Rahul Gandhi
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| Rahul Gandhi | |
| Constituency | Amethi , Uttar Pradesh |
|---|---|
| | |
| Born | 19 June 1970  New Delhi, Delhi |
| Political party | INC |
| Residence | New Delhi |
| As of September 22, 2006 Source: [1] | |
Rahul Gandhi (born June 19, 1970) is an Indian politician and member of the Parliament of India, representing the Amethi constituency.[1] His political party is the Indian National Congress.[2]
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Family
Gandhi is a member of the Nehru-Gandhi political family, the son of Sonia Gandhi, currently the President of the Indian National Congress, and Rajiv Gandhi, the former Prime Minister who was assassinated in 1991 by Sri Lankan Tamil Eelam militants from the LTTE. Gandhi was 14 years old when his grandmother, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, was assassinated by her security guards. His great-grandfather, Jawaharlal Nehru, was the first Prime Minister of India. His great-great-grandfather, Motilal Nehru, was a distinguished leader of the Indian independence movement.[3] In 2004, he reportedly had a Colombian girlfriend called Juanita[4].
Education and career before politics
Rahul Gandhi attended St.Columba's School, New Delhi[4] before entering the The Doon School. The Doon School had been his father's alma mater. [5] Rahul Gandhi attended Doon from 1981-83 before being home-schooled for security reasons.[citation needed] His admission to St Stephen's College was controversial as he was believed to have been admitted on the basis of his abilities as a competitive pistol shooter, which was disputed.[citation needed] He left the school in 1990, after one year of education.[4]
It is reported that Harvard alumni records list him as attending between 1990 and 1993 but not as completing a degree.[6] He transferred, reportedly due to security concerns following his father's murder, to Rollins College in Florida where he completed a B.A. in 1994[7]. During the parliamentary elections in 2004, Gandhi claimed that he had received an MPhil in Development Economics after attending Trinity College, Cambridge. Media enquiries report that he attended under the alias "Raul Vinci").[8] He worked in London with the strategy consultancy firm Monitor Group,[citation needed] before returning to India in late 2002 to run an engineering and technology outsourcing firm in Mumbai[9].
Political career
In 2003, there was widespread media speculation about Gandhi's imminent entry into national politics, which he did not deny.[citation needed] He appeared with his mother at public events and Congress meetings.[citation needed] He also travelled to Pakistan on a goodwill visit to watch the first series between the countries in 14 years in an One Day International with his sister Priyanka Gandhi.[10]
Speculation heightened in January 2004 about him and his sister's possible entry into politics when they visited their father's former constituency of Amethi, which their mother held at the time. He refused to give a definitive response, stating "I am not averse to politics. I have not decided when I will enter politics and indeed, if I ever will."[11]
In March 2004, he announced his entry into politics by announcing that he would contest the May 2004 elections, standing for his father's former constituency of Amethi in Uttar Pradesh in the Lok Sabha, India's lower house of Parliament.[12] Before that, his uncle Sanjay held the seat before a plane crash. The seat had been held by his mother until she transferred to the neighbouring seat of Rae Bareilly. The Congress had been doing poorly in Uttar Pradesh, holding only 10 of the 80 Lok Sabha seats in the state at the time.[13] At the time, this move generated surprise among political commentators, who had regarded his sister Priyanka as being the more charismatic and likely to succeed. Party officials did not have a CV ready for the media, such was the surprise of his move. It generated speculation that the presence of a young member of India's most famous political family would reinvigorate the Congress party's political fortunes among India's youthful population[14] In his first interview with foreign media, ee portrayed himself as a uniter of the country and condemned "divisive" politics in India, saying that he would try to reduce caste and religious tensions.[12] His candidacy was greeted with excitement by locals, who had a long standing affinity with the family's presence in the area.[13]
He won with a landslide majority, retaining the family stronghold with a margin of over 100,000 as the Congress unexpectedly defeated the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party.[15] His campaign was directed by his younger sister, Priyanka Gandhi Vadra.[citation needed]
Although he holds no other office and concentrates mainly on constituency issues and the politics of Uttar Pradesh, it has been widely speculated in the Indian and international press that Sonia Gandhi is trying to groom him for a chance to become a national-level Congress leader in the future.[16]
In January 2006, at a convention of the Indian National Congress in Hyderabad, thousands of party members asked for Gandhi to take a more prominent leadership role in the party and demanded that he address the delegates. He said "I appreciate and I am grateful for your feelings and support. I assure you I will not let you down", but asked for patience and declined to immediately seek a higher profile role.[17]
Gandhi and his sister managed their mother's campaign for reelection to Rae Bareilly in 2006, which was won easily with a margin greater than 400,000 votes.[18]
He was a prominent figure in a high profile Congress campaign for the 2007 Uttar Pradesh Assembly elections; Congress, however, won only 22 seats with 8.53% of votes. The election saw the Bahujan Samaj Party, which represents low caste Indians, to become the first party to govern in its own right in Uttar Pradesh for 16 years.[19]
Rahul Gandhi has been appointed as an All India Congress Committee general secretary on 24 September 2007 in a reshuffle of the party secretariat.[20]
Rahul Gandhi has also been given charge of the Youth Congress and the National Students Union of India as part of the Congress Party reshuffle on 24th September 2007.[21] He attended the Congress Working Committee meeting held at New Delhi on November 8, 2007.
Image
Rahul Gandhi's legal affairs team has taken a number of heavy-handed measures to prevent damage to his image. For example, when Newsweek alleged in late 2006 that he had not completed his degrees at Harvard and Cambridge or kept his job at the Monitor Group, they were slapped with a legal notice, following which they hastily retracted or qualified their earlier statements.[22].
Far more serious allegations of rape, apparently originating from the web forums of Hindu revolutionary group Hindu Unity and spreading through sympathetic vectors in the blogosphere and other web discussion communities, surfaced in early 2007. The host of the web board, ezboard, was served a legal notice as well[23], and immediately shut down Hindu Unity's web board, for what it deemed as "Terms of Use" violations.[24][25]
On the subject of the Nehru-Gandhi family he noted:
| “ | You know that when my family decides to do anything, it does it. Be it the freedom struggle, the division of Pakistan or taking India to the 21st century,[26] | ” |
Criticism
Rahul Gandhi counted the 1971 break-up of Pakistan among his family's "achievements". This statement of his has invited criticism from several political parties in India, as well as from notable people in Pakistan including the Foreign Office spokesperson [27]. Well-known historian Irfan Habib remarked that the comments were "..an insult to the Bangladesh movement. Rahul is free to say whatever he wants to, but in a democratic country playing up family is certainly not in good taste."[28]
During the Uttar Pradesh election campaign in 2007 he said that "if anyone from the Gandhi-Nehru family had been active in politics then, the Babri Masjid would not have fallen". This was interpreted as an attack on P.V. Narasimha Rao, the Prime Minister during the demolition of the mosque in 1992. Gandhi's statement triggered a controversy with some members of BJP, the Samajwadi Party and the Left dubbing him as both "anti-Hindu" and "anti-Muslim"[29].
His remarks on freedom fighters and the Nehru-Gandhi family have been criticized by BJP leader Venkaiah Naidu who asked "Will the Gandhi family take responsibility for imposition of emergency ?"[30]
See also
