Priyanka storms into 2019 poll arena
From reluctant politician to a formidable opponent
NEW DELHI: For years, at every significant party event, Congress workers would demand an organisational assignment for Priyanka Gandhi, who would typically silence the chorus with a politely worded statement denying she nursed any political ambition.
In August 2014, for instance, after the grand old party was reduced to its lowest ever tally in the Lok Sabha and some reports suggested that she would be made a Congress general secretary, she dismissed such talk as “conjecture” and “baseless rumours”. “The constant conjecture about my assuming various posts in the Congress party and the manner in which this issue is brought up at opportune moments is incorrect,” Priyanka Gandhi said at the time. “I would be very grateful to all concerned if they desisted from encouraging such baseless rumours.”
Congress leaders had so far maintained that a decision on her role in the party would be taken by Priyanka Gandhi along with Sonia Gandhi and Rahul Gandhi. And that is precisely what happened.
TAKING THE PLUNGE
On Wednesday, Priyanka Gandhi, 47, finally took the plunge into active politics with her appointment as the Congress general secretary in charge of Uttar Pradesh East, having been content thus far to manage the election campaigns of her mother, Sonia Gandhi, in Rae Bareli and brother, Rahul Gandhi, in Amethi.
In January 2014, Rahul Gandhi had told Hindi daily Dainik Bhaskar, “Priyanka is my sister and friend. Besides she is an active member of Congress and that is why she is lending a helping hand to strengthen me and the organisation. I do not think she will have any electoral role.”
As the general election looms, Rahul Gandhi, 48, the Congress president, divided the party organisation in Uttar Pradesh, politically India’s most important state, accounting for 80 of the 543 seats in Lok Sabha, into two units. He handed over charge of UP West to Jyotiraditya Scindia, 48, who was elevated as Congress general secretary.
Known as a good speech maker and a crowd puller with a striking resemblance to her grandmother, the late Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, Priyanka Gandhi is expected to galvanise the Congress cadre not only in the eastern part, but across the state, and also give a much needed impetus to its revival efforts.
Ahead of the 2014 Lok Sabha elections, Priyanka Gandhi had also denied a media report suggesting that she was keen to contest the Varanasi seat against Narendra Modi but that she had been held back by party high command.
“No one in my family would ever stop me from contesting an election. My brother, mother and husband would wholeheartedly support me if I wanted to contest,” she had said.
“Always by your side in every phase of your life. Give it your best,” her husband, Robert Vadra, said in a Facebook post after the announcement.
FORGIVING FATHER’S KILLERS
On March 19, 2008, Priyanka Gandhi showed a compassionate side when she visited the Vellore central jail to meet one of the assassins of her father Rajiv Gandhi. After her more than an hour-long meeting with Nalini Sriharan, wife of Murugan who made the bomb that killed the former prime minister in 1991, and was also sentenced to death, she decided to forgive her father’s killers and said she had no objection to their release.
In an attempt to counter her aggressive campaigning, the BJP has often raised the issue of alleged controversial land dealings by her businessman-husband, Robert Vadra, whom she married in 1997.
Senior party leader Janardan Dwivedi once spoke about how the late former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, had told him about his daughter’s political interests in 1990. “She wanted to understand political events and political language. I have an evidence of it. But I don’t want to discuss it now. I can only indicate that in this context Rajiv Gandhi had told me something in 1990,” Dwivedi had said.
ELECTORAL DEBUT
She has so far dismissed speculation about her contesting the upcoming Lok Sabha election from Rae Bareli.
“There is no question of me contesting from Rae Bareli…my mother will contest from there,” she had said on the sidelines of a party function in Delhi in December 2017.
Priyanka Gandhi once said she had her own reasons to not run in elections. “My decision to not contest is personal. I will only change it when I feel from within that I should,” she had said. With Priyanka Gandhi accepting her first formal assignment in the party, the possibility that she may have changed her mind cannot be ruled out.