A visit from a daughter

In one private and quiet act of meeting with a person (who was part of her father’s assassination plot) on a jail bench, Priyanka Gandhi-Vadra has stunned Indians into debating notions of revenge, forgiveness, wanting to know the truth so it can be dealt with, but most of all, on what reconciliation means.

Unlike her brother and mother, who are clearly involved with the affairs of the Congress directly and therefore justifiably open to the scrutiny, Priyanka has a right to be completely quiet about this private, agonising moment. A mother of two, a young woman with a striking resemblance to her grandmother Indira Gandhi, she has made it clear that it is her brother who is in politics and not her. But there is something about this act that merits comment and contextualising.

Many in this generation might dismiss this as old hat, but like many other nameless Indian families, the Nehru-Gandhi family and jails have had a very special connect. Several families were separated by long sentences, prison visits being the only means of communication between young children, wives and jailed family members in pre-independence India. Letters From a Father to His Daughter, that Pandit Nehru wrote for Indira Gandhi, only epitomised the conversation between an anxious parent and his only daughter, from behind jail bars. It is that flicker of similarity between those letters and now, another daughter wanting to have a conversation with the last truth involving her father, that makes news of this meeting more poignant.

In a larger framework, as historians like Eric Hobsbawm have never tired of saying, the 20th and now the 21st century have demonstrated themselves as among the most violent periods in human history. We have had two world wars, there is a war in our own continent in Iraq and Afghanistan swallowing many lives. Not to mention the Holocaust, apartheid, the Palestinian tragedy and other instances of social violence closer home. In each of these instances, meeting victims, those who escaped by the skin of their teeth and those who were witnesses to the violence or were brought up on stories of what befell their forefathers, it is the same story of seeking “justice” and, mostly, a bitterness that is hard to let go of. The tragedies that men and women go through seem to get a new lease of life as they mould the thinking of survivors. The century gone by has been generous in handing out causes to virtually all of us, who then think we have reason to harbour grievances, and our own personal and very dark shadows.

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