While the former’s present bad luck is understandable since the Congress suffered a major setback in the general election, Varun should normally have been riding high since his party did exceedingly well. Yet, he has been summarily deprived of the general secretary’s post in the BJP and is now apparently sulking in silence.

The conjectures about why Varun has been snubbed by his party have identified two reasons. One is his hauteur, which is a familiar trait of the Nehru-Gandhis, presumably because of their uncommonly long and successful stint in national politics. Varun’s father, Sanjay, who was called “wayward” and “uneducated” by his uncle, B.K. Nehru, was known for his arrogance.

The second reason is the faux pas committed by Varun’s mother, Maneka, when she said that he could be U.P.’s chief minister. In a party where even a Union minister cannot appoint his own private secretary without Narendra Modi’s approval, it was fatal for Maneka’s and her son’s ambition to be so uppity.

In any event, Varun’s usefulness for the BJP is probably over. The high point of his career in the party was when he made a stridently anti-Muslim speech in U.P. in 2009. It must have been a matter of considerable satisfaction for the BJP that a great grandson of Jawaharlal Nehru, the symbol of secularism in India, should be virulently castigating the Muslims like any common or garden-variety RSS pracharak. Although he was subsequently given a clean chit by a court in Pilibhit, that episode remains his main claim to fame.

Varun may have also had to pay a price for saying that he had heard that some “good work” had been done in Rahul’s constituency of Amethi and that the crowd at Modi’s pre-election Kolkata rally was “okay”. But, it was the Maneka’s pitch for the chief minister’s post which clearly sealed his fate.

For astrologers, it is undoubtedly the portentous movements of heavenly bodies in the dark recesses of space which have cast their ominous shadows on the new generation of the Nehru-Gandhis, for Rahul, too, is feeling the ill-effects of their fateful gyrations. While Varun can avail of the luxury of withdrawing from public life for some time, Rahul cannot do so.

Even as the Congress stumbles along without any direction, especially in the Hindi belt, the focus will almost always be on him and his mother. Irrespective of whether his coterie of handpicked associates rises to his defence, or the old guard persists with their occasional criticism couched as advice, the chatterati will continue to ask what Rahul is doing to revive the party. Few will believe that its good showing in Rajasthan in the recent by-elections has anything to with the mother and son. It was simply the result of the anti-incumbency factor beginning to erode the chief minister, “Maharani” Vasundhara Raje’s base.

This is not the first time that the Nehru-Gandhis have experienced rahu kaal, the inauspicious time caused by the mythical planet, rahu. But, on other occasions, as in 1977 or 1989 or 1996, it didn’t face a formidable opponent. Its adversaries in those periods were fragmented entities incapable of holding together for long. Now, it is the opposite with the BJP being led by a forceful personality while the Congress is coming under strain because of the presence in it of what Rahul calls “multiple voices”.

It is an accepted fact of politics that the only person who can silence such internal dissent is one who promises sure-fire electoral success. This is the case in the BJP today where Modi has been able to sideline the party’s old guard because he holds out the hope of election victories at the national level, notwithstanding the recent setbacks in U.P. and Rajasthan. There is no one in the Congress who can give a similar assurance.

The whys and wherefores of its present misery is a matter of debate, but empiricism suggests that families, like any living entity, go through a process of growth and decay. No other family in recent times has had as long a stint in positions of political power as the Nehru-Gandhis, dating back nearly a century to Motilal Nehru becoming the Congress president in 1919.

If Jawaharlal Nehru’s reign as the prime minister was the high point of the family’s history, then the decline began with his grandson, Rajiv, squandering a massive majority in the Lok Sabha in 1989 because of his suspected involvement in the Bofors howitzer scam. The 2004-14 period saw a revival under Rajiv’s widow, Sonia, because of a slump in the BJP’s fortunes following the Gujarat riots of 2002. But, now, it has become dark again for the Congress with the party’s tally of Lok Sabha seats falling to its lowest level. (IPA Service)