Grilling The Gandhis

It will be a long battle ahead for the Congress’s first family, but the ED questioning Sonia has pushed the party out of its comfort zone and on to the streets

- Namrata Biji Ahuja

Sonia Gandhi was not offered any food, not even tea, while being interrogated in the National Herald case. The Enforcement Directorate was told that it was against the interim Congress president’s security protocol, and the agency did not want to take any chances.

So there sat Sonia, 75 and recovering from Covid-19, in a small ventilated room with a typist and the interrogating officer. The ED had summoned her in the money laundering case a while back, but Sonia first reached the agency’s office on July 21. The interrogation continued on July 26 and 27.

The agency followed all the protocols—Covid tests were done, a government doctor and an ambulance were kept on standby, and Priyanka Gandhi Vadra was allowed to wait on her mother, with a medicine kit, in another room. Priyanka was also allowed to meet Sonia in between and took her home for lunch. This was in contrast to what the ED had done during Rahul Gandhi’s questioning in the same case in June. It had stopped Priyanka at the gate then.

On day one, Sonia answered 28 questions; on July 26, she answered 50, and was determined to do so with clarity and conviction.

The big question haunting the Congress top brass at its Udaipur Chintan Shivir in May seemed to have followed the Gandhis to Delhi. The question being, how did the party lose its connection with the common man and what has it done to revive it? Ironically, the ED seemed to have hit upon the same question, albeit in a different way.

The alleged money laundering took place during the “revival” of Associated Journals Limited (AJL), the publisher of the English newspaper National Herald, which Jawaharlal Nehru had launched to be the voice of the “common man”.