History will clearly recall Rahul as the Gandhi scion who lost his grandmother Indira Gandhi and father Rajiv Gandhi at a very young age. Yet, history seems to have forgotten the ‘other’ Gandhi who is also a product of same tragic circumstances.
Much like his cousin, Feroze Varun Gandhi has had a turbulent life. And yet his personal and political evolution has been markedly different from Rahul’s.
Varun the Poet
Varun Gandhi penned ‘The Otherness of Self’ in 2000, months after his initiation into politics by his mother, Maneka Gandhi. The book was reflective of a mind that yearned to remain disconnected from the everyday and the ordinary.
....All my thoughts in solitude
and then it seems like being all alone
is like being in a crowd...
– Excerpts from The Otherness of Self
It was this penmanship that had the likes of Atal Bihari Vajpayee and LK Advani sitting up and taking notice of the Gandhi who had, until then, been forgotten.
15 years later, Varun has released yet another anthology of poems, ‘Stillness’, that span myriad emotions.
Varun’s book, reviewers say, is a quiet, evocative collection of poems that speak of melancholy, loneliness, hope and desolation.
After all these years, I’m not sure I’ve understood my failure, After all these years I’m still not sure that its you who will decide my price
- Excerpt from the Poem ‘Hidden’ in STILLNESS
Interestingly, Varun’s political journey has also been a lonely, at times even desolate, one. The solitude his poetry talks of, could be reflective of Varun’s isolation in Indian politics.
Though Varun has a pocket borough in Pilibhit, carefully cultivated by his mother over the years, he may have hoped to make a bigger impact on Indian politics - a hope that has got him into trouble, more often than he’d like.
Varun’s Game of Thrones
Yeh panja nahi hai. Kamal ka haath hai... Yeh k###on ke gale kaat dega. Saare Hindu ek ho jao...
(This hand represents the Lotus. It will slit the throats of Muslims. All Hindus unite)
Almost as soon as Varun made this incendiary speech against Muslims in Pilibhit in 2009, his party - the BJP - distanced itself from his remarks, leaving Varun to clean up without their backing.
Though Varun had claimed that the footage had been doctored, the incident shot him into infamy.
In another speech, Varun even pledged to uproot all of Mayawati’s statues in Uttar Pradesh and replace them with Ram temples.
Yet, if you meet Varun Gandhi, he comes across as a quiet, humble young politician, not some ‘rabble rouser’. Perhaps those speeches were a case of trying too hard, the pressure of being a Gandhi in the saffron camp?
A thousand stories deep I lay my sense of regret. I kneel before the sigh of the sunset. I wait for the truth to smooth these rough silences. I wait for the night…..
- Excerpt from the Poem ‘Truth’ in STILLNESS
Being The ‘Other’ Gandhi
A 100-day old Varun’s fate was decided the day he lost his father to an air crash in 1980. Three years later, Indira Gandhi unceremoniously ousted his mother Maneka from the family home at Delhi’s Willingdon Crescent.
Until his sudden death, Sanjay Gandhi was the obvious heir to Indira Gandhi’s throne. Not his elder brother Rajiv. By that logic, had Sanjay lived on, Varun would have been next in line. He may have been PM some day.
But that was not to be.
Disowned by the Congress and the Nehru-Gandhi family, Maneka searched for support in those who were vehemently opposed to the Congress.
And it was Sonia and Rahul the Congress gradually turned to for leadership.
Rahul, the Inheritor. Varun, the Disinherited.
Rahul taking centerstage. Varun a mere bystander.
While Rahul’s flaws and absences are forgiven and forgotten by a Party desperate for a unifying leader, Varun remains insignificant in a party where he is simply a misfit.
And so he pours his talent, and speaks his mind, into an engrossing collection of poems, perhaps aptly titled Stillness.
What does it mean to want? Is it a licence to go forth expand and conquer? Is it a dilution of the core of the essence? Is it an animalism? In breaking the mould, Roaming hungered, hunted and scared; feverish. Not knowing whether the prey lies within
- Poem ‘Want’ from STILLNESS