Indian Dynasty Grooms Its Next Political Star

Most people in this farming region haul their water home in buckets. It’s often so dirty it makes them sick. Their roads are rutted like washboards. Half the time, they have no electricity.

For more than 25 years, this deprived district has been the Gandhi family’s political finishing school, where the heirs of India’s most privileged dynasty are groomed for power.

Amethi’s voters recently sent Rahul Gandhi, 34, to Parliament for the first time. His late uncle Sanjay once held the seat. So did his father, former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi. In 1999, eight years after his father was assassinated, his mother, Sonia, also won the right to represent Amethi.

Last month, she was poised to become India’s prime minister after the Congress Party she leads won national elections. By refusing the post and choosing to wield power behind the scenes, Sonia is shrewdly holding open the door to the prime minister’s office for Rahul, says biographer Rasheed Kidwai, who knows her well.

Sonia was born and raised in Italy, but Kidwai calls her “a very Indian mother” because she wants her son to take up the family mantle instead of his younger sister, Priyanka Gandhi Vadra, who is considered smarter and politically sharper.

“Nobody, to my knowledge, had ever asked [Sonia] about Rahul’s political future. She was always asked about Priyanka’s political future,” says Kidwai, a journalist and author of “Sonia: A Biography.”

“But mother Sonia -- an Indian mother -- would always make it a point to bring son Rahul in,” he says. “Rahul has gone more to his mother’s side: He is shy and doesn’t like to seek the limelight.”

Like his father before him, Rahul was a reluctant politician. Both men’s mothers prodded them into politics.

Rajiv’s mother, former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, forced him to lead the party -- against Sonia’s wishes -- after the matriarch’s first choice, younger son Sanjay, died in a 1980 plane crash. Sanjay’s widow, Maneka Gandhi, is now a member of Parliament for the opposition Bharatiya Janata Party, which draws much of its support from Hindu nationalists.

Maneka thinks her sister-in-law outsmarted her opponents by refusing to be prime minister, ending the argument over her foreign roots but allowing her to keep control over the government.

She isn’t shy about her influence, Maneka says.

“I think she’s the power in front of the throne. I don’t think she makes any bones about the fact that she has avoided the flak that would have gone with the position, but she has no intention whatsoever of relinquishing any of the power of the position.”

Sonia says she was driven to lead the party, despite fears that she might suffer the same fate as her husband and mother-in-law, who was also assassinated, because she wanted to honor their sacrifices -- and the Gandhi name.

“I have photographs of my husband and mother-in-law in my office,” she told an Indian newspaper editor during the recent election campaign. “And each time I walked past those photographs, I felt that I wasn’t responding to my duty, the duty to this family and my country.

“I felt I was being cowardly to just sit and watch things deteriorate in the Congress [Party], for which my mother-in-law and the whole family lived and died.”

Sonia has Cabinet rank in the new government, but no portfolio. She heads a powerful committee that resolves disputes among coalition partners, ensuring a leading role for her in key policy decisions.

As president of the Congress Party, she appoints its top officials and is expected to name Rahul party secretary-general responsible for the battleground state of Uttar Pradesh -- where Amethi is located and Indira Gandhi ran for Parliament -- setting him up for dynastic succession.

But as Rahul’s star rises, his resume is coming under scrutiny, and critics are questioning whether he is fit to govern or simply a creation of Congress Party image makers.

“They are trying to build him up to become prime minister, but this won’t happen,” says Hriday Narayan Dixit, vice president of the BJP in Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous state. “His only ability is being the son of Sonia Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi.”

Harvard and Cambridge

Before Rahul entered politics this year, Indians knew little of him beyond what the media had reported: He went to Harvard and Cambridge universities; he worked abroad in jobs variously described as financial consulting, software engineering and brokering bank securities; and he is a charming, handsome bachelor with a reclusive Colombian girlfriend.

The Gandhi family guards its privacy carefully. In January, an attendant on a state-run Indian Airlines flight used his cellphone camera to snap pictures of Rahul, girlfriend Juanita, his sister and her two daughters on a holiday flight.

When the photos appeared in a few south Indian newspapers, Sonia Gandhi complained to the country’s aviation minister, and the flight attendant was fired.

Few who know Rahul well will speak about him, or his business, on the record. Rahul and his spokesman, Rajiv Shukla, a Congress Party member of Parliament, declined interview requests.

More than a year before Rahul officially became a candidate in April, the Times of India wrote that he had returned to India to set up a software exporting business.

The paper quoted an unidentified family friend who said Rahul is “very knowledgeable about technical and engineering matters” and, like his late father, has a pilot’s license. He is also a marksman, a skill that got him into New Delhi’s prestigious St. Stephen’s College on a sports scholarship when his grades couldn’t.

But Rahul didn’t have to swear to anything on his resume until April 3, when he signed an affidavit required of all candidates for Parliament.

In the declaration, he listed two educational qualifications: a 1989 high school diploma and a 1995 master of philosophy degree in development economics from Trinity College at Cambridge University.

Rahul’s affidavit does not mention an undergraduate degree. A Cambridge spokeswoman, who confirmed that Rahul was awarded his master’s degree, said students cannot enter graduate school without an undergraduate degree. She would not say how Rahul met that qualification.

He attended Harvard before Cambridge, but only took a few non-degree courses, according to biographer Kidwai.

In his affidavit, Rahul also said that he lives with his mother, does not own a car and, at the time of signing, had the equivalent of $555 in cash. He also had more than $92,000 in four Indian and British bank accounts, and $18,600 in his company’s account in Britain. He paid $403.75 in Indian income tax this year, the declaration says.

The only business interest that Rahul declared was Backops Services, of which he owns 83% of the shares.

The engineering firm was formed Feb. 28, 2002, with a capital investment of slightly more than $5,500, according to records in the Indian government’s corporate registry.

The company’s declared objectives fill more than 17 typed pages and include businesses as diverse as computer consulting, trading in chemicals and essential oils, prospecting for minerals, and manufacturing hospital supplies, textiles, trucks and airplanes.

Business Activities

Rahul is linked to at least three firms operating under similar names: Backops Services Private Ltd., Backops Engineering and Backops Ltd. Europe, whose foreign bank account is listed in his election declaration.

Neither Rahul nor any of his business associates would talk about the firms, and his business activities remain unclear.

Rahul is one of two corporate directors in Backops Services. The second director, who is also one of four shareholders, is Manoj Muttu, a retired air force wing commander. He is an aide to Sonia in Amethi district.

Sonia won the constituency in 1999 but stepped aside to make way for her son and now represents neighboring Rae Bareli. Muttu says he headed Sonia’s office in Amethi and supervised development projects funded by government money she received for her district.

Muttu, who adds that he hopes to do the same job for Rahul, says he could not answer questions about Backops because he is not in “the executive half of the company.”

The obscure world of a Gandhi scion’s business dealings is far from the hard realities of Amethi district.

Here, villagers know that with Rahul elected, they are likely to be rewarded.

That’s how it was when his father became prime minister and ordered the building of a state-owned aircraft parts plant in the district.

Dogged by corruption allegations, Rajiv lost power in 1989. After he was assassinated two years later as he campaigned for reelection, the aircraft plant closed down.

Gangaram Yadav lost his job on the assembly line and now sells stale samosas in his small teashop.

He has electricity only 14 hours a day. After 6 p.m., he works by the flickering glow of a kerosene lamp.

“We feel that if Rahul Gandhi becomes prime minister, he will be able to run the country well,” says Yadav, 45. “He has given us a commitment that he will work for development.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

Extending the line

Rahul Gandhi is the latest in a generations-long line of Nehru-Gandhi family members who have been at the center of Indian politics. The family is not related to Mohandas K. Gandhi, whose philosophy of nonviolent struggle helped India win independence from Britain.

Great-grandfather: Jawaharlal Nehru (1889-1964): Educated in England and practiced law before becoming a protege of Mohandas Gandhi; became president of the Congress Party in 1929. Was first prime minister of India, serving from 1947 until his death.

Grandmother: Indira Gandhi (1917-84): Nehru’s only child; married political activist Feroze Gandhi, who died in 1960. Served as prime minister 1966-77 and 1980-84; assassinated by bodyguards.

Parents: Rajiv Gandhi (1944-1991): Elected to Parliament in 1981; became prime minister after his mother was assassinated. Killed by a suicide bomber while campaigning to become prime minister again.

Sonia Gandhi (1946- ): Italian-born; elected to Parliament in 1999; turned down prime ministership in May but remains Congress Party president.

Uncle: Sanjay Gandhi (1946-1980): Indira’s second son, a controversial advisor to his mother during her first term. Won a seat in Parliament in 1980; died in a plane crash.

Sister: Priyanka Gandhi Vadra (1972- ): Served as her mother’s campaign manager and became something of a star on the campaign trail. Considered by some to be a future leader of the Congress Party.

Rahul Gandhi (1970- ): Won a seat in Parliament this year in his first try for public office, running in the family’s longtime political stronghold, Amethi.

Sources: BBC, World Book Encyclopedia, Times reporting. Graphics reporting by Tom Reinken.