'She was not a yes person. She would tell the truth and her feelings to Indira Gandhi, and Indira Gandhi would value her opinion. The same was the case with Rajiv Gandhi who would value her opinion.'
Mohsina Kidwai's passing last week marks the end of an era in Indian politics -- one defined by quiet integrity, organisational depth, and a rare commitment to public life that transcended identity and region.
In this interview with Syed Firdaus Ashraf/Rediff, author and political commentator Rashid Kidwai reflects on her remarkable journey, tracing her evolution from a grassroots leader in Uttar Pradesh to a figure of national stature with deep connections across party lines and states.
Four years ago Mrs Kidwai had published autobiography, My Life in Indian Politics, which was narrated to Mr Kidwai.
Key Points
- 'She was a devout, practising Muslim. Yet she didn't have that Muslim identity. She never flaunted her Muslimness. So she was very mainstream, very urban and very cosmopolitan.'
- 'It was only in 2018-2019 that she got her own house. This in spite of the fact that she was urban development minister and she was sort of responsible for giving lakhs of houses to the urban poor and others.'
- 'Her last act in the Congress presidential election that was conducted in 2022, she voted for Shashi Tharoor (and not Malikarjun Kharge who was a Gandhi family nominee). She proposed and seconded Shashi's name. One can say this was a radical move because she wanted some kind of change in the functioning of the party.'
How do you recall Mohsina Kidwaiji?
She was very well-grounded, and with the masses. There are very few people in the country who have represented the legislative council, the legislative assembly, the Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha -- and she was one of them.
There are very few people hailing from Uttar Pradesh who have represented both eastern and western as it is a very big state. In fact, there are only seven countries bigger than UP in terms of population.
And she had the distinction of winning both from eastern Uttar Pradesh, that being Azamgarh, and the western region, Meerut. She also contested a couple of elections from the Domariaganj-Siddharthnagar region in the east and was unsuccessful but the margin of her defeat was very narrow. She had this pan-Uttar Pradesh identity.
One more thing which is very important, she was a devout, practising Muslim. Yet she didn't have that Muslim identity. She never flaunted her Muslimness. So she was very mainstream, very urban and very cosmopolitan. She was basically an organisational person.
Away from Uttar Pradesh, she had a lot of contacts, she worked in states like Kerala, Punjab, Chhattisgarh as she had a very pan-Indian appeal. Even now there is not a state where she would not know 10, 15, 20 people on a first name basis.
This was evident when her end came as there was an outpouring of grief from all over the country cutting across party lines. A person like Subramanian Swamy condoled her death on X and so did Defence Minister Rajnath Singh, they were her political opponents.
What was it about her that kept her Muslimness in the background?
She actually imbibed that from her father-in-law, Jamil Ur Rahman Kidwai. He was a freedom fighter. I want to narrate an incident which she had told me, that will tell you what her mental makeup was.
In one of the pre-independence elections, Jamil Sahab, as he was known, was contesting elections from Barabanki district. It was a tough election because at that time elections were fought on communal lines. Muslims voted for Muslims and Hindus voted for Hindus. This was pre-independence, and the Muslim League had put up a very formidable candidate against Jamil Sahab.
Jawaharlal Nehru, who was sort of micromanaging that entire election, sensed that Jamil Ur Rahman Kidwai was in political trouble. So he sent a couple of maulanas and maulvis from Jamiat-ul-Ulama, which was a political ally of the Congress at that point of time.
When these people arrived in Barabanki, Jamil Sahab treated them well to tea, coffee, snacks and all, but refused to take them to public meetings.
When they said they had come to campaign for him, Jamil Sahab asked, 'What is your purpose? This election is not about Islam, against Islam or anything like that. The elections have very little to do with religion.' Subsequently, Jamil Rahman Kidwai lost the election.
When he met Nehru who was doing a post-election results appraisal, he asked Jamil Sahab why he did not avail (the help of the maulanas). To which Jamil Sahab said I would prefer to lose elections rather than take the help of maulvis.
This is the political culture Mohisna Kidwai imbibed.
Tell us about the 1978 Lok Sabha bye-election and its political significance.
The Azamgarh bye-election of 1978 was actually a turning point in Indira Gandhi's great comeback. As you know, in the 1977 election the Congress was decimated, particularly in northern, central and western India.
In Uttar Pradesh, which then included what is now Uttarakhand, the Congress had drawn a blank in all 85 Lok Sabha seats. Indira Gandhi was facing a crisis of confidence after her defeat in the 1977 elections. The Congress party had split by then and there were all kind of cases foisted against Indira Gandhi.
In the midst of these things, there was a bye-election in Azamgarh. And Mohsina Kidwai, who was a state Congress president, was asked to contest from there. She hailed from Barabanki and not Azamgarh and yet she went on to contest the parliamentary bye-election in 1978. She fought that election with very little resources.
One thing you've got to admire about her was that Mohsina Kidwai was ahead of her times, I would say. She introduced crowd-funding for her elections. It was very interesting.
One morning when she was leaving for campaigning, she noticed there was a paan shop close to where she was staying, and that the paanwala would always look at her as if he wanted to say something. So one day she stopped by and made small talk, and that person said 'Mohsinaji, you are fighting a very tough election. These are difficult times and all, and here is my distinct contribution. Take this ₹5, it will come handy.'
This ₹5 gave her an idea. She went to the public meeting and narrated the paanwala incident. Soon after other people started giving her one rupee, two rupees, five rupees, etc. This sort of gave her money to fill petrol, bear some of the other campaign expenses, etc.
The Azamgarh bye-election became a turning point for Indira Gandhi because she realised that if Mohsina Kidwai can win, so can she. Of course, Indira Gandhi had campaigned for her in that bye-election. So it was as much as a vote for Indira Gandhi.
It was one seat of Azamgarh, but it led to the downfall of the Janata Party. Mohsina Kidwai was very different -- like people say, God does not make such people now.
Any other incident you can recall from those days?
There was a split in the Congress after the 1977 defeat.
The Congress party in Uttar Pradesh did not have an office because it had been taken over by the breakaway side. So Mohsina Kidwai shifted the state party office to her house, 6 Darul Shafa in Lucknow. She started operating the Congress office from her quarters.
One day she came to know that there was an auction of a house in Lucknow. She discussed with her husband Khalidur Rahman Kidwai about buying that house for the party as the party didn't have money. They had 1.5 lakh rupees with which they were planning to buy that house. She took her money and submitted her documents to opt for that auction. And finally she got that property for Rs 2.75 lakhs in open bidding.
The rest of the money which she fell short was raised again by crowd funding. People donated ₹100, ₹200, ₹500 to reach the figure of ₹2.75 lakhs. At that time this kind of money was a fortune, I'm talking about '78-'79. This place was then made into 10 Mall Avenue in Lucknow. I think in 2017-2018 she transferred that property to the Congress party.
This kind of gesture and sacrifice is quite unprecedented not only in the Congress but also in the political class.
And linked to it is also another thing, she didn't have a house of her own till the period I'm talking about. It was only in 2018-2019 that she got her own house. This in spite of the fact that she was urban development minister and she was sort of responsible in Rajiv Gandhi's time for giving lakhs of houses to the urban poor and others.
So this is the political legacy of Mohsina Kidwani.
Do you mean to say she never owned a house?
Till 2016 she was in the Rajya Sabha. All her life she had been staying in government houses or some rented accommodation.
Is this why you said earlier that God doesn't make such people?
There was a total commitment from her side to the ideology of the Congress party. She was very close to Indira Gandhi and later on to Rajiv Gandhi. She was very loyal to the party.
She never hesitated in making any kind of sacrifice. She always felt she was duty-bound.
I used to go to her house at Vishwambardas Marg in New Delhi and later 12 Janpath and M S Apartments. These are various houses in Delhi where she was staying at different times. In the morning ordinary Congress workers would come to meet her, and these were ordinary people and not big leaders of the Congress party.
I'm talking about workers, somebody coming from Murshidabad in Bengal, somebody coming from Karnataka, somebody coming from what is now Telangana, somebody coming from Uttar Pradesh. She would meet everybody, and these people came without appointment. She was very happy about it.
It is said she was a Gandhi family loyalist. So how did she feel after 2014 when Narendra Modi came to power? Did you ever meet her? And what was her outlook towards the Congress party's decline?
She was aware of the kind of challenges for the party and she knew the sort of morality and propriety that had cropped up in the party.
She knew of money, muscle power and communalisation of politics but she always felt that it was the Congress' duty to fight against communal forces, be it Hindu or Muslim religious extremism.
She always believed in the composite culture of India. She believed that as a nation, Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, Buddhists, Christians, they all were different but are like one community.
Her brother Saladin Ahmed, a cricketer and later an administrator, had migrated to Pakistan.
Mohsina's parents migrated to Pakistan by the early '60s. Mohsina Kidwai had married by then, in 1953 at the age of 21. So there was no question of her going to Pakistan.
Some time in the 1960s, I assume her parents had gone and settled in Pakistan. She also lost one of her brothers in the 1971 War. His name was Zia and he was a tea garden manager in East Pakistan (now Bangladesh). Till date no one knows what happened to him.
As far as she is concerned, she was very much Indian by birth, and Indian by choice. She stayed on. Some of her siblings who were with her parents had gone over to Pakistan.
Jawaharlal Nehru told her father-in-law that she should be in politics. So what spark did Nehru see in her?
In her autobiography, My Life in Indian Politics, which was narrated to me, she told me of the time when Jawaharlal Nehru came to meet Jamil Sahab, her father-in-law. He saw her and I think she was just 25, 26 or so. He asked her, 'Do you have an interest in politics?'
Nehru always looked for Muslim women to represent in public life and he did get women like Begum Maimoona Sultan who was Bhopal's member of Parliament.
He would always encourage such moves because he wanted the mainstream to be inclusive. So wherever he would spot talent, he would always encourage them to join politics and to the credit of Jamilur Rahman Kidwai, he encouraged his daughter-in-law to join politics.
I think she became an MLC in 1960 and started her journey in politics.
It is said she was instrumental in getting Sonia Gandhi to enter politics. Is it true?
She would not make such a claim because she's a very modest person, but -- this is my understanding -- what happened between '91 and '96, not just the demolition of the Babri Masjid but also issues like economic reforms, the kind of corruption allegations levelled against Prime Minister P V Narasimha Rao. She was very concerned that the Nehruvian values and principles were being compromised.
So she along with Arjun Singh, K Natwar Singh, Sheila Dixit and N D Tiwari tried to convince Sonia Gandhi to join politics. There were several people who were there who formed the Congress-Tiwari, what was known as Congress T.
Indira Gandhi, Rajiv Gandhi, Sonia Gandhi, Rahul Gandhi, Priyanka Gandhi, they always valued her opinion.
She was not a yes person. She would tell the truth and her feelings to Indira Gandhi, and Indira Gandhi would value her opinion. The same was the case with Rajiv Gandhi who would value her opinion.
You see her last act in the Congress presidential election that was conducted in 2022, she voted for Shashi Tharoor (and not Malikarjun Kharge who was a Gandhi family nominee).
She proposed and seconded Shashi's name. One can say this was a radical move because she wanted some kind of change in the functioning of the party.
How should India remember Mohsina Kidwai? What should the young generation learn from her life?
You can be very effective without being very intimidating or overwhelming.
She was slightly left of centre in politics.
She did her job efficiently, whatever was given to her. She did the job to the best of her abilities.
She was of very high integrity and morality. A deeply religious person who was very accommodating (to people of other faiths).
Some years back I met one of the ISKCON temple authorities. He told me that at every annual meet the ISKCON temple remembers people who have contributed to them and among those people, was Mohsina Kidwai. I was very surprised.
I asked, why? He said, because they were facing a lot of problems to construct the temple in Delhi. There were a lot of procedural problems and Mohsinaji helped them as a minister to clear all the bureaucratic hurdles.
When I narrated this to Mohsina Kidwai she immediately recalled the incident but did not take credit and said, 'It is nice they remember me.'
So I'm saying again, there are not many people who are like this.
As I said, she was deeply religious and very secular in the genuine sense.
When she was transport minister during Rajiv Gandhi's time the transport ministry had railways, surface transport, shipping, and civil aviation under it. In other words, Madhavrao Scindia, Rajesh Pilot and Jagdish Tytler all were junior ministers as ministers of state and working under her. She was the Cabinet minister.
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