The recent denial of a party ticket for the coming Lok Sabha polls to Varun Feroze Gandhi highlights the endless roller coaster he has been on since his birth 44 years ago, soon after Indira Gandhi’s triumphal return to power in 1980. As the son of Mrs Gandhi’s political heir Sanjay Gandhi, his stars seemed very bright indeed. Yet within three months of his birth, Varun’s world started collapsing with his father crashing his two-seater plane.
Two years later, it slid further downhill after his doting grandmother banished his widowed mother Maneka for contesting her new political heir, elder son Rajiv. Efforts to snatch Varun from Maneka failed and he left the Gandhi household, a dazed two-year-old clutching his mother’s hand provoking banner headlines and photographs on newspaper front pages across the country. A little over two years afterwards, Mrs Gandhi herself was gone, shot dead by her Sikh security guards in vengeance for the Golden Temple operation by her government.
Varun's Constant Ups and Downs
In the violent aftermath of the assassination that sparked off bloody anti-Sikh pogroms, followed by an unprecedented record victory for the Congress led by Rajiv Gandhi, the fortunes of Maneka and consequently Varun appeared to dip further. She contested from her husband’s old constituency Amethi against his elder brother who thrashed her by over 270,000 votes. With Maneka poised on the edge of political oblivion Varun’s future political prospects seemed dim.
However, Varun’s roller coaster ride miraculously swung upwards again, along with his mother, as Rajiv Gandhi's term in office drew to a close in the late 1980s. Tainted by the Bofors scandal and deserted by key aides like VP Singh and Arun Nehru, Rajiv Gandhi lost power in the 1989 national elections to a motley gaggle of coalition parties led by the Janta Dal. Maneka’s joy was compounded by her own victory as a Janata Dal candidate from the Pilibhit Lok Sabha constituency.
Although she lost from Pilibhit to the BJP in the mid-term polls that followed after the shambolic fall of the Janata Dal government, she would win back the constituency in four successive elections before handing it over to her son Varun who she had introduced to her constituents at the age of 19 as her political heir. The youngest Gandhi in politics took to it like a duck to water. Bolstered by joining the BJP along with his mother, Varun in 2004 his entry to Parliament in the 2009 elections was spectacular getting nearly 420,000 votes more than both Gandhis in the Congress, his aunt Sonia and cousin Rahul and even more than his own mother. Interestingly his victory margin over his nearest rival was 10,000 votes more than the one that Rajiv Gandhi had scored over Maneka in 1984.
Varun’s political stature in the BJP grew in leaps and bounds with many senior leaders including Lal Kishan Advani, Murli Manohar Joshi, and Rajnath Singh secretly thrilled at what they felt was a huge political catch from the Gandhi dynasty. In fact, in 2013 he was made the youngest-ever national general secretary of the BJP pushing up his aspirations even further. He had already made a mark in charging up young workers in his constituency and slowly extending his influence to other parts of Uttar Pradesh as well.
No Future Left Him for Him in Today's BJP
Unfortunately for the rising political star the advent of the Modi-Shah juggernaut in 2014 knocked him from the pedestal that more senior BJP leaders had perched him. Varun had palpably less heft with the Prime Minister nor the then BJP president who had just electorally demolished the Gandhis, and he was increasingly seen as a brash upstart who had too many independent ideas to be trusted in a party where blind faith in the supreme leader was the touchstone to success. The young Gandhi’s woes worsened with the rise of Yogi Adityanath as the ruling deity of Uttar Pradesh after the 2017 state assembly polls leaving hardly any scope for other claimants to political clout.
While Varun has managed to win comfortably two successive parliamentary polls after his maiden victory making it three in a row, he has been systematically marginalised both in Uttar Pradesh and at the national level.
Dogged by his shifting stars he has twisted and turned to stay politically relevant - sometimes spouting Hindutva hate rhetoric but often analysing serious bread and butter issues, paying obeisance to the top leadership but raising his voice on behalf of the protesting farmers and privately keeping in touch with the Opposition including his estranged Gandhi cousins and aunt Sonia even as he doggedly refuses to break with the BJP.
Unfortunately, despite knowing he has no future left in the BJP under the present leadership, Varun’s options to carve out an alternative political career are limited. The Congress nor the Samajwadi Party have little inclination to accommodate him in a meaningful position and he has wisely not been lured by friendly gestures from the Opposition considering the very tentative poll prospects of the latter.
Varun can only keep on keeping on in the hope that one more turn upwards on his personal roller coaster in the guise of a drastic political shakeup both within the ruling party and the Opposition in the near future.
(The writer is a Delhi-based senior journalist and the author of ‘Behenji: A Political Biography of Mayawati’. This is an opinion piece. The views expressed above are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for the same.)
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