Sonia Gandhi Quotes

How much more does Sonia Gandhi’s son know about the past of the party of which he is now the vice president? Not very much. In Rahul Gandhi’s understanding of his party’s history, only five leaders have mattered: his mother, his father, his grandmother, his great-grandfather and Mahatma Gandhi, the only Indian politician whom he (and Sonia) have granted parity with their own family. Gokhale, Tilak, Rajaji, Azad, Kamaraj, even (or especially) Patel—these are merely names (and sometimes not even that) to the heir apparent. By

Together we can face any challenges as deep as the ocean and as high as the sky

Had Shastri been given another five years, there would have been no Nehru–Gandhi dynasty. Sanjay Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi would almost certainly still be alive, and in private life. The former would be a (failed) entrepreneur, the latter a recently retired airline pilot with a passion for photography. Finally, had Shastri lived longer, Sonia Gandhi would still be a devoted and loving housewife, and Rahul Gandhi perhaps a middle-level manager in a private sector company.

Sonia Gandhi and her son play an important part in all of this. Their job is to run the Department of Compassion and Charisma and to win elections. They are allowed to make (and also to take credit for) decisions which appear progressive but are actually tactical and symbolic, meant to take the edge off popular anger and allow the big ship to keep on rolling. (The best example of this is the rally that was organised for Rahul Gandhi to claim victory for the cancellation of Vedanta’s permission to mine Niyamgiri for bauxite—a battle that the Dongria Kondh tribe and a coalition of activists, local as well as international, have been fighting for years. At the rally, Rahul Gandhi announced that he was “a soldier for the tribal people”. He didn’t mention that the economic policies of his party are predicated on the mass displacement of tribal people. Or that every other bauxite “giri”—hill—in the neighbourhood was having the hell mined out of it, while this “soldier for the tribal people” looked away. Rahul Gandhi may be a decent man. But for him to go around talking about the two Indias—the “Rich India” and the “Poor India”—as though the party he represents has nothing to do with it, is an insult to everybody’s intelligence, including his own.) The division of labour between politicians who have a mass base and win elections, and those who actually run the country but either do not need to (judges and bureaucrats) or have been freed of the constraint of winning elections (like the prime minister) is a brilliant subversion of democratic practice. To imagine that Sonia and Rahul Gandhi are in charge of the government would be a mistake. The real power has passed into the hands of a coven of oligarchs—judges, bureaucrats and politicians. They in turn are run like prize race-horses by the few corporations who more or less own everything in the country. They may belong to different political parties and put up a great show of being political rivals, but that’s just subterfuge for public consumption. The only real rivalry is the business rivalry between corporations.

Es un momento histórico por otra razón, cargada de un simbolismo que demuestra la diversidad de la India, su capacidad para la convivencia y su creciente movilidad social. Sonia Gandhi, criada como católica, cede el poder a un primer ministro sij, nacido en 1932 en una familia muy humilde del Punjab occidental, hoy perteneciente a Pakistán, y conocido por su irreprochable honestidad. Y lo hace en presencia de un presidente de la República musulmán llamado Abdul Kalam, nacido en una familia paupérrima y experto en física nuclear. Hace menos de un siglo, nadie hubiera podido imaginar que esto pudiera ocurrir en el país donde hasta hace poco el nacimiento, y no el mérito, determinaba el curso de la existencia. Y hace tan sólo un mes, ¿quién hubiera podido predecir semejante ceremonia entre tres representantes de religiones minoritarias?

But his opinion that Sonia should enter politics was also based on his conviction that without a Nehru-Gandhi family member at the top, the Congress party would splinter and wither away. This view was also encouraged by members of the Delhi durbar—a ‘power elite’, to use sociologist C.Wright Mill’s term, comprising civil servants, diplomats, editors, intellectuals and business leaders who had worked with or been close to the regimes of Nehru, Indira and Rajiv. Some of them inhabited the many trusts and institutions that the Nehru-Gandhi family controlled. They had all profited in one way or another, over the years, from their loyalty to the Congress’s ‘first family’.

On 15 August 1997, during the occasion of fifty years of India’s independence, the Indira Gandhi Memorial Trust organized an international conference to which former Zambian president, Kenneth Kaunda, was invited. In previous years, all participants had been put up in Lalit Suri’s hotel on Barakhamba Road. For the 1997 conference, Sonia decided that all invitees would stay in the Oberoi Hotel. Kaunda arrived a day late and, like in previous years, he drove from the airport to Suri’s hotel. I informed Sonia of his arrival, and that he was staying at Lalit’s hotel. She was incensed and asked me to meet Kaunda and request him to shift to the Oberoi. It was a manifestly unreasonable demand. I had known Kaunda for many years but my errand was a painful one. When I told him about this, he said he had settled down and, after a long flight, needed rest. I conveyed Kaunda’s message to her. That should have ended the matter; it did not. Arrogance took over. She asked me to go back to Kaunda and ask him to shift to the Oberoi. I attempted to dissuade her but she did not relent. I told her she was being irrational. Kaunda was one of Africa’s most admired and respected leaders. He was twenty-two years older than Sonia. Indira Gandhi and Rajiv would never have behaved in such an insensitive manner. On hearing her second message, Kaunda said that this would put him in an embarrassing position. ‘What do I tell Suri?’ he asked. Kaunda could observe my discomfiture. I told him there had been a falling out. Kaunda agreed to shift after apologizing to Suri.

L.K. Advani wrote a personal letter to Manmohan Singh, putting forth the demand. Stories doing the rounds suggest that Manmohan Singh, the then prime minister, was not averse to it, but UPA chairman Sonia Gandhi would not agree.

A corrupt and dynastic political party is antithetical to the rule of law and to carefully crafted constitutional checks and balances to prevent abuse of power. A tendency towards autocracy and consequent institutional subversion is inevitable with a party thus configured. The result is a prime minister bereft of real power, subservient to the dynastic head and a mute spectator to the loot and plunder of the nation’s resources; a president who is a loyal camp follower and will faithfully rubber stamp the decisions ordained by the dynasty: witness how unhesitatingly President Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed signed the Proclamation of Emergency at Mrs. Gandhi’s bidding in 1975 and ponder whether Mrs. Pratibha Patil, (besieged as she was by her co-operative sugar factory in liquidation, her co-operative bank bankrupt, and her family embroiled in the murder case of a popular intra-party rival in Jalgaon at the time of her nomination by Mrs. Sonia Gandhi), would have done otherwise; or for that matter whether President Pranab Mukherjee, whose many acts of subversion of the Constitution during the Emergency have been documented by the Shah Commission, is so radically transformed that he would now protect it; a judiciary accused of judicial overreach when it censures the government or brings its ministers to book while its inconvenient judgments are subjected to review or Presidential Reference; a CAG whose findings against the government’s decisions are vilified as being patently erroneous, in excess of jurisdiction and even motivated, although that august body, the Constituent Assembly had opined that as the guardian of the nation’s finances, the CAG was as important a Constitutional functionary as the justices of the Supreme Court; a CVC appointed despite the taint of corruption and over the protest of the leader of the Opposition, whose appointment was finally quashed by the Supreme Court; and a CBI whose only role on empirical evidence is to falsely implicate political opponents and wrongly exonerate the regime’s members and cronies.

The evidence available and the behaviour of the Congress party, whether in power or out of it, to stall and derail any effective investigation into the Bofors case lead to a clear inference that Quattrocchi was the face of Sonia Gandhi, and that this was her share of the deal. In July 1993, the Swiss courts had permitted official naming of the account operators, including Quattrocchi. Yet, before the CBI could question Quattrocchi and detain him, he bolted from Delhi on the night of July 29-30 1993. It is common knowledge that this was made possible through the direct intervention of Sonia Gandhi and the Congress government. The spurious and slapstick efforts made thereafter to secure Quattrocchi’s extradition, the de-freezing of his accounts, the deliberate errors and gaps in documentation by the CBI that had the least intention of trying to extradite the accused Quattrocchi, only establish the misuse of the entire government machinery and tools to subvert legal processes and fool the people of our country.

But luck came Prannoy Roy’s way, when his longtime friend Arun Jaitley became the Information and Broadcasting Minister in October 1999 in the Vajpayee Government. All CBI moves to act against NDTV and Prannoy Roy for looting Doordarshan were put in the deep freezer. CBI could not move an inch because Jaitley as MIB totally blocked the actions of the investigating agency and it could not file a charge sheet in the case. And after 14 years, the CBI in 2013, during Sonia Gandhi led UPA regime filed closure report in trial court. The rest is history-The savior Jaitley continued to be present in NDTV screens with his off and on exclusive interviews.

After Sonia Gandhi-led UPA came to power with the support of Left parties in 2004, NDTV’s golden days started. NDTV became a go between Congress leadership and its Left partners. Money started pumping in NDTV from tax havens, violating all norms of Finance Ministry during P Chidambaram’s tenure. Padma Shri awards were granted to Barkha Dutt and Rajdeep Sardesai though NDTV was one of the originators of paid journalism; especially during the 10-year long Congress regime and was at last exposed in the Niira Radia tapes.

Severe illegalities of tax evasion were done by NDTV during Congress regime and P Chidambaram and Pranab Mukherjee were competing to dole out gifts to NDTV to please their master Sonia Gandhi who wanted the great injustice (sic) of stoppage on religious conversion undone.

Quand on aime, l'amour vous donne une force extraordinaire. Et rien ne vous fait plus peur. On ne se soucie que de la personne aimée.

At the Gay Hussar we had a brief discussion of a new biography of Indira Gandhi. Moni spoke against it, not because she had read it but because she had read negative reviews and because Sonia Gandhi had opposed it. Later Michael would take the same line, which I thought rather a poor show in a journalist and biographer. In some matters, Michael and his circle took a kind of partisan view of the world that boded ill for my own biography. Moni, in fact, would later intervene, imploring me not to publish the ‘Lamia’ story.

since 1989, all-India elections have been fought over such non-issues as the Bofors and hawala scandals, the reconstruction of a non-existing temple, reservations of a few thousand jobs in government service, the merits of a Vajpayee over a foreign-born Sonia Gandhi, or victory over a few hundred intruders in Kargil.

In 1998, when Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee was unseated by a vote of no-confidence, Sonia made an abortive bid to become prime minister. She was thwarted by Mulayam Singh Yadav who withdrew support to the Congress-led government after indicating an initial willingness to offer it.

Pranab was never so transparent either in expressing his disagreement or support. After returning from an important visit to Washington DC, Pranab chose not to brief the PM for three days. He had gone to see Sonia Gandhi but had not sought an appointment with Dr Singh. On the third day, I asked Dr Singh what had transpired at Pranab’s meetings with President Bush and Condoleezza Rice. ‘I don’t know,’ was his plaintive reply.

As Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, Congress president Sonia Gandhi and Rahul Gandhi — at the time party general secretary — smiled down at voters from billboards ahead of the general election in 2009, theirs was the picture of a Happy Family. Dr. Singh’s decisiveness in pushing through the Indo-U.S. civil nuclear deal and his deft stewardship of the economy made him the first choice of the middle class, established and aspirational, ensuring he was the party’s prime ministerial candidate again.

People who have known Sonia for years urge me not to swallow the line that she was never interested in politics and only allowed herself to be drafted into the leadership because of her concern for the party. A portrait is painted of a woman completely seduced by power but unable to wield it, lacking the skill, charm, vision, indeed everything except the hunger for power itself.

In that sense, Singh’s elevation as prime minister, sometimes heralded as a hallmark of the country’s progress in overcoming sectarian divides, was somewhat deceiving. He hadn’t originally become prime minister as a result of his own popularity. In fact, he owed his position to Sonia Gandhi—the Italian-born widow of former prime minister Rajiv Gandhi and the head of the Congress Party, who’d declined to take the job herself after leading her party coalition to victory and had instead anointed Singh. More than one political observer believed that she’d chosen Singh precisely because as an elderly Sikh with no national political base, he posed no threat to her forty-year-old son, Rahul, whom she was grooming to take over the Congress Party.

Most of all, India’s politics still revolved around religion, clan, and caste. In that sense, Singh’s elevation as prime minister, sometimes heralded as a hallmark of the country’s progress in overcoming sectarian divides, was somewhat deceiving. He hadn’t originally become prime minister as a result of his own popularity. In fact, he owed his position to Sonia Gandhi—the Italian-born widow of former prime minister Rajiv Gandhi and the head of the Congress Party, who’d declined to take the job herself after leading her party coalition to victory and had instead anointed Singh. More than one political observer believed that she’d chosen Singh precisely because as an elderly Sikh with no national political base, he posed no threat to her forty-year-old son, Rahul, whom she was grooming to take over the Congress Party.

Sonia Gandhi no end as perhaps she could not digest the application of law to the good Christian (Roy) serving the cause of God – so what if he stole a few pieces of silver?

NDTV was attracting several investors during the UPA regime. Mukesh Ambani and Naveen Jindal’s father in law’s Oswal Group were funding NDTV. Niira Radia tapes tell us that she brought Mukesh Ambani to NDTV. One must remember that these were the days of 2G, Coal, Krishna Godavari (KG) Basin scams[8] under the leadership of Sonia Gandhi. NDTV was accepting money from all the culprits in the scams. Now it is found that NDTV even had a money trail of $40 million from Malaysia’s Maxis Group which was illegally allowed to take over Aircel mobile phone operator by Sonia Gandhi’s Finance Minister P Chidambaram in 2006[9]

Without any qualifications whatsoever, Sonia Gandhi fancies herself as an uncrowned empress of India and has psychologically bulldozed her similarly unqualified son into believing that India’s prime ministership is his birthright. For a long time I did not believe that he would succumb to his mother’s monarchical passion. It was in November 2008, after the monstrous terrorist attack in Mumbai, that I started having doubts.