- and that has become increasingly true with successive generations. Nehru seems not to
have been wholly committed to the idea of his daughter succeeding him, whereas Indira
saw first Sanjay and then Rajiv as her helpers and likely successors. Rajiv did not have
time to consider such things before his death, and would probably have said that Sonia was
a most unlikely successor because of her foreign and non-political background. Sonia then
saw it as her maternal and dynastic duty to bridge the gap and establish Rahul as the born-
to-rule successor, and pushed this far more overtly than earlier generations had.
Tragedy, Death and Acceptance