On 9th August, Union Home Minister Amit Shah addressed the Lok Sabha during the Monsoon session of the Parliament. Amit Shah was replying to the no-confidence motion moved by the Opposition. He spoke for 2 hours and 13 minutes, breaking a 58-year-old record of the longest speech in the house. One of the key highlights of his speech was the mention of a poor woman named Kalavati.
Launching a scathing attack on Rahul Gandhi, the Home Minister said, “There is a leader in this House who has been launched in politics 13 times and he failed every time. I have seen one of the launchings. He went to a poor woman named Kalavati to have a meal and describe the heart-wrenching condition of hers here. His party was in power for six years after that. What did Kalavati get from them? Nothing. She received a gas cylinder, toilet, tap water, and free ration during the tenure of the Modi government.”
Rahul Gandhi and Kalavati
The story dates back to 2008, the year Congress first “launched” Rahul Gandhi in politics. Following the tradition of electoral outreach to the poor, the Gandhi scion met a woman named Kalavati Bandurkar in Jalka village of Yavatmal in Maharashtra amid the surging agrarian crisis in the Vidarbha region. Her husband had committed suicide and she was left alone to fend for seven daughters and two sons. Rahul Gandhi met Kalavati and reportedly gave her a cheque of three lakh rupees.
Rahul Gandhi’s visit garnered widespread media attention and financial aid began pouring in for Kalavati. He mentioned his meeting with Kalavati and another woman named Shashikala in his speech during the no-confidence motion moved against the UPA government in 2008. However, Amit Shah in his address in the Lok Sabha, during the no-trust motion against the Modi government last week, alleged that no one from the Congress followed up with Kalavati after Rahul Gandhi’s visit. He said that the house, electricity, gas, toilet, food, and healthcare was all given to her by the Narendra Modi government. Notably, two years after Rahul met Kalavati, her daughter and son-in-law reportedly committed suicide owing to debt.
Kalavati, who last met Rahul Gandhi during the Bharat Jodo Yatra, reportedly refuted the Home Minister’s claims. However, the entire episode has shed light on many such similar incidents from the past wherein the Congress dynasts met the poor only for photo ops, and political opportunism. While the Nehru descendants reap political benefits, the poor who get used are forgotten, to be lost in the pages of history in the following years. One such story is that of Rahul Gandhi’s grandmother, Indira Gandhi, and her ‘adopted daughter’ Sonkeshiya.
Indira Gandhi’s ‘adopted daughter’ Sonkeshiya
In the election year 1980, a bus accident in the erstwhile Deoria district in Uttar Pradesh created ripples in New Delhi. The death of a Dalit woman named Basarkaliya created an uproar among the locals of Narayanpur village in Kushinagar where she belonged. She was survived by her eight-year-old grandson Jaiprakash and six-year-old granddaughter Sonkeshiya. The government deployed Provincial Armed Constabulary (PAC) in the area in a bid to pacify the locals but this decision proved counterproductive.
A bunch of Dalit women from the village accused the PAC jawans of gang rape. The then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi herself had to pay a visit to the village for damage control. It is during this visit that Indira announced that she has ‘adopted’ the deceased woman’s granddaughter Sonkeshiya. The six-year-old Sonkeshiya made national headlines once. Indira Gandhi went on to win elections and was eventually assassinated in 1984. Sonkeshiya lost her brother a few years later. She was never visited by any Congress leader ever after to take account of her life.
Over 40 years later in 2020, the Yogi government came to the aid of Sonkeshiya, now a wife and a mother of three. With the efforts of Kushinagar MP Vijay Dubey, Sonkeshiya’s house got a toilet. Nebua Naurangia Block President Shashank Dubey also visited Narayanpur to take stock of Sonkeshiya and her village. The locals narrated their challenges and put forth their demands related to electricity, roads, drinking water, and drainage. The Yogi administration had also assured the provision of all government schemes for Indira Gandhi’s adopted daughter and her family.
1985: Rajiv Gandhi met Phanas Punji in Odisha, a woman who had sold a family member for just Rs 40, to buy some food
As mentioned earlier, meeting the poor has been more like an electoral tradition in Congress historically. Phanas Punji became the poster woman of Rajiv Gandhi’s visit to Amalapali village in the then Kalahandi district of Odisha in 1985. “I remain all about that visit. I am where I was when he met me,” she told Down To Earth in an interview in 2022. Her story reflected the extreme poverty that swept the district.
In March 1985, Phanas Punji was in the news for having sold her 14-year-old sister-in-law for Rs 40, so that she could buy some food, owing to the severe drought that had struck the district bringing farmers to their knees. Then PM Rajeev Gandhi asked her, “Why didn’t you sell your baby daughter?” to which Phanas replied, “Who would have bought a baby?” It was after this encounter that Rahul Gandhi’s father delivered the infamous statement: “Only 15 paise from the one rupee meant for the poor actually reaches them.”
Prime Minister Narendra Modi in January 2019 took a dig at the former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi over this very remark. “You would remember the remark by one of our former prime ministers on corruption. He had asserted that whatever amount Centre government sends to its people, only 15% reached the recipients and 85% gets disappeared.” PM Modi said, “The remark was a confession about the plight that country was suffering from.”
He then slammed Congress for its inability to solve the issue of corruption. PM Modi said that even decades after the former PM’s remark, the governments did nothing to solve the issue and the 85% loot continued, and on the other hand the common man continued paying taxes.
Today, Phanas lives with her family including her son, daughter-in-law, and grandchildren in a one-room house. The house was constructed with the support of the Naveen Patnaik government in 2015. In an article from 2016, Phanas was quoted as saying, “Go away. You guys take my pictures and sell them for a price while I continue to wallow in poverty.” Such has been the condition of a destitute woman visited by Rajeev Gandhi, a visit to no avail. Her family continues to live in debt.
Sonia Gandhi’s adopted village in Rae Bareli
Sonia Gandhi too has taken the skill of garnering headlines. Under the PM Modi-launched ‘Sansad Adarsh Gram Yojana’, Sonia Gandhi adopted a village named Udwa from Jagatpur block in Rae Bareli. However, a report from 2017 during the Uttar Pradesh state assembly elections shows the dismal state of the village. In April 2017, only 19 out of the 608 households who live in Sonia Gandhi’s adopted village had a toilet. Others have to go to farms to relieve themselves. The women have to make this trip before dawn. 40 Kms away from the city Rae Bareli, Udwa had fragile tin-roofed houses where one even has to bend to enter the house. “Villagers say she has hardly visited, neither has any Congress leader inquired about their requirements,” the report from 2017 read.
A report from 3 April 2018, reads that in Udwa village, the school students were found cleaning classrooms with brooms even as teachers sat there. The toilets were locked and opened only when students needed to use them. There was no running water and it looked as if it was not cleaned for months. Similar is the fate of the Jagdishpur village adopted by Rahul Gandhi. A primary school in Jagdishpur had only one teacher present. The Principal’s room was filled with sacks of ration food and classrooms had heaps of coal. Students roamed about as their food was cooked in their classrooms.
Jawaharlal Nehru’s tribal ‘wife’ and her tragic fate
The cause of every problem often lies at its roots. The same goes for Congress and its tendency to communicate with the poor for photo-op. On 6th December 1959, Nehru visited a West Bengal village to inaugurate a dam. The Damodar Valley Corporation had chosen a 15-year-old tribal girl called Budhni Manjhiyan for Nehru’s welcome. While Budhni was extremely happy, little did she know, that her life was about to take an extremely troublesome turn.
During the inauguration, since this was the first dam being inaugurated by a tribal woman, Jawaharlal Nehru gave Budhni a garland as a mark of appreciation. He had wanted the dam to be inaugurated by someone who had worked on the construction of it. That night, the Panchayat of the Santhali society was called to discuss these ‘developments’. Budhni, to her horror, was informed that according to Tribal traditions, she was now ‘married’ to Jawaharlal Nehru, since a garland was given. Also according to Tribal traditions, since Nehru, now declared her husband, was a non-tribal, she was boycotted by the Santhali community, for being the ‘wife’ of a non-tribal.
At that point in time, Budhni continued to work at the Damodar Valley Corporation but that didn’t last. She was soon, in 1962, thrown out of her job and found herself helpless. She later moved to Jharkhand and struggled to make ends meet there for 7 years. When asked in 2016 what her wishes were now, she said, “I appeal to Rahul Gandhi to get us a house and a job for my daughter, so we can spend the rest of our lives in peace.”
While there is no record of Rahul Gandhi heeding the tribal woman’s prayers, Congress leaders have continued to use the inauguration of the dam by Budhni to epitomize the Nehru-Gandhi name till as recently as in March this year.
Now @SupriyaShrinate, the lady version of @JhaSanjay, did not even know that it was in Odisha. Sings praises of #Nehru quoting someone who tweeted that it was Adivasi Lady inaugurating BARC. While the tweep deleted the tweet, our lady's pride paraphrase is still hanging around pic.twitter.com/2eaeQBTsnD
— Suresh 🇮🇳 (@surnell) May 27, 2023
From photo-ops, and shifting blames, to ignorance and elitism, Congress has time and again used the poor to score political brownie points. In fact, elitism is at the center of it all, a sense of “us doing charity for them.” This very elitism was last visible even in the lower ranks when the party took a jibe at PM Modi for his English accent while addressing the joint session of the US Congress on 23 June 2023.
Their clear disconnect from the grassroots, and Indian and human values in general that showed when Nehru garlanded an Adivasi woman also reflected when Rahul and Priyanka smiled for the cameras while on their way to Hathras to meet the family of the gang rape victim.
बेहद शर्मनाक,हाथरस की बेटी के लिए ग़म और शोक मनाने निकले भइया बहना का असली चेहरा देख लीजिए,देखिए कि कैमरा देखते ही मातम मनाने वाले राहु़ल प्रियंका गाड़ी में कैसे हंसी ठहाके लगाते मस्ती करते हाथरस आ रहे,दरअसल ये ख़ुशी UP में नफरत की आग फैलाने को लेकर है,हाथरस बहाना है,UP जलाना है। pic.twitter.com/qZlCJg0Viz
— Dr. Shalabh Mani Tripathi (@shalabhmani) October 3, 2020
The siblings came under intense criticism for their callousness. People pointed out how they were laughing and having fun while visiting the family of the bereaved. One would have expected the prevailing mood to be somber considering the circumstances of their visit, however, Rahul Gandhi and Priyanka Gandhi appear to be laughing and making merry on their way to meet the victim of a family which has only recently lost their daughter. It is ironic the number of times that Rahul Gandhi claims to speak up for the poor by casting aspersions against the Modi government accusing it of aiding “Adani, Ambani”.
This is the same Rahul Gandhi who in 2013 had made headlines for undermining the poor saying that “poverty is a state of mind.” “Poverty does not mean the scarcity of food, money, or material things. If one possesses self-confidence, then one can overcome it,” Rahul was quoted as saying. Every time Rahul Gandhi and Congress pretend to speak for the poor and against the Central government on poverty, it seems they attempt to convince themselves more of his claims than anyone else.
