New Delhi: Prime Minister Narendra Modi is fighting for his vision of India, and she for hers, former Congress president Sonia Gandhi has said, disclosing that she has had “practically no real contact” with him and when they do come face-to-face, he tends to look away, avoiding eye contact.
Acknowledging that Modi had certainly “worked his way to power within the RSS from an underprivileged world”, Gandhi writes in her memoir that his origins may not have been as humble as his PR team has made out in marketing his image.
The long awaited “Belonging: A Journey of Love”, published by HarperCollins India, hit the stands Tuesday.
“Narendra Damodardas Modi has been the prime minister of India for more than twelve years as of this writing and is now in his third term in office. To this day, I’ve had practically no real contact with him. We meet at semi-official gatherings — for instance, at the end of every Parliament session, when leaders of the major parties customarily gather at the Speaker’s chamber,” she says in the book.
“It’s a very small room, and usually many people are present, but when he comes face-to-face with me, we greet each other with a formal namaste. This is different from the past, when leaders across party divides would treat one another with cordiality. He tends to look away, avoiding eye contact,” Gandhi says.
On occasions when Gandhi returned from a stint in the hospital, Modi has asked, “Theek hain aap?” (“Are you all right?”), to which she replied, “Jee, ab main theek hoon, shukriya.” (“Yes, thank you, I’m fine now.”), the book says.
“Apart from such brief exchanges, we have never really conversed, though we’ve exchanged formal birthday and New Year greetings over the years,” she says, acknowledging that they come from different ideological worlds with Modi’s idea of the country being vastly different from hers.
“All I learnt about India was assimilated from the members of my family, their lives of service, and their faith in a nation that encompassed a host of races and cultures, languages and faiths, based on principles of liberty and equality for all. Narendra Modi’s idea of India was constructed by the ideologues of the RSS and the experience of his own growing up. It affirmed a fundamentalism in which his faith and culture superseded all others,” she says.
In that India, hierarchy, order, and control are central, Gandhi adds.
“He was fighting for his vision of India, and I for mine: an India against hegemony, an India that stands for inclusiveness, secularism, and social justice. It wasn’t personal,” she says in the book.
Modi’s path to politics was charted along a course completely different from hers, Gandhi points out.
“But there were elements of his discomfort with the ruling elite of our times that I too had come to understand well. I often found myself ill at ease in a drawing room in Delhi in the midst of a political discussion — feeling that the opinions expressed were very far removed from the reality of India. The suffering, the struggle to survive, that I had witnessed in my constituency and seen in my travels through the country were to this privileged group unimaginable,” she says.
Modi’s origins may not have been as humble as his PR team has made out in marketing his image, but he had certainly worked his way to power within the RSS from an underprivileged world, Gandhi says.
“When speaking in Parliament, he (Modi) at times uses the same coarse language he employs in addressing a public rally. Much of the time he derides the opposition in what can only be termed a tirade. Jawaharlal Nehru, our first prime minister, is a particular target of his party’s hostility, for having set our country on a democratic and secular course,” she says.
The Sangh Parivar internet sites are full of malicious abuse and falsehoods against Nehru, she writes in the book.
The BJP’s stated aim, Gandhi says, is what they call a “Congress-free India” — free of the party, its policies, and its ideology.
“I tend to believe that this antipathy stems from the conditioning of the prime minister by the RSS. It has inculcated in its cadre a commitment to an exclusionary, hardened version of Hinduism that has been crafted into a political agenda.
“What I learnt from my mother-in-law is the faith that’s been practised for centuries in India by vast numbers of our people –from stalwarts of the freedom struggle to the poorest in our villages. It embraces diverse beliefs and different paths, adheres to no single deity, dogma, prophet, or scripture, and has included traditions of dissent,” she says.
Gandhi writes that she was educated in the way of ahimsa and dharma as Mahatma Gandhi interpreted it, and from this followed her own experiences of acceptance and understanding.
“Of course, the centuries-old caste system that ruled Indian society has its own long-standing problems of oppression and inequality; but some of the major figures of reform have used ideas precisely within Hinduism to question and challenge the stranglehold of caste,” she says.
“Belonging: A Journey of Love” is a personal memoir, with politics providing the background or “a kind of framework”, as she writes in the book.
