Maneka Gandhi Maneka Gandhi

Sonia Gandhi Sonia Gandhi

Close to three decades ago, Sonia and Maneka Gandhi began a troubled relationship as daughters-in-law in Indira Gandhi's official residence. It is entirely fitting then that their latest bout is linked to Jawaharlal Nehru's official residence, Teen Murti Bhavan, which even amid the (admittedly fading) grandeur of the imperial city of Delhi presents itself as a proud monument.Once home to the British commander in chief in India it became, after Independence, the house of the prime minister. When Nehru died in 1964, the future of the "noble mansion" - to borrow an expression the great man used in another context - worried some people.As Raj Thapar, then publisher ofrecalled in her autobiography(1991), "It was within 10 days of Nehru's death that Indira (Gandhi) rang Romesh (Raj's husband) one morning, sounding desperate. Meher Chand Khanna, the then housing minister, had apparently sent his minions to ask her if they could remove the furniture and that she plan to vacate the house as soon as possible. She was alarmed, 'What shall I do?' she asked, almost in tears. He told her to sit tight."To ensure Lal Bahadur Shastri didn't move in, the Nehru Memorial Trust or Fund was hurriedly created and "Teen Murti was dedicated to the nation and the 'people of India'". In sum, it stayed with the Family, the Congress.

In the very year, the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library (NMML) was set up and took over much of Teen Murti Bhavan. The government-funded NMML and the private Nehru Memorial Fund (NMF) happily co-existed, with the Fund for some inexplicable reason being given five rent-free rooms. It was a nice single party arrangement.



On Thursday, November 22, 2001, the grip slackened a bit. The Prime Minister's Office (PMO) finalised the composition of the new society that would run the NMML for the next five years. A tortuous proxy war between Sonia and Maneka, Nehru's granddaughters-in-law, was beginning to tell.



Saw Culture Ministry as chance to get back at Sonia.

Wanted to remove Sonia from the NMML governing body.

Says her sacking was the result of a Sonia-PM POTO deal.

Was worried by Maneka's "proactive" role at ministry.

Conveyed her wish list on NMML society to Vajpayee.

Congress denies Sonia had any hand in Maneka's sacking.

The NMML is governed by a society of 33 members, 27 nominated by the government for five years and six ex officio representatives - including three secretaries to the government of India and, to confound incestuous confusion, one nominee of the Nehru Fund. From the old society, barely half a dozen - among themEditor M.J. Akbar - had been given a new term. Sonia was no more the president nor N.D. Ti-wari, veteran Congress politician, vice-president. They were only ordinary members, losing their jobs to Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee and BJP MP T.N. Chaturvedi.Old Nehru-Gandhi associates like Abid Hussain and H.Y. Sharada Prasad were no longer on the list, but Man-mohan Singh (Congress) and Sikandar Bakht (BJP) were. They were joined by Penguin CEO David Davidar,cartoonist R.K. Laxman and senior journalist Dileep Padgaonkar, Mammen Matthew, editor of the Malayala Manorama Group, and scientists Anil Kakodkar and M.G.K. Menon. Notable among those waved goodbye were Devendra Swaroop and K.R. Malkani, RSS-affiliated ideologues who had found a place in the society over the past two years courtesy midterm resignations.The list was not a victory for either the Congress or the BJP. Rather, it was the PMO dispensing old-style patronage. Nor did the unusually large media contingent seem to fit into the NMML's avowed purpose of promoting scholarship in modern Indian history. Nevertheless, Sonia's effective dethronement at the NMML - coming two years after she was removed as chairperson of the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts (IGNCA) and made an ordinary trustee - meant a minor truncation of a huge inheritance ().The PMO's decision also brought the curtain down on a week of riveting gossip. On Sunday, November 18, the prime minister had sacked Maneka as minister of state for culture - the agency overseeing the NMML and the IGNCA - and moved her to the insignificant department of programme implementation and statistics.Maneka had gone to town telling everybody she had been booted out - after only 78 days in the ministry - be-cause she was trying to free bodies like the NMMLfrom Sonia's clutches. She implied that a deal had been struck between Vajpayee and Sonia, in which the Prevention of Terrorism Ordinance would be backed by the Congress if Maneka were removed. "It was quid pro quo for POTO," says Maneka.Maneka came into the Gandhi household as Sanjay's bride in 1974. Sonia was already the established daughter-in-law, married to older brother Rajiv. The family bitterness intensified after Sanjay died in 1980 and, on March 28, 1982, Maneka left the prime minister's residence under, literally, the media's gaze. In 1984, after Indira's assassination, Maneka challenged Rajiv in the Amethi Lok Sabha constituency, running a sometimes crude campaign and taking the political rivalry beyond a point of return.The fires still burn. The immediate provocation was the November 19 inauguration of the controversy-ridden first building of IGNCA, India's premier culture promoter (). Sonia, Maneka's camp says, refused to attend the function if Maneka, as minister for culture, were seated on the dais. The Congress predictably denied this. Numerous other theories began doing the rounds as well.BJP spokesman V.K. Malhotra bizarrely claimed Jagmohan, tourism minister, had anyway been promised the Culture Ministry three months ago. The RSS, some observers divined, was behind Maneka's transfer because she approved of an M.F. Husain exhibition at the National Gallery of Modern Art (NGMA) and removed P. V. Krishna Bhatta, an ABVP man, as chairman of IGNCA's Bangalore regional centre.Certainly the most unique theory blamed everything on the dogs. Some time ago Maneka, in her capacity as an animal rights activist, had dashed off a letter to the South Korean ambassador in Delhi in protest against his country's practice of eating dogs. Maneka, sources in the PMOclaimed, had thereby caused a diplomatic incident and needed to be pulled up.When contacted, Maneka confirmed she had written the letter but added that this was her third communication with the ambassador in recent weeks. The first was a phone call "when we discovered a Korean-owned restaurant in Chennai was serving dog meat. I told him this was illegal". Soon afterwards, residents of Maharani Bagh - the south Delhi neighbourhood where Maneka stays - complained that the food habits of a Korean diplomat were causing stray dogs to disappear. Maneka was again on the phone and the "ambassador didn't deny the allegations".For Maneka none of this was important. What mattered was that she had been taking on Sonia. On July 23, a month and a half before Maneka became culture minister, the term of the NMML society expired. Maneka was convinced that the NMML's annual allocation of Rs 4.5 crore was being misused: "I wouldn't be surprised if money from here was being used to fund other Rajiv Gandhi Foundation projects."Such financial suspicions were complemented by intellectual misgivings. The personal papers of Jawa-harlal Nehru are stored at the NMML. Maneka says Disinvestment Minister Arun Shourie told her the removal of the Congress-Sonia hegemony from the NMML society would make these papers more accessible to scholars. So Maneka drew up a list of 50 names for the prime minister to choose from. It specifically excluded Congress politicians. Even so, only a few from it got the PMO's nod.The other side was not inactive. Congress sources admit K. Natwar Singh - the NMF's representative on the NMML governing society - and Man-mohan met the prime minister with a Sonia wish list that included senior par-tymen such as Rafiq Zakaria.Natwar denies this: "No such list exists. No message was conveyed." So was 10 Janpath alarmed at Maneka's "proactive" steps at the Culture Ministry? Suman Dubey, journalist and family confidant, says, "I never got the feeling that anybody was worried. There were fears Maneka may do damage to the institutions, not about anything personal."While it is tempting to see the politics of culture as abetween Indira Gandhi's twothis is, to be fair, not quite accurate.For one, it is Maneka who is doing most of the talking, leaking and alleging; Sonia is silent. You can attribute this to dignity or the fact that, as inheritor of the dynasty's edifice, she can speak through various proxies, an indulgence denied to Maneka. Even so, some allegations simply cannot be independently verified. For instance, Maneka says the recent Katherine Frank biography of Indira Gandhi - which Maneka successfully took to court after it claimed Sanjay and she murdered people - was masterminded by Sonia "just to forward her own image". Let anyone try and prove that.Next Maneka has a history of making loose statements that don't quite stand up to factual scrutiny. Even her theory that the osmotic relationship between the NMML and the NMF was responsible for keeping the Nehru papers from public view is not quite correct.In 1984, Nehru's papers were willed by Indira to Rahul Gandhi - just as Indira's papers were bequeathed to Priyanka and the royalties fromleft to Feroze Varun, Maneka's son. The NMML is the custodian of the Nehru papers, "owned" by Rahul - he can, theoretically, reclaim them. Royalties from any publications go to the NMF, of which Sonia is chairperson. It is a neat mix of national heritage and family property.The Nehru papers are divided into two sections - pre-1946 and post-1946. The first lot, says NMML Director O.P. Kejariwal, can be consulted by any scholar with his (the director's) permission. For a peek at the second set, sanction has to be sought from the Culture Ministry and Sonia, as legal representative of her son Rahul. Sonia's control of the papers is by virtue of family ties, not institutional office. Removing her from the NMML or even the NMF will not really help.In recent times, Sonia has allowed Frank and historians such as Sunil Khilnani, Judith Brown and Bimal Prasad to study the post-1946 papers. There are accusations that she is selective in her approval but that is an ethical issue, not a legal one.Finally, as culture minister, Maneka made herself more enemies than she can simply blame Sonia for. At IGNCA, she had arguments with trustee M.V. Kamath, who is hardly pro-Congress. She scoffs at IGNCA President L.M. Singhvi for "not attending office for two years". Singhvi counters by saying, "I'm there almost every other day." She wasn't happy with her predecessor, Ananth Kumar, who, a Maneka aide says, "left 700 files unsigned".Ananth Kumar's choice for the job of IGNCA secretary general, N.R. Shetty - professor of electronics and one-time vice-chancellor of Bangalore University - has had to experience "special reviews" ordered by Maneka. In a rejoinder, Shetty has criticised the "roving and fishing inquiries". At NGMA Maneka was seen as being overly influenced by the artistic and other sentiments of friend and Shiv Sena MP Pritish Nandy (see "Sales Pitch", INDIA TODAY, November 12, 2001). The list goes on.Maneka began her term well enough, rounding up former bureaucrats Bhaskar Ghose and Ashok Vajpai and crafts specialist Jyotindra Jain as informal advisers. "We met only once though, in September," recalls Vajpai. After that the woman whom an old associate describes as "unusually sharp but with many chips on her shoulder" decided to "open up far too many fronts".Politically, not everybody is happy with Maneka's sacking. Some in the BJP are upset and even embarrassed that she was "not allowed to go after her sister-in-law" and provoke Sonia into reaction. There is also the irony of BJP appointees in institutions like IGNCA defending what were long seen as Nehru-Gandhi white elephants. The party that once capitalised on political metaphors is coming to terms with the zeal of new converts.The NMML, for instance, has long been viewed as a body of accomplished but strictly leftwing scholars. BJP sources rue three successive NDA culture ministers - Murli Manohar Joshi onwards - have not been able to take on this "monopoly". In the words of one disgruntled BJP functionary, "The prime minister has, instead, perpetuated the old order, even bringing in Congress types like Singhvi." It's been a case of old cronies for old.That doesn't help Maneka. From Kalyan Singh to V. P. Singh, she says she is considering a host of political alliances. With assembly elections in Uttar Pradesh four months away, she talks of putting up candidates in at least 50 constituencies in and around her Lok Sabha seat of Pilibhit. It's a great boast that, one cynic carps, can be matched for vacuity only by Sonia's claim that the Congress is on the comeback trail in Uttar Pradesh. Oh these...