My political career made and unmade by Gandhis: Mani Shankar Aiyar

In an interview with PTI Videos on his forthcoming book “A Maverick in Politics” published by Juggernaut, Aiyar said he “has had it all” but, at the end of the day, he was “completely isolated in the party”. However, he maintained that he was still a member of the party and asserted, “I’ll never shift, and I will certainly not go to the BJP”.

Asked about the patronage from the Gandhis, Aiyar said, “If you want to be successful in politics as an individual, you have to have a very strong base. Either you have a constituency where you’re not defeated or you’re undefeatable, or you have a caste base or you have a religious base. I had none of these.”

“I only had patronage. I had the favour of (former) prime minister Rajiv Gandhi. I then had the favour of Sonia Gandhi. But that’s a very, very uncertain basis on which to be in politics. So when Sonia Gandhi got angry with me in 2010, that patronage got withdrawn. And yet not completely withdrawn,” he said.

Aiyar added that on a personal level, she continued to have some affection for him.

“So it was a very slow decline. But it was a decline that took place over a period of about 15 years… And then, once Rahul Gandhi came in, I thought it was going to go up. Because he said to me that where he used to agree with me 75 per cent, he said ‘now I agree with you 100 per cent’,” the former Union minister told PTI.

“And then proved that he agreed with me 100 per cent by asking his mother to remove me from the only position I had in the Congress, which was as the national convenor of the party’s Panchayati Raj Sangathan, named after Rajiv Gandhi. And then refused to meet me, or most of the time refused to meet me. With the result that today, I am completely isolated,” he said.

So, Aiyar said, the very family that gave him the opportunity had withdrawn that opportunity from him.

“The reason given is that I’ve had it all. And I have. I’ve been a member of Parliament on the Treasury benches. I’ve been a member of Parliament on the Opposition benches. I’ve been a minister. I’ve been out of the ministry and still an MP. So I’ve had it all. But at the end of the day, I am completely isolated in the party,” he said.

For 10 years, he was not given the opportunity to have a one-on-one meeting with Sonia Gandhi or spend any meaningful time with Rahul Gandhi, the veteran leader said.

“And I have not spent time with Priyanka except on two occasions. And she comes on the phone to me, so I’m in touch with them. So the irony of my life is that my political career was made by the Gandhis and unmade by the Gandhis,” he told PTI.

Aiyar detailed his “decline…fade out…fall” in a chapter of his books.

In a 2010 interview, Digvijaya Singh had echoed his views in tackling Naxalism, Aiyar says in the book.

Towards the end when Singh was asked whether he had brought his views to the attention of then home minister P Chidambaram, he had replied by describing Chidambaram as “arrogant” and “unwilling to listen to advice”, he says.

He then narrates how the following day, a TV reporter asked for his reaction to Singh’s interview, and referring to the remarks on Naxalism, he had said, “I agree with him ‘one lakh per cent’”.

“Towards the end of the interview, the reporter asked whether I shared Digvijay’s opinion of the Union home minister P Chidambaram. I cautiously replied that as PC was a senior colleague of mine from the same state of Tamil Nadu, I would not like to comment on him,” he says.

“Typical of television news broadcasts, when the interview was telecast, the ‘one lakh per cent’ comment was highlighted and the ‘no comment’ on Chidambaram was deleted,” Aiyar says in the book.

He goes on to narrate how just an hour before his swearing-in as a Rajya Sabha member on April 15, 2010, he got a “furious tongue-lashing” on the phone from then Congress president Sonia Gandhi over the issue.

Aiyar goes on to detail several controversies, including the 2017 “neech” remark row and his subsequent suspension from the party.
He narrates how his distance with the Gandhi family increased with that incident, saying one could date his fall precisely to December 7, 2017, when he had made the comment.

“After I returned from Goa in early January 2018, I waited for the members of the AICC Central Disciplinary Committee to get back to me. None did. So, I called them. The Three Musketeers said they were yet to meet the newly sworn-in Congress president, Rahul Gandhi, while earnestly reiterating their plea to me not to reply to the show cause notice until they had met Rahul and got back to me. They never did,” Aiyar says.

Meanwhile, Rahul Gandhi kept me away “as if I were a political leper”, he says.

“This farce went on for the better part of six months. Then, on the eve of my wife and I leaving for Boston to spend a few weeks with our daughter, who was teaching at MIT, I called Priyanka and requested her to convey my birthday greetings to Rahul on June 19 while I was away,” he says.

Aiyar says she asked him why he could not send his wishes himself and seemed quite taken aback to learn that he was not allowed to communicate with Rahul Gandhi till his suspension was revoked.

“She started asking how, in that case, I was in touch with her, and quickly corrected herself to say, ‘Ah! I see, because I am not in the party!’ She then suggested I send her my greetings and she would pass them on to her brother,” says Aiyar.

“As there were still a few weeks to go for the birthday, I thought this was a window of opportunity to press my case for re-induction into the party. Accordingly, on the Delhi-Doha sector of our flight to Boston, I drafted my plea for revocation of my suspension, thinly disguised as a letter of birthday greetings,” he says.

“When we landed at Doha, I handed over my draft to (my wife) Suneet. She was scathing. ‘Don’t you have any self-respect?’ she asked me. ‘Why are you cringing like this?’ I honestly did not know. That was the standard mode in which Congressmen begged and pleaded with their president for their rights,” he adds.

“Here I was, Suneet replied, begging on bended knees before a man 30 years younger than me. For what? After three decades of serving the party and standing up for his father?” he says.

“So, on the next sector, Doha-Boston, I rewrote the letter. Suneet took the draft from me and quickly glanced through it. She chastised me once again: Did I not have, she repeated, any self-respect? Did I have to crawl to demand my right to a hearing, to seek justice and fairness, to make my case before the person responsible for my arbitrary suspension?” he says.

“What was I after? A small corner in the Congress sun after having proved my worth over the past quarter of a century? Did I not realise that I was being made a scapegoat by people who wanted to save themselves? Could I not see that as they had no further use for me, I was being discarded like soiled tissue paper? Why not just walk away with my honour intact?” he says.

Don’t run after them, his wife admonished Aiyar, especially after the abominable way in which he had been treated, according to the book.

“I withdrew my second draft and embarked on a third. That she refused to even see. The rest was up to me. I sent off the third draft and waited weeks for a reply. When it did come, it was just a routine letter of thanks for the birthday greetings that Rahul must have sent to hundreds of people,” he says.

Then, all of a sudden, K Raju, IAS (Retd), at the time one of Rahul Gandhi’s closest aides, dropped in to confidentially inform him that he was being re-inducted into the party on Rajiv Gandhi’s birthday, August 20, and that he would have a meeting with Rahul Gandhi on the day, according to the book.

The suspension was revoked but the meeting did not materialise.