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Our Leader of the Opposition

I moved from Bombay to Delhi in the wake of the Indo-Pak War of 1965. (Unkind Delhiites have been known to growl that this was Marshal Ayub Khan's secret revenge on the Indian capital!) But this timing meant that I am one of the few to have seen both Indira Gandhi's first days as prime minister and Sonia Gandhi's debut as Leader of the Opposition. The latter has been making a deliberate attempt to imitate her mother-in-law; how well has she succeeded?

Quite frankly, I think the Congress should start looking for a new leader. To date, Sonia Gandhi's performance in the Lok Sabha has ranged all the way from the merely inconsequential to the truly pathetic. The Press gallery is still chuckling over the way she wished the prime minister good health when he was down with flu...

The Congress president decided to make her speech in Hindi. This was a mistake -- trying to speak in an Indian language underlines just how much of a foreigner she is. And it was doubly an error because she can't actually read anything written in the Devanagari script, which meant that her speech had to be written in the Roman script used by English, French, Italian, and other European tongues.

Unfortunately for her, Sonia Gandhi doesn't know the architecture of the Lok Sabha very well. If she did, she might have realised that the Press gallery affords an excellent view of the front benches. Journalists watching from above saw the word Mananiya -- 'Honourable' -- written in large English letters at the beginning of the speech. (I should explain that members are expected to address the chair, and that the Speaker is commonly titled the 'Honourable Speaker'.)

What precisely was the object of this farcical exercise? Would Sonia Gandhi's good wishes have been any less welcome had she chosen to express herself in English? Contrarily, does anyone believe that the Congress supremo is somehow more 'Indian' simply because she chooses to flaunt her meagre stock of Hindi? And at the very least, it should be simple common sense not to display her ignorance of Devanagari to the world. If nothing else, Sonia Gandhi should invest in a new pair of spectacles so that she wouldn't need to write in such large letters that they are visible from the Press gallery.

And I would also suggest that she should take lessons in Hindi in the privacy of those giant walls that guard 10, Janpath, not in the Lok Sabha chamber. Because it is now a common sight to see the Leader of the Opposition nervously asking Madhavrao Scindia (her deputy in the Lok Sabha) to vet her speeches for errors.

Piling error upon error, she also asks the same favour of P M Sayeed -- a Congressman but also deputy speaker. (It is an unwritten rule that the holder of that office shouldn't be seen displaying any untoward bias; I certainly can't recall any previous deputy speaker acting as a consultant to the Leader of the Opposition.)

You could argue that these are relatively minor matters of procedure; yes, but Sonia Gandhi has also displayed her immaturity in political issues. There was the way in which the Congress MPs made asses of themselves over the inclusion of Rajiv Gandhi's name in the Bofors chargesheet. There was the aborted attempt to nail senior ministers over the Ayodhya issue. And most recently there was the way in which she leapt to her secretary's defence when rumours arose that he was involved in some scam or the other.

Vincent George, secretary to the Nehru-Gandhis since Rajiv Gandhi's day, is no stranger to controversy. (An anonymous letter giving details of his supposed misdeeds is rattling around Congress circles in Delhi; it has, of course, been leaked to the media.) But I never expected a Leader of the Opposition to be quite so vehement about contradicting a newspaper report. Nor have I ever heard an employer refer to a secretary as George-saheb -- or was that just Sonia Gandhi's fabled politeness?

Whatever it was, did Sonia Gandhi really expect the rest of the Opposition to rise to the defence of her private secretary? Quite honestly, it is hard to find Congressmen who like the man (though most are too scared to say so openly).

There were 233 members of parliament in the twelfth Lok Sabha who were prepared to back Sonia Gandhi's bid for the top job. Given her pathetic performance as Leader of the Opposition, the Congress president will be hard-pressed to find even half that number in this Lok Sabha.

T V R Shenoy