Nine days after Raj Kumar Hirani’s “Lage Raho Munnabhai” hit the theatres, the Congress Working Committee (CWC) met in New Delhi on September 10 to plan the centenary commemoration of Mahatma Gandhi’s Satyagraha in South Africa. When it was her turn to speak, Mohsina Kidwai invoked the movie—an unusual reference in a CWC meeting—and told her colleagues to learn from it on how to communicate Gandhi’s message to the new generation.
Born in 1932 to an aristocratic family in Uttar Pradesh’s Banda district, Kidwai was a staunch loyalist of the Nehru-Gandhi family, particularly Indira Gandhi. The platform for her entry in politics, however, was laid way back in 1954 when 22-year-old Mohsina met Jawaharlal Nehru with her father-in-law Jameel Ur Rehman Kidwai, a Congress stalwart in UP. Mohsina had mentioned in her biography that Nehru asked Jameel, “When are you introducing her to politics?”
She became the minister of state for food in the UP government in 1973. But her biggest impact came five years later, when she won the by-poll in Azamgarh in 1978—a year after the Congress was routed in the Lok Sabha polls. Kidwai’s victory signalled a crucial turnaround for the beleaguered Congress in the post-Emergency era. It was also a reminder that the Congress under Indira Gandhi was down but not out. Two years later, the squabbling band of the Janata government collapsed, and Gandhi returned to the South Bloc as the PM.
The highlight of her election was captured in a photo: Kidwai pushing a hand pump in a village while Indira, who campaigned for Kidwai for five days, quenching her thirst. For party veterans, the picture also showed the deep bond between the two women leaders.
Her brief biography in the Lok Sabha portal showed an interesting side of Kidwai: her focus on the upliftment of Dalits and marginalised communities—a vote bank that later sided with regional outfits in the post-Mandal period and wiped out the Congress’s strongholds in northern India. Kidwai was a minister in UP for Harijan and Social Welfare (1974-75), and her social activities were “Upliftment of women and children, including Harijans and amelioration of the down-trodden sections of the society.”
In her long political career, she held several ministerial posts in UP and later became a Union minister in Indira and Rajiv Gandhi’s cabinets. The three-time Lok Sabha MP held labour, health and rural development portfolios. When the UPA came to power in 2004, Kidwai, a Gandhi loyalist, didn’t find a place in the cabinet as a set of young leaders stepped ahead, signalling a generational shift in the Congress. Although she was not vocal in dissent, she backed Shashi Tharoor in the 2022 Congress presidential election, possibly a silent protest against the organisation that she was a part of for decades. In her death, the Congress and the country lost another leader from the fading generation and an important member of the old school of Indian politics.
Political analyst KV Prasad remembers her as a good orator, exuding old-world charm, grace and dignity. Another prominent analyst, Javed Ansari, said, “She was the voice of sanity and reason. She was unwell for the past two years. Whenever we met, I saw an old, Congress loyalist in her. She said, ’I had a long life. Before I close my eyes, my party should regain its position.’”
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