Najma Heptulla had called the then Congress chief Sonia Gandhi from Berlin
New Delhi:
After being elected president of the Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU) in 1999, Najma Heptulla called then Congress chief Sonia Gandhi from Berlin to convey the news, but she had to stay on the phone for an hour as staff told her that 'Madam is busy'.
The former Rajya Sabha vice-chairman, who had left the Congress after differences with Mrs Gandhi and joined the BJP in 2004, mentions the incident in her just-released autobiography “In Pursuit of Democracy: Beyond Party Lines”.
Ms Heptulla said the IPU chairmanship was a “historic first and a great honour, marking the culmination of my journey from the Indian Parliament to the world parliamentary stage”.
First, she called Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee from Berlin and he received her call immediately.
“When he heard the news, he was delighted, firstly because the honor had come to India, and secondly because it had gone to an Indian Muslim woman. He said, 'Come back and we will celebrate.' I was also able to connect immediately to the vice presidential office,” she wrote.
However, when she called up Sonia Gandhi, Congress Party president and my leader, one of her staff first said, “Madam is busy.” When I pointed out that I was calling from Berlin, an international call, he just said, “Wait a minute.” I waited a full hour. Sonia never came on the phone to talk to me.”
Mrs Heptulla says she was really disappointed.
“After that call, I did not tell her anything. Before forwarding my name for the post of IPU president, I had sought her permission and at that time she had given her blessings,” the former Manipur governor wrote.
“If every country, every culture and every family has its special moments – events so important and somehow so personal that they transcend the normal flow of everyday life – this was one of those moments for me – a moment in time so important that it forever drilled a sense of rejection into my psyche.
'However, it was a rejection that turned out to be prescient. It foretold a time of transition, a downward spiral and crisis in Congress, leaving the old and experienced members, who had given their all to the party, besieged and demoralized. A new group of inexperienced sycophants started running the affairs of the party,” she said.
Ms Heptulla, who was appointed Union Minister for Minority Affairs in Narendra Modi's government in 2014, said after she became IPU president, the Vajpayee government upgraded the rank of her office from minister of state to minister.
“Atalji has allocated Rs 1 crore in the budget for the IPU president to travel to countries not paid by the IPU council. It was Vasundhara Raje who invited me and other MPs to celebrate my election as IPU President at the Parliament House, where we usually host all our receptions in Parliament,” says the book, published by Rupa.
“The following year, when I invited Sonia Gandhi to attend the Millennium Conference of Presiding Officers in New York, she withdrew at the last minute,” Ms. Heptulla wrote.
In addition to her political career, Ms. Heptulla has written several books and is a prominent advocate for democracy, social justice and women's rights.
She says that in 1998, when Sonia Gandhi took over the party mantle, “there were far too many layers of people between the grassroots and the leader”.
'That was the problem with 10 Janpath. Direct communication was broken due to lower officials. They were not party workers, but clerks and other staff who worked there. And they blocked all access to the leader, affecting the health and ethics of the organization and endangering both. harmony and productivity of party members,” Ms. Heptulla wrote.
“As followers of the Congress, we no longer played an active role in providing feedback to our leader – so crucial for a party to perform well. There was little interaction based on the quality of our exchanges, little understanding of who made up our leaders' in-groups or out-groups or even how we can support our leader's vision. The decline then started,” she adds.
According to Ms Heptulla, Rahul and Priyanka Gandhi were not active in politics at that time but were busy with their own lives.
“Our leader's behavior was against the best practices and principles of cooperation that had developed over many decades in the Congress,” she said of Sonia Gandhi's leadership.
Ms Heptulla says Sonia Gandhi's idea of communication was a “sharp and serious departure from the earlier Congress culture”. “Indira Gandhi used to hold an open house. She was accessible to the ordinary members,” she writes.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)