Author: Editorial
Publication: The Free Press Journal
Date: August 30, 2002
URL: http://www.samachar.com/features/300802-sify.html
The surprise attack on the Congress
President Sonia Gandhi's foreign origins by the Tamil Nadu Chief Minister
J. Jayalalithaa, is bound to revive the controversy centering around the
competence of a foreign-born Indian citizen to become prime minister. Whatever
the motive of the AIADMK supremo's gratuitous broadside against her at
this point of time , there is no denying that her barb hit the Congress
boss clear and hard. For, within hours of Jayalalithaa's frontal assault,
Sonia had her minions offer a counter defence. Though what the Congress
Party spokesmen said did not constitute a valid response to the core issue
of her foreign origin, nonetheless it did underline the Tamil Nadu Chief
Minister's changing positions on the subject.
To the extent that AIADMK boss had
given a letter of support to the then President K. R. Narayanan, following
the one-vote fall of the Vajpayee Government in 1999, backing the claim
of Sonia Gandhi to form an alternative government it showed her opportunism.
Yet, it did not take away anything from the validity of Jayalalithaa's
objections against Sonia's claim to prime ministership. The AIADMK chief
asserted at a press conference in New Delhi on Wednesday that to have Sonia
as prime minister would be a huge disaster. " It (Sonia becoming prime
minister) should not be contemplated. It will be a disaster for all right-thinking
and patriotic Indians," Jayalalithaa declared.
And taking recourse to election-like
rhetoric she thundered that " it was a crying shame and a pointer to the
moral bankruptcy of the Congress which was in the forefront of the struggle
to end foreign rule to do an about-turn." Quite clearly, the BJP and others,
specially the forlorn leaders of the Nationalist Congress Party who had
left the Congress Party on the question of Sonia's foreign origin, would
draw much comfort from Jayalalthiaa's unexpected broadside against the
Congress boss.
Though the Congress Party was quick
to question Jayalalithaa's motives behind the attack against its supreme
leader, the AIADMK circles debunked their defence later in the day by setting
the record straight over her purported support to Sonia's candidature for
prime ministership back in 1999. The AIADMK boss explained that though
Sonia had attended her famous tea party at which the strategy to pull down
the then Vajpayee Government was to be honed further, " but at no stage
did I support Sonia Gandhi as prime minister," Jayalalathiaa asserted.
She said that her candidate for prime minister after the fall of the Vajpayee
Government was the CPI(M) leader Jyoti Basu and not Sonia.
Since Jayalalithaa's words against
Sonia were bound to sound very pleasant to the BJP ears, there was much
speculation as to whether the Tamil Nadu Chief Minister was desperate to
curry favour with the NDA Government. Maybe she was. But, then, does that
take away anything from the basic question that she has raised about Sonia's
foreign origins and her decision to acquire an Indian passport good seventeen
years after she had struck a matrimonial alliance in the Nehru-Gandhi family.
Remarkable thing is that Sonia deemed
it right to become an Indian citizen only when her husband was obliged
to head the family firm, that is the Congress Party, after the premature
death of Indira Gandhi's chosen heir, Sanjay, in an air crash. That should
tell something about the degree of love and attachment Sonia had felt for
the country she was constrained to adopt and which she now aspired to rule
as prime minister. In sum, the issue raised by Jayalalithaa will not go
away.
Most Indians, urban or rural, educated
or uneducated, feel uneasy at the thought of a `foreigner' leading the
country. As Jayalathiaa said, in a nation of one billion people it was
a crying shame for the Congress Party to be led by the Italian-born au
pair with no merit whatsoever other than the fact that she was the widow
of the Nehru-Gandhi family.
