Rahul Gandhi's Seventh Birthday: A Lesson in Fickleness

Rahul Gandhi’s seventh birthday turned into a sombre affair after all but one of his friends skipped the celebration in the wake of his grandmother, Indira Gandhi’s, electoral defeat in 1977. In her tell-all memoir, “Belonging: A Journey Of Love”, Sonia Gandhi recalls the incident as a painful lesson in the fickleness of human relationships in the political sphere. “On Rahul’s birthday, June 19, we’d barely managed to settle into our new home (12, Willingdon Crescent), but I was determined to have a small celebration for him. He’d given me a list of friends to be invited, children who’d attended his previous birthday parties,” she says. Unlike today’s elaborate “theme” birthday parties, they were simple affairs – a few decorations, a homemade cake, some snacks, and potato chips, favourites of both children and adults, Sonia Gandhi says. “Priyanka (Gandhi Vadra) had been eagerly helping me with the decorations and the preparation of the cake. She had climbed up a chair and, held up by her brother, was hanging up balloons on the verandah’s doors. At every stage she would call out, ‘Ma, look! Look — how pretty’. Everything was soon ready: bunting and balloons, the table in the front verandah colourfully decorated,” she recounts. Sonia Gandhi also recalls how her mother-in-law, Indira Gandhi , had a collection of clay toys from Bengal fashioned to look like real insects, lizards, and flies and would keep them in a tin box, wrapped in cotton wool to prevent them from breaking. “She asked me to have the box handy so she could, at an opportune moment, quietly pop some on the table or on one of the children’s plates. That would invariably startle the guests and cause much amusement and laughter,” she says. As they waited for the guests, Rahul and Priyanka rushed to the table for a final inspection of the arrangements, Sonia Gandhi recalls in the HarperCollins India-published book released on Tuesday. “Time passed. Rahul’s best friend, Siddharth, arrived by himself. More time went by. I thought at first there might have been a miscommunication and got down to calling one parent after another. But the response was strangely evasive, and then it hit me: No other children were coming. Yes, things had indeed changed: A simple association between a seven-year-old and his classmates had been tainted by politics,” she says. Rahul was visibly hurt despite attempts by his grandmother and parents to cheer him up, Sonia Gandhi says, describing it as one of the early painful lessons he learnt about the fickleness of human relationships in the political sphere. “We cut the cake, but without much cheer, and my mother-in- law handed me back the toy box. ‘We can use it another time,’ she said, sadly,” she recalls. Later, Rajiv Gandhi sat Rahul down and tried to comfort him, saying, “It’s not your friends’ fault, Rahul, don’t be upset with them”. “Maybe their parents are afraid of being friends with your family. Some people are scared of the government,” Sonia Gandhi recalls Rajiv as saying. “It was a difficult phase in the children’s growing up. Apart from incidents that touched them personally, the political upheaval, the tension all around and at home was affecting them too,” she says. Sonia Gandhi says the family was also concerned about the children’s well-being since they were sometimes mocked by their schoolmates. “They’d come home upset and ask me, ‘Ma, why are people calling Dadi and Chacha thieves?’ ‘Why are they saying they’ll go to jail?’ ‘Have they done something bad?’ I would try to explain and calm them down. It is not true. Some people are against them, but you know how strong they are: there’s nothing to fear,” she would tell them, according to the book. Recalling another incident, Sonia Gandhi says she once received a message from the school that Priyanka had been crying. She rushed there and found her daughter outside the classroom, trying to dry her tears. “I hugged her and asked her to tell me what had happened. A boy had said something nasty to her. I was furious. I wasn’t going to let it pass. But as she realised that I was on the warpath, she pleaded, ‘No, Ma, no-please don’t say anything to him. He’s already been scolded by the teacher,” Sonia Gandhi recalls. “My heart sank: Here was my little five-year-old teaching me a lesson in forgiveness!” she says. The Emergency was imposed by Indira Gandhi just before midnight on June 25, 1975. President Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed issued the proclamation at Gandhi’s behest, which was later ratified by the Union Cabinet. On January 18, 1977, Indira Gandhi called for fresh elections and released all political prisoners. On March 16, 1977, Indira Gandhi and her son Sanjay were defeated in the Lok Sabha elections and on March 21 that year, the Emergency officially came to an end. The Gandhi family then faced a series of cases against them, and the tide turned for them only after Indira Gandhi won a by-election from Chikkamagalur in November 1978.