Indira’s ‘soonbai’, a leader in her own right

Sonia Gandhi's first ever public meeting was in the tribal Nandurbar district of Maharashtra in 1998 when the Congress had virtually written off that election under the uncharismatic Congress president Sitaram Kesri.

Sharad Pawar was leading the campaign in Maharashtra and was startled to discover the enormous response Sonia received - beyond any party mobilisation, people from the surrounding villages kept coming to the meeting ground even after her address was over and her helicopter had taken off.

I was present at that meeting and when I spoke to the women there, I discovered they were ecstatic at getting to see-- even if from a distance - and hear "Sonabai" (Sona is a very common name in Maharashtra), 'Indiranchi soonbai' (Indira's daughter-in-law). They did not mind or notice she had pronounced 'Shivaji' as 'Shivji' or needed help with the word 'adarsh' - it was left to critics to pick holes in her accent, poise and nervous demeanour.

The response to her meetings across the regions of Maharashtra was phenomenal that year. When she finally got to Shivaji Park in Mumbai for the Congress's closing rally three weeks later, the crowds were again beyond the party mobilisation. By then she had got 'Shivaji' right and was more confident and assured before the cheerily applauding audience.

The Shiv Sena-BJP, then in power in Maharashtra, and Bal Thackeray, who considered Shivaji Park his backyard (he would be cremated there 14 years later) were blown out of their minds. They spent the next couple of days frantically mobilising their own crowds - anything short of the numbers that Sonia had got would have been unacceptable.

They claimed they had got more at their own closing rallies, but it did not matter after the ballot boxes were opened. From the half dozen seats the Congress expected to win, they were rendered speechless when their final tally stopped at 42 out of the 48 Lok Sabha seats in Maharashtra. Four of those seats, of course, were won by different faction leaders of the Republican Party of India but even they knew that their victory belonged to the Congress through and through.

Those 40-odd seats kept the Congress from slipping beneath three digits in the Lok Sabha but when Sonia Gandhi got to Maharashtra again a few months later for a state party convention in Nashik, she was gracious enough to hand the entire credit for that stupendous performance (never bettered since by the Congress in Maharashtra though Narendra Modi managed 42 along with 18 of the Shiv Sena in 2014) to Sharad Pawar.

A year later Pawar got trapped in his own legend and thought he could return the same performance in 1999. At the head of the Nationalist Congress Party he got only six Lok Sabha seats from Maharashtra, a broken Congress fared better with a little over double that number.

I came face to face with Ms Gandhi at a dinner hosted for her by Pawar the evening of the Nashik convention. She had just taken over as party president and some hostile women reporters would not let her off easily. She was still shy and wilting, looking as though she wanted to dart behind someone to avoid meeting reporters. But when they asked her about her presidentship and how she felt about it, pat came the reply, “Very humbled."

She was only one small party worker in a long line of great leaders of the Congress who had been entrusted with the job and she had a lot to learn from them and those present willing to teach her, she said. She was under no illusions about why she had got the job and was fully aware of her limitations and handicaps. She charmed most of the reporters present with her shy responses, those who continued to be sour at her elevation could fault her only for rolling her R’s and softening her T’s.

By the time I came face to face with her again in Latur, she had lost the foreign accent and gained much in confidence. Indeed, she proved she was very worthy of being 'Indirabai’s soonbai' that the rural women of Maharashtra had opened their hearts - and votes to - a few years earlier.

After a public rally in Latur, then chief minister Vilasrao Deshmukh’s constituency, a group of reporters, I among them, met her for a tète-à-tète at the government guest house where she was staying. The BJP-led NDA was in power at the centre and one of us asked her to respond to their criticism that the Congress was a dead horse. She did not lose her equanimity. “I think you must remind them that they have only four states and we govern 14. So, the majority of the people are with us, no?”

Deshmukh let out a whoosh of relief for he thought the question would have offended her and was surprised at her ready reply.

But my face-to-face with her in 2004 has been the most memorable. Sonia and Sharad Pawar addressed a joint rally in Solapur that year – the home constituency of then Chief Minister Sushil Kumar Shinde, whose wife was contesting the Lok Sabha seat that year.

I was idly surfing television early that morning in my hotel room when I caught Narendra Modi, the then Gujarat chief minister, describe Sonia as a Jersey cow and Rahul as her hybrid calf. For that time, it was highly shocking for even Bal Thackeray, known for an abrasive tongue had never gone so far as to target a woman politician in such intemperate language. I was galvanised enough to get on the phone to Shinde and ask him for an audience with Sonia Gandhi.

His office called back a few hours later to say a personal, one-to-one interview was not possible but she had agreed to take some questions from the media at the airport a few minutes before her departure. I got there early and took a spot at the barricade right opposite where she was expected to be standing during the interaction.

Not knowing how best to break it to her, I jumped in with my question after the first volley was over – I wanted her to react to Modi’s abuse. Standing right opposite her, I saw her flinch and immediately regretted my question. But she recovered in barely a few seconds and said nonchalantly, “Oh, I don’t care, let him abuse me. The more they call me names, the more people shower their love upon me. Let them go ahead and abuse me as much as they like. I care only about the people.”

She left after that but later at a dinner hosted by Shinde I was still mulling over whether I had done the right thing to throw that hurtful question at her, so publicly. Shinde walked over to me and said, “I am glad you asked her that question and we got a fitting reply. None of us in the party would have cared to inform her about the abuse and the BJP would have got away with it."

As it is, the BJP lost half of its 26 seats from Gujarat that year and that was the margin of difference between the Congress and the BJP that led to the cobbling together of the UPA.

Although there was not much by personal meetings after that, over the years, I saw Sonia Gandhi evolve from a shy debutante to a confident leader that led her party to two national victories in the 20 years of her Congress presidency. It would not have been easy for Indira's daughter-in-law to step into her formidable mother-in-law's shoes but she never seemed to lose sight of what she told us in Nashik - she was just one party president in a long line of Congress greats. But she did set the record for being the longest serving Congress President and another for giving it all up and retiring gracefully at the peak.

How many Indian politicians have had the courage to do that so far? None in the Congress and none in any other party either.