Behind
The Indian Press’s
Adulation Of Sonia Gandhi
By Sarath Kumara
and Keith Jones
19 April 2006
World
Socialist Web
When
Congress Party boss Sonia Gandhi announced last month that she was resigning
her parliamentary seat only to seek re-election in the by-election her
resignation triggered, India’s corporate media all but unanimously
proclaimed her a master political strategist. Once again, Gandhi had
confounded her political opponents, or so the story went, while bolstering
her credentials as a politician uninterested in the perks of office.
Typical was the reaction
of the Hindustan Times. In an editorial titled “Sonia Gandhi’s
a smart politician,” it termed Gandhi’s temporary withdrawal
from the Lok Sabha “a masterstroke”
In fact, Gandhi’s resignation
became necessary because a campaign that the Congress had gotten up
against the rival Samajwadi Party using the so-called office-for-profit
issue had gone badly awry. The current head of the Gandhi-Nehru Congress
dynasty and power behind the throne in Congress-led United Progressive
Alliance government suddenly found herself in danger of being stripped
of her Lok Sabha seat by presidential order. Had that happened, Gandhi
would have been legally barred from seeking re-election until the current
parliament is dissolved—that is, until the next all-India election.
It was the Congress, with
Gandhi’s fulsome support, that first made a hue and cry about
the constitutional prohibition against Indian parliamentarians holding
a Union or state government-appointed post unless parliament has explicitly
excluded that post from the office-for-profit prohibition.
The Congress had charged
that Samajwadi Party actress-cum-politician Jaya Bhaduri was violating
the office-for-profit prohibition because she was simultaneously a member
of the upper house of India’s parliament, the Rajya Sabha, and
the chair of the Uttar Pradesh Cinema Promotion Board.
Acting on the Congress’s
complaint and the recommendation of the Election Commission, Indian
President Abdul Kazam found that Bhaduri was holding a state government
appointment that parliament had not specifically exempted and therefore
stripped her of her Rajya Sabha seat. (Although the Samajwadi Party
and the Congress are ostensibly allies against the Hindu supremacist
Bharatiya Janata Party or BJP, the two parties have long been locked
in a bitter and unseemly power struggle. Earlier this year, Samajwadi
Party leaders accused the central government of bugging their phones.)
The opposition, with the
BJP in the lead, responded to the Congress’s successful goring
of Bhaduri by charging that Gandhi was herself in violation of the office-for-profit
prohibition, since she was both an MP and chairperson of the National
Advisory Council, a new body created by the UPA government after it
came to power in 2004 to monitor implementation of the UPA’s Common
Minimum Programme.
Realizing that Gandhi was
at best in a legal gray zone, the Congress responded to the opposition
campaign by trying to adjourn parliament so that new legislation could
be brought forward providing Gandhi with the requisite exemption. But
the BJP and its National Democratic Alliance allies, the Samajwadi Party,
and the Left Front all refused to cooperate, with the BJP accusing the
Congress of trying to hijack the parliamentary agenda to serve Gandhi’s
personal interests.
Gandhi and her advisors then
happened on the resignation ploy, which made the office-for-profit issue
mute, since she no longer held a Lok Sabha seat.
The dominant partner in India’s
coalition government evidently did not want Gandhi’s fate to be
determined by a president appointed by the previous BJP-led government.
Within Indian political circles,
it is generally accepted that the office-for-profit prohibition—which
was instituted to prevent the executive from trying to influence parliamentarians
through the distribution of sinecures—needs to be overhauled.
Some 60 other parliamentarians, from both the government and opposition
benches, are reputed to be holding Union and state government appointments
in violation of the office-for-profit rule.
Despite the political fireworks,
the issue is unlikely to have any serious impact on the future of either
the UPA government or Sonia Gandhi.
But the Congress’s
attempt to profit through the office-for-profit issue and the press
reaction to Gandhi’s resignation do merit further comment.
First and foremost, the extraordinary
rallying of the press around Gandhi and the fawning praise of her leadership
underscore that the most powerful sections of the Indian ruling class
view that the UPA regime—which holds powers only because of the
parliamentary support of the Left Front—currently constitutes
the best vehicle for pressing forward with their neo-liberal agenda.
Since coming to power in
May 2004 on a wave of popular anger at the increasing misery and economic
insecurity produced by the BJP’s economic reforms, the UPA has
accelerated the dismantling of all regulatory restraints on capital,
while using the Stalinist-led Left Front to contain and derail the inevitable
popular opposition.
Admittedly, last fall, there
were increasingly loud complaints from India’s corporate elite
that the UPA government was bending too much to pressure from the Left
Front and temporizing in the face of popular protests against further
privatizations and deregulation and the gutting of restrictions on layoffs
and plant closures.
But Prime Minister Manmohan
Singh and Finance Minister P. Chidambaram were quick to respond with
pledges to accelerate the pace of reform—Chidambaram notably promising
that the UPA will act with a “killer instinct” akin to that
of China, which has given capital carte blanche while ruthlessly suppressing
working-class and peasant unrest.
More importantly, the government
announced the opening of the retail sector to increased FDI and pushed
forward with its airport privatization plan in the face of a militant
strike, which was ultimately suppressed by the unions.
India’s corporate elite
was no less impressed with the UPA’s negotiation of a nuclear
accord with the Bush administration over the protests of its Left Front
parliamentary allies. The Indo-US nuclear accord is viewed by the Indian
elite as going a long way to realizing its ambitions for India to be
recognized as a world power, for it constitutes de facto recognition
of India as a nuclear weapons state and holds out the promise of a close
partnership with Washington.
One certainly can imagine
that under different conditions—conditions in which the corporate
elite had grown disenchanted with the Congress-led UPA—the press
might have spun Sonia Gandhi’s problems with the office-for-profit
issue quite differently.
The fact that the president
of the Congress and head of the Congress parliamentary party was in
violation of a constitutional prohibition would have been proclaimed
a scandal and Gandhi’s maladroit use of the office-for-profit
issue against the Samajwadi Party held up as evidence of her poor judgment.
Although the circumstances
are different, one only has to recall how the press pilloried Natwar
Singh, then India’s foreign affairs minister, after he was named
in an appendix to Paul Volcker’s final report on the so-called
Iraqi oil-for-food scandal. Volcker provided no evidence of any wrongdoing
by Singh, and other countries, including France and Russia, dismissed
his report as an attempt by the US Republican right to smear its opponents.
Yet the press and Singh’s opponents in the Congress party leadership
latched onto the Volcker report as a means of drumming out of the government
someone known for his opposition to the Iraq War and who opposed privileging
the Indo-US relationship over other bilateral ties.
The press adulation of Sonia
Gandhi is also significant because of the light it sheds on the continuing
degeneration of the Congress, the traditional ruling party of the Indian
bourgeoisie. However unjustly, the Congress, because of its association
with the struggle against British rule, once enjoyed genuine mass support.
Today, it is a corrupt and
bloated apparatus—a party that has failed to win a parliamentary
majority since 1984, and that is dependent on the Left Front not only
to sustain it in office, but to lend its claims to be a progressive
party, concerned with the plight of the poor, any semblance of credibility.
The Congress’s factional
war with the Samajwadi Party is nothing new. Indira Gandhi was assassinated
after an attempt to exploit Sikh communalist politics backfired. But
without any significant support in large swathes of the country, the
Congress today relies more than ever on the media, maneuvers and reactionary
appeals to win votes and form governments—whether it be the recent
recruiting to the Congress of the former Shiv Sena Chief Minister of
Maharashtra, Narayan Rane, or the attempt to prevent a rival coalition
to come to power in Bihar through the use of president’s rule.
And atop the Congress is
the entirely accidental figure of Sonia Gandhi, who owes her position
as supreme arbiter of Congress organizational affairs to the death of
her brother-in-law, Sanjay Gandhi, and the assassination of her husband,
Rajiv Gandhi. Yet the Congress leaders must all pay homage to Sonia
Gandhi’s wisdom and character. Thus, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh
said that Gandhi’s recent resignation had once again shown her
to be India’s “tallest leader” and someone with “a
rare commitment to moral values.”
And the press—at least
as long as the corporate elite calculates the UPA is the best vehicle
for pursuing its neo-liberal agenda— joins in.