New Delhi: In 2018, on board a flight to Boston from Delhi, Mani Shankar Aiyar sat down to write a plea to Rahul Gandhi, then serving as the Congress president, to revoke his suspension from the party announced during the 2017 Gujarat assembly polls.
Aiyar was suspended from the party on 7 December 2017, following an uproar over his comment on Narendra Modi, calling the Prime Minister a “neech kisam ka aadmi” and issued a show-cause notice as well.
Aiyar handed over the first draft of the letter — “thinly disguised as a letter of birthday greetings” — to his wife, Suneet, who did not mince her words to convey what she thought of his plea.
“Here I was — Suneet replied — begging on bended knees before a man thirty years younger than me. For what? After three decades of serving the party and standing up for his father?” Aiyar recollects in the second volume of his autobiography, A Maverick in Politics, published by Juggernaut Books.
Aiyar admits that he could not respond to his wife. After all, that was the “standard mode in which Congressmen begged and pleaded with their president for their rights”, confesses the veteran Congressman in the book, which captures his personal and political journey from 1991 to 2024.
Suneet found the second draft equally bereft of self-respect and refused to see the third one, which Aiyar eventually sent to Rahul, who never replied. Aiyar did receive a routine letter of thanks for the birthday greetings, but on the personal issues he raised, there was not a word.
In his memoir, Mani Shankar Aiyar reckons that his “neech kisam ka aadmi” remarks on Modi proved to be the epitaph of his long political career, which began under Rajiv Gandhi and remained marked by ups and downs.
However, Aiyar further writes in the book, his fallout with the Gandhi family dates back to 15 April 2010.
Mani Shankar Aiyar’s interactions with Sonia Gandhi
In 2010, Digvijaya Singh publicly criticised then home minister P. Chidambaram over his approach to tackling Maoism, calling him “arrogant and unwilling to listen to advice”. Speaking to the media on the issue, Aiyar made remarks that appeared to endorse Singh’s view on Chidambaram.
On 15 April, as Mani Shankar Aiyar prepared to take oath as a newly-nominated member of the Rajya Sabha, he received a call from the then Congress president Sonia Gandhi, who “gave me a furious tonguelashing”.
“I suspect (but do not know) that the home minister got in touch with her to protest Digvijaya’s public criticism of him, apparently endorsed by me. I tried to get a word in edgewise, but she was in such a fury that I deemed it unwise to try to explain matters to her till she had calmed down. That moment never came — and marks my ‘Decline … Fade Out … Fall’,” notes Aiyar.
Since then, Aiyar had only three one-to-one meetings with Sonia — the first of which was in August 2013. At that meeting, held after Rahul Gandhi took over as the Congress vice-president, Sonia asked Aiyar to make way for Meenakshi Natarajan as the national convener of the Rajiv Gandhi Panchayati Raj Sangathan (RGPRS).
The next meeting was in 2023, when Aiyar met Sonia to invite her to the launch of his memoir’s first volume at the India International Centre in New Delhi on 23 August.
Sonia did not just attend the launch but also stayed right to the end, “and I was both pleased and relieved as the media would have gone to town if she had left early, alleging she was angered or upset by something I had said”, writes Aiyar.
The latest meeting between the two took place on 5 February 2024 during the run-up to the Lok Sabha elections, which Mani Shankar Aiyar wanted to contest from Tamil Nadu’s Mayiladuthurai constituency, represented by him thrice in the past.
“She (Sonia) noted my requests and ended the meeting on an exceptionally encouraging note, saying she would do her best to try to bring me into the Lok Sabha. After nearly fifteen years of frustration, I emerged from her office floating on a cloud of hope and expectation,” he notes.
However, Aiyar learnt later that Rahul Gandhi “ruled out” his candidature.
“I was crushed. My hopes had been raised high, and I could not agree with such discriminatory ‘ageism’. I had specifically raised the question of my being an octogenarian in my conversation with Sonia Gandhi on 5 February. And she had agreed that my physical and mental fitness made my age irrelevant. But I had been warned by Sonia Gandhi’s closest aide that in the event of Rahul thinking differently, his mother would defer to him. That is what had happened. I was now a ‘Maverick Out of Politics’!” Aiyar signs off.
On the eve of the launch of the first volume of his memoir, Mani Shankar Aiyar, in an interview with ThePrint, had said that the Congress leadership, including the Gandhi family and the team of party president Mallikarjun Kharge, consider him to be a “dinosaur” who can be relegated to the “sidelines”.
(Edited by Madhurita Goswami)
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