Varun Gandhi: The Congress’ cousin card

There is something starkly different between being a Gandhi–or Nehru-Gandhi to be precise–and at the same time being a part of the Bharatiya Janata Party. But in the case of a young member of Parliament from Uttar Pradesh such as Varun Gandhi, the relationship between the two is not only as old as the time he took his first steps into politics but is also the second generation. His mother Maneka Gandhi has been and continues to be a Central Minister in the BJP Government and this has been so right from Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s time. Thus, Varun virtually carries the twin-legacies emanating from Nehruvian values as also those learnt or imbibed from the Sangh Parivar for nearly a decade.

Given the inherent and natural difference between these two diverse streams, the question that hangs is just how comfortable can Varun or his party be with each other? There may not be any firm answers to this at the moment but there have been times when signs of uneasiness between Varun and his party became visible. This happened as recently as when he became the target of the party satraps for his advocacy (through a newspaper column) for refugee rights for the Rohingya Muslims who are fleeing from Myanmar in their bid to escape the wrath of State’s military and the indifference of the majority Buddhist population.

The Minister of State for Home Affairs, Hansraj Ahir, took umbrage at Varun’s stand and went so far as to flaunt national interest before Varun, making him relent a bit. Somehow, soon after Varun tried to come onto the same page as the party by taking the plea of not challenging the BJP’s stance on Rohingyas but seeking a national policy vis-à-vis giving asylum in genuine and deserving cases. However, the BJP found itself in the throes of another storm kicked off by an old party hat, Yashwant Sinha.

The former Union Finance Minister came down heavily on the state of economy presided over by Arun Jaitley for the past three years amid his other preoccupations related to Defence, Information and Broadcasting and Corporate Affairs besides urgent party matters.

Soon issues related to Jaitley’s economic management overshadowed most other things including the little row created by Varun’s worries about refugees amid his party’s attempts to shut doors on the Rohingyas.

Yet, the exchange between him and Ahir brought out the gap in the thinking of the lone Nehru-Gandhi heir in the BJP and his party into the open. This is not a generational gap as Sinha and a few other veterans such as LK Advani and Murli Manohar Joshi find themselves in the cold. Unlike these BJP stalwarts, Varun has age in his favour and is capable of thinking differently or even out of the box. So much so, that at one point before the February-March polls in Uttar Pradesh, the BJP toyed with the idea of making him the party’s candidate for the post of Chief Minister so as to take on the equally young Akhilesh Yadav while serving as a foil to his Congress cousin, Rahul Gandhi.

Somehow, the BJP dragged its feet in the case of UP where it put out another party MP, Yogi Adityanath, for the top post of the state following an astounding verdict in the polls in its favour. And this obviously cannot be supposed to make Varun any happier. So ever since he is being kept in reserve for maybe some future vacancy suitable for his abilities and stature. Somehow, the last of the two has certain illustriousness appended to it because of his being from the same Nehruvian stock to which Rahul Gandhi also belongs.

Though of late the BJP and more so the party chief, Amit Shah, have been berating, in fact, ridiculing, the dynastic trend given to politics by the Congress, the fact is that initially, or back in the 1990s, Maneka was welcomed by the BJP to the party fold mainly because she has been popular and thus intended to carry on the legacy of her husband Sanjay Gandhi in politics.

And Varun only followed her footsteps. Ever since their entry into the BJP, or perhaps even before that, both mother and son have been politically distant from the other Nehru-Gandhis of the Congress. Yet, this could not remain so socially when Varun, Rahul and Priyanka Gandhi grew up together. So much so that both Rahul and Varun have never campaigned against each other though now their parliamentary constituencies virtually touch each other.

So the question that palpably dogs politics is whether the present generation of the Nehru-Gandhis, including Varun, is under watch for the little affinities that together the first cousins of the country’s most politically-oriented family may have or may develop in the times to come for each other despite their being in different parties. This appears to be more likely since the BJP has been trying to keep Varun waiting for a bigger role than being a mere MP from Sultanpur irrespective of the possibility whether this is going to be in the party since he has earlier been a BJP general secretary, or in the Narendra Modi’s Government.