Sonia Gandhi at the launch of her book ‘Belonging: A Journey of Love’
Sonia writes that in the 1999 Lok Sabha elections, colleagues wanted her to contest from Amethi, her husband Rajiv Gandhi’s seat, and also from a southern constituency, amid strong rumours that BJP would try to keep her out of Parliament, even by getting the Amethi poll countermanded. Congress had won every Lok Sabha election in Bellary since 1952. ‘Ek sher ni, sau langur, Chikmagalur, Chikmagalur!” (‘One lioness, a hundred langur monkeys, Chikmagalur, Chikmagalur!’) was a battle cry during the 1978 Chikmagalur bypoll that saw Indira Gandhi’s return to Parliament after Emergency.
BJP and RSS fielded Swaraj, she recalls, calculating that the fight would tie her down in Karnataka even if she lost.
She writes that slogans have always played an important part in election campaigns, and his (Verma’s) were “many and striking”. A cat-and-mouse game followed, ending in Bellary after she travelled through Andhra Pradesh. Unfamiliar with Bellary, she found its dry, rocky landscape unlike Amethi’s. The constituency was then known for textiles and iron ore. It would later become synonymous with illegal mining and the Reddy brothers, who campaigned for Swaraj. Sonia toured the district with a local Congress politician and the party’s general secretary in charge of Karnataka. She stayed in a supporter’s partly built house, where his wife kept offering freshly made snacks that she felt compelled to accept, she recalls. Swaraj, Sonia writes, learnt Kannada phrases and framed the contest as one between a ‘desi beti’ and a ‘videshi bahu’. Priyanka Gandhi, she writes, campaigned in Bellary but spent most of her time in Amethi as her mother’s election agent, while Rahul Gandhi accompanied her on tours elsewhere. Sonia, in her memoirs, writes it was one of the boldest coinages by Hindi poet Shrikant Verma, MP and Congress spokesperson for many years.