NEW DELHI - The continuing political emergence of Priyanka Gandhi is the talk of India. Priyanka's pedigree is without equal in the country. Her grandfather was Jawaharlal Nehru, India's prime minister on independence in 1947, her grandmother was Indira Gandhi, her father Rajiv Gandhi, each a prime minister of India, and her mother is Sonia Gandhi, leader of the opposition Congress party. Priyanka, 32, a graduate in psychology from Delhi University, is a mother of two children, which occupy most of her time, including such media opportunities as an evening out at the visiting Russian circus recently. Nevertheless, she still finds time to be active in the Delhi social circuit as her husband likes dancing, and she helps him in his jewelry business. Hereditary alone, though, should not qualify Priyanka as a future prime ministerial candidate of the world's largest democracy, but it certainly helps. The media frenzy surrounding Priyanka was set off by the Chief Minister of the state of Madhya Pradesh, Digvijay Singh, who belongs to the Congress party, who called on her to campaign for the party in the state's upcoming elections. The four states of Delhi, Chattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan go to the polls on December 1 in what is widely seen as a precursor to the main battle between Congress and the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in general elections due in a year's time. Singh's call to Priyanka came amid reports suggesting that he could be defeated. Such is Priyanka's stature and influence that any political action of hers attracts attention, albeit often negative. In a recent episode, Priyanka helped a dalit (a person of a lower caste), which had Mayawati, who goes by one name, India's dalit leader and then chief minister of the biggest Indian state, Uttar Pradesh, take very public umbrage. And the media can't get enough of it. A few months ago, the political firmament was engaged by weighty issues such as possible Indian troop deployment in Iraq, when came a snippet about Priyanka. She was supposed to be meeting some inconsequential party functionaries at an undecided venue, in her spare time. It was enough to set the TV cameras, with heavy equipment to allow live updates, preying in the capital heat, as nobody knew where exactly the gathering was to take place.
Heavyweight political commentators - torn from topics of more substance - were quickly wheeled out to pontificate on Priyanka. Will she take the plunge into fully active politics? And if she does, then what? What about her relations with her brother, Rahul, her husband, her in-laws, her actual age, her two kids, who looks after them, the maid or Sonia? ... ad nauseam. And of course, never far from any discussion of Priyanka is that fact that her mother is Italian born. So what does that make her? Strangely, Rahul, who is older, and who comes from exactly the same lineage, is rarely talked about in political terms, and this in a society where sons are generally preferred to daughters. To some, Priyanka's predicament is a question of ordained gender rotation. First there was Nehru, then Indira, then Rajiv. Priyanka logically follows next as per a matrix (maya in Indian terms) that we humans cannot decipher. Critics describe it as a dynastic rule, blaming the Gandhis for perpetuating it, though each time it is the people who vote them in or out. Others aver to it as a national obsession, like cricket, that drives the country to bouts of irrationality that grinds all work to a halt when a match is on. As veteran journalist Inder Malhotra points out in his recent book Dynasties of India and Beyond, there are political dynasties all over the world. The new governor of California, Arnold Schwarzenegger, gained from his association with the Kennedy name - his wife Maria Shriver is the daughter of Sargent Shriver, brother-in-law of John F Kennedy and George McGovern's running mate in the 1972 presidential election. George W Bush is, of course, the son of Bill Clinton's predecessor. And even Al Gore comes from a famous American political dynasty.
Coming back to the Priyanka phenomenon, though, there are those who aver to the weakness in Sonia armory. Sonia carries all of the the Gandhi appendage, being the wife of the late Rajiv Gandhi, but her opponents never fail to remind the population of her foreign origin, as well as the law in even such an advanced country as the US that disallows a person not born in the country from becoming president. Sonia's supporters undergo a seasonal change of color on the foreigner issue. Last season, the powerful backward caste leader from Uttar Pradesh, Mulayam Singh Yadav, said that she is Indian as she is married to one (earlier Yadav said that she is foreign despite marrying an Indian). This season, Yadav is back to his anti-Sonia talk. Similar is the case with the powerful breakaway Congress leader Sharad Pawar, who fancies himself as a future prime minister. Thus, the foreigner issue is raised by friends and foes when it suits them. The tag is like a shadow, although Sonia does try her best and appears in the likeness of her famous mother-in-law Indira - in gait, in imperious style, in the clothes that she wears and even in her hairstyle that now sports a wisp of white, so distinctive of Indira.
Analysts say that Priyanka, on the other hand, is a natural - she doesn't need to be like Indira or Rajiv, she is bits of them, making women in the country who grew up idolizing Indira for the way she ran the country and tossed the fawning men around her, remark, "Oh God, she is just like Indira." These arguments are still not enough to qualify her as potential prime minister of India. The strongest argument is the dynamics within the Congress party, with the Gandhi name the only unifying umbrella. It also explains Sonia's ascent after the assassination of her husband Rajiv. Congress leaders are a conglomerate of hugely fragile egos and ordinarily think very low of each other, except anything phonetically Gandhi, which has the effect of collective subjugation. A similar assertion is now made about the BJP, which is in power, led by Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee. Sonia's Indira garb is going to be tested, in the general elections scheduled for the near future. If she fails, one Gandhi may replace another. In the sub-continent, daughters have a history of inheriting the political mantle, if not property, of their fathers - Pakistan's Benazir Bhutto, India's Indira Gandhi, Bangladesh's Hasina Wajed and Myanmar's Aung Sang Suu Kyi. Will Priyanka do so too? It is a billion-people question.
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