| Thrice was the crown offered, and thrice refused by a Caesar’s widow, Sonia Gandhi. Never in the history of the subcontinent has there been such an act of self-abnegation. Even Prince Siddartha’s repudiation of all his worldly goods to attain Buddhahood or Mahatma Gandhi’s mortifying penances cannot match this unprecedented gesture of self-sacrifice. It has taken an Italian-born Gandhi to demonstrate to Indian politicians the virtues of ahimsa, just as it took an Albanian-born nun to show Indians (and the world) that charity does not begin at home but in the slums of Kolkata. |
| Could it be accidental that both Sonia Gandhi and Mother Teresa happened to have been Roman Catholics, a religion once imported into India and which now like that other foreign faith – Islam - is being gradually marginalised within India? Can this latest rejection through the ballot box by the trans-religious spectrum of the Indian electorate be construed as a rejection of the BJP’s policy of Hindutva? Has the broad mass of the Indian public decided to rinse the saffron tilak off its forehead? Has India reverted permanently to secularism? |
| Only time and perhaps another election will tell. For the moment, the BJP and its cohorts are in disarray. They have been vanquished as the demons Sumbha and Nisumbha had been in the Devi Mahatmya poem, defeated by a fair Chandiki Devi. In the poem, the Devi, created by the devas through the accumulation of their tejas or cosmic energies, is taunted by Nisumbha for relying upon the support of her companion sakti forces. She then absorbs them within herself, to form a powerful and formidable coalition against her adversaries. |
| Mrs Indira Gandhi, who after the success of her war against Pakistan in 1971 was herself adored by her devotees as the militant Devi, must be watching this coup by her Congress party with wry amusement. Mrs Gandhi, once dismissed by the Congress Syndicate as her father’s housekeeper, in time followed him as prime minister. Sonia Gandhi, relegated to a role as her mother-in-law’s housekeeper, has gone one better. She has sidestepped that very office of prime ministership, and chosen instead to control a kitchen cabinet from her kitchen. To some observers, the key in Indian politics to the highest electoral office seems to hang on the chatelaine of a dead Prime Minister’s housekeeper.[EXTRACT] |
Published in DAWN 2 June 2004, titled: Sonia & her act of self-abnegation, and reprinted in WHEN BUSH COMES TO SHOVE & OTHER WRITINGS (2006). |
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