For many years, BJP MP Varun Gandhi was, for most of India, a bewildered-looking child clad in white on the sidelines of a series of tragic family funerals that dogged the Gandhis in the 1980s. After that, he was the man who was arrested, at the height of an election campaign in 2009, for alleged hate speech (subsequently acquitted in court).
A few years on, he has, in defiance of party discipline, spoken out for farmer groups protesting against the three farm laws passed by Parliament last year, and called out efforts by a film actor to denigrate India’s freedom struggle.
From being the BJP’s ‘Gandhi’ to opposing the party line on the farmers protest and the Lakhimpur Kheri incident, Mr. Gandhi has defied easy categorisation throughout his life, but there is a definite trajectory to his evolution from a politician who was accused of hate speech to a political moderate within the BJP.
Born in New Delhi in March 1980, he lost his father when he was just three months old. With his mother, former Union Minister Maneka Gandhi, estranged from the larger Gandhi family, he remained out of the Congress fold. Political ambition, however, ran deep in him. Even before he was 25 (the legal age when one can contest polls), Mr. Gandhi joined the Atal Bihari Vajpayee-led BJP in 2004.
For a party that decried dynastic politics, the pride it took in recruiting a member of the Gandhi family was one of the paradoxes of Indian politics. As one BJP parliamentarian told this reporter once, “After all, we may own a (M.F.) Husain painting, but Varun Gandhi owns a Husain of himself (a painting of Varun as a child with his mother Maneka Gandhi)!” Both the BJP and Mr. Gandhi, according to many, seemed aware of this distinction.
First election
All that was put to test in the 2009 general election, when Mr. Gandhi contested, for the first time, from Pilibhit, Uttar Pradesh. By all accounts, it was a difficult election but Mr. Gandhi won with a handsome margin. He did, however, create headlines for all the wrong reasons for allegedly indulging in hate speech at a public rally and was later arrested and acquitted in that case. That cast a pall on the young leader, but it was something he worked hard to overcome, he later told this reporter. During his incarceration in Pilibhit’s District Jail, he befriended two Catholic nuns from Kerala who used to visit inmates as part of social work. He asked them to pray for his release. And once out of jail, he financed their trip to the Vatican.
His subsequent political rhetoric has steered clear of communal bias, and he has written much on the rural economy and spent generously from his local area development fund as an MP.
Mr. Gandhi has, however, repeatedly chafed under the yoke of party discipline. As general secretary of the BJP in charge of West Bengal in 2013, he contradicted the party line by stating that public rallies attended by then Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi in the State were not as well attended as claimed. The ascendancy of Mr. Modi, both in the BJP and Indian politics, has been a development that forced many politicians to rethink their strategy for upward mobility. For Mr. Gandhi, too, the case has been the same.
He had already moved to a politically moderate position, after 2009, and was ready, by 2016, to target the chief ministerial position in Uttar Pradesh. Posters of Varun Gandhi as the future leader of the BJP in Uttar Pradesh sprang up overnight just as the party was to hold its National Executive meet in the then Allahabad in 2016, a year before the Assembly election. The party did not view these kindly and Mr. Gandhi’s attempts to push for a position came a cropper.
Uneasy stand-off
In the latest round in the stand-off with the BJP, Mr. Gandhi was dropped from the national executive of the party and his mother was not included in the Council of Ministers in 2019. His views on the Lakhimpur Kheri incident were seen as an open call to chart his own path. As of now, neither the BJP nor Mr. Gandhi is willing to say more than what is already out in the public domain. The question that arises from all of this is whether Feroze Varun Gandhi, one of the inheritors of the Nehru-Gandhi legacy who turned into ‘the BJP’s Gandhi’, is now ready to be his own version of a “Gandhi”.
