Rahul by Jatin Gandhi, Veenu Sandhu

would get in touch with him. Some time later, P. Madhavan, who had been on the personal staff of the Nehru–Gandhi family for over two decades, called with an unusual request: Rahul Gandhi wanted to learn boxing. Would Bhardwaj agree to teach him?
    ‘I was surprised,’ said Bhardwaj, who was nearing seventy then. ‘Rahul couldn’t have been planning to enter the boxing ring, of this I was sure. Perhaps he wanted lessons in self-defence, I thought.’ Not wanting to let the opportunity pass, Bhardwaj promptly agreed. As for fees, all he wanted was to be picked from and dropped back at his house. The classes were to take place at 12 Tughlaq Lane where Rahul lived.
    India was less than a year away from the next parliamentary elections. The UPA government, led by the Congress, had been in power for four years. The next test was nearing. Politicians in the country had slipped into election gear. Rahul did, too, with boxing lessons from Bhardwaj. The world of politics isn’t very different from the boxing arena. The right moves made at the right time can turn the game around. Underestimating one’s opponent can cost dearly. It is important to get into the mind of the rival and be prepared to strike and to defend simultaneously. Boxing and politics both call for patience, speed, timing and stamina.
    Rahul learnt his lesson well. In the Lok Sabha elections that followed in 2009, he retained his Amethi seat by defeating his nearest rival, Asheesh Shukla of the ruling Bahujan Samaj Party, by over 3.7 lakh votes. Not only this, the Congress which had, for over two decades, been reduced to a marginal player in Uttar Pradesh, struck hard and re-emerged as a party to watch out for. Rahul had decided to break into the formidable Mayawati’s territory and the Party won twenty-one of the eighty Lok Sabha seats. Before the elections, an energetic RG, as he’s called within the Party, also spoke at 125 rallies, travelling more than 80,000 kilometres across India in a span of just six weeks—his numbers were higher than those of any other politician in that election. The physical endurance that he had built up during the boxing lessons came in useful.
    Bhardwaj, who had decided to observe Rahul very closely not just as a student but as a man who was being touted as the future prime minister of India, said, ‘He was always ready for more. If I told him to run one round of the lawn to warm up, he would run three.’
    The boxing sessions were held three days a week on the lawns of 12 Tughlaq Lane. At times, Priyanka and her children would also come to watch Rahul train. Sonia, too, would sometimes sit and watch. ‘One day, Priyanka asked me to teach her as well,’ said Bhardwaj. He explained some boxing moves to the younger and equally athletic Gandhi sibling and was quite taken aback by the punch she threw: ‘It was a beautiful punch, totally unexpected from someone trying her hand at boxing for the first time.’
    The scene that summer wasn’t very different from the way it used to be when, as children, Rahul and Priyanka were forced to take private lessons at home due to security reasons after Indira was assassinated.

    The day Indira was shot, Rajiv Gandhi was on an election tour in West Bengal. When he flew back to Delhi that day, the road from the airport to AIIMS was lined with security ‘unprecedented in the history of the country’, as a
Time
magazine report noted. Sharpshooters were positioned by the road on either side. Satwant Singh, one of Indira’s two assassins who survived the counterattack by his colleagues, told his interrogators that Rajiv, too, was a target of those who had planned the assassination. As Rajiv settled down in his new job as prime minister succeeding his mother, the task of protecting him and his family was taken away from the Intelligence Bureau and the Delhi police and entrusted to the newly raised Special Protection Group (SPG).
    After Operation Blue Star, Indira had been advised against having