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| Saturday, 7 August 2004 |
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Young Gandhi discovers limits of Indian politics by Simon Denyer AMETHI, India, (Reuters) - It starts as soon as Rahul Gandhi leaves his constituency home in northern India, hundreds of men and women crowding forward for a few seconds to press their demands through his open car window. An old man with an enormous handlebar moustache wants help for his family's medical costs, a shifty young man wants a job, another wants Gandhi to help his son, who he says has been unfairly failed on a school exam. The young Congress member of parliament - widely fancied as a future prime minister - listens patiently to each supplicant. Letter after letter is passed through the window, and into a large canvas bag in the back. "It's a free-for-all," Gandhi says as his car crawls through the crowd. "When my father was here he did a lot for this place, and they expect that." The latest member of the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty to enter politics is rapidly discovering for himself the enormous expectations his election to parliament in May has generated - and the limits to what he can do. When his father, Rajiv Gandhi, was prime minister and MP for Amethi he showered the constituency with money, development and jobs. After his assassination by a suicide bomber in 1991, very little has been done here. Today Rahul's mother, Sonia Gandhi, is arguably India's most influential politician, but even she cannot help Amethi without cooperation from the state government of Uttar Pradesh. Rahul is allotted just $430,000 a year for development in Amethi, enough, he says, to build just 10 km (6 miles) of roads in a 600 square km (230 square mile) constituency. "I am elected to bring development but I am not empowered," he said. "My hands are tied." Gandhi returned to India in 2002 after studying at Harvard and several years working for a computer firm in Britain. At the time few people foresaw greatness for the quiet, bespectacled young man. Today, astrologers are not the only people predicting he will one day lead India. "I think people need to re-jig their expectations," he told Reuters. "If I went by people's expectations I would go mad." Rajiv Gandhi was thrust into politics and leadership after the assassination of his mother, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, in 1984. Rahul, who describes his father as his "hsero", is determined to learn politics at his own pace. Sensitive to criticism that he has no qualifications for a political career - beyond his family name - he acknowledges he still has "a lot to learn about life". For now he is concentrating on his new constituency, touring villages, listening to people's demands. It is far too soon, he says, to talk of him as a minister, let alone a prime minister. "There are a lot of other people with a lot more experience who can become ministers," he said. "I am 34 years old, I need to be in a phase of understanding as opposed to executing." Gandhi says "something clicked inside" when he was just 21 years old and carrying his father's ashes back by train to the family's ancestral home in Allahabad in Uttar Pradesh. "When we entered UP, there was a huge crowd running with the train, very emotional and upset," he said. "I felt then that I had a certain responsibility towards these people." Since then Rahul has grown up abroad, returning home with a quiet confidence but also with a strong sense of indignation at the poverty he is confronted with in India. He has something of the youthful energy and idealism of his father when he first entered politics. There is something, too, of his grandmother's crusading zeal to eliminate poverty, and of the principles of her father, India's first post-independence leader, Jawaharlal Nehru. "Of course I have always had my family breathing down my neck," Gandhi says when asked what had shaped his views. "My grandmother actively had disdain for rich people," he said. "She didn't have much respect for them, and I think the same is true of my great-grandfather." "In my family we have this thing for the underdog," he said. "If I see a person in a position of strength and they are abusing that, it makes my blood boil." Rahul is angry, too, at the "fanatics" and "fundamentalists" who have stoked communal hatred in India in the past decade, a swipe at the opposition Bharatiya Janata Party and their Hindu nationalist philosophy. Yet in the rough-and-tumble of Indian politics there is little time for idealism, and Gandhi is rapidly discovering the realities of the world around him. This is a country where many people enter politics to avoid criminal charges, where politicians and organised crime often go hand-in-hand, where several government ministers are themselves facing charges from corruption to murder. The young Gandhi's ideals are already facing a test. "If there were Congress ministers who were tainted, I'd have something to say about it," he said. "But the ministers are part of a coalition government, and obviously there are compromises that need to be made." "Criminalisation is a fact of life in politics. You just have to step outside, at the local level it is full of criminals. That is not something I like, and I will do everything to ensure it is stopped and solved." What is frustrating Gandhi at the moment is not just how little he can help his constituents, but also how little anybody around him cares. "It is in our power as politicians to help people on a reasonably large scale," he said. "But a hell of a lot of people are not interested... sometimes you feel you want to do something and you realise you're alone, or very limited." When his constituents ask for electricity, he can only appeal to the state government, which is run by a rival party. Gandhi says they are not helping. "Why should they?" So if Congress was in power in the state government, it would also decline to help constituencies run by rival parties? "Absolutely," he says with a wry smile. |
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