As governments compete, so religions contend. The ecumenist Gandhi, who declared, “I am a Hindu, a Muslim, a Christian, a Zoroastrian, a Jew,” might find it difficult to stomach the exclusivist revivalism of so many religions and cults the world over. But perhaps his approach has always been inappropriate for the rest of the world. As one of his Muslim critics retorted, to his claim of eclectic belief, “Only a Hindu could say that.”
And finally, the world of the spinning wheel, of self-reliant families in contented village republics, is even more remote today than when Gandhi first espoused it. Despite the brief popularity of intermediate technology and the credo “small is beautiful,” there does not appear to be much room for such ideas in an interdependent world. Self-reliance is too often a cover for protectionism and a shelter for inefficiency in the Third World. The successful and prosperous countries are those who are able to look beyond spinning chakras to silicon chips — and who give their people the benefits of technological developments that free them from menial and repetitive chores and broaden the horizons of their lives.
But if Gandhism has had its limitations exposed in the years after 1947, there is no denying Gandhi’s greatness. While the world was disintegrating into fascism, violence, and war, Gandhi taught the virtues of truth, nonviolence, and peace. He destroyed the credibility of colonialism by opposing principle to force. And he set and attained personal standards of conviction and courage that few will ever match. He was that rare kind of leader who was not confined by the inadequacies of his followers.
Yet Gandhi’s Truth was essentially his own. He formulated its unique content and determined its application in a specific historical context. Inevitably, few in today’s world can measure up to his greatness or aspire to his credo. No, Gandhi’s “triumph” did not change the world forever. It is, sadly, a matter of doubt whether he triumphed at all.
The India of the first fifty years after independence was therefore a post-Gandhian India. It paid lip service to much of its Gandhian patrimony while striking out in directions of which Gandhi could not have approved. But its central challenges remained the ones Gandhi identified: those of overcoming disunity and discrimination, of ensuring the health and well-being of the downtrodden, of developing the capacity to meet the nation’s basic needs, of promoting among Indians the integrity and commitment he labeled “Truth.” These challenges, modified by the ways in which India has attempted to rise to them in the last fifty years, remain. They will continue to set the defining agenda of the next fifty years.
2
Two Assassinations and a Funeral Deaths and a Dynasty
After the general elections of 1996, as after those of 1991, the question on many Indian lips was a curious one: Will she or won’t she?
As a minority government tenuously wielded power in the monsoon of 1991 after the inconclusive result of India’s most violent general election ever, its future clouded by swirling speculation about the ambitions of rival leaders, the most avid speculation in New Delhi’s political circles concerned a nonpolitician. The question was again asked in mid-1996, though in more muted terms, after a more tranquil contest that witnessed the repudiation of much of India’s political establishment. Will Sonia Gandhi, the Italian-born widow of former prime minister Rajiv Gandhi, enter politics? And if she does, how long will it be before modem India’s dominant political dynasty rules again?
On the face of it, the question was absurd. Not only was Sonia a “foreigner” (her Indian passport too recent in 1991 to have needed renewal) and a Roman Catholic (in a land where fewer than 2 percent of the population share her Christian faith), but she was reserved, intensely private, and famously antipolitical. The tales of her reluctance, tragically vindicated, to allow her late husband to entangle himself in India’s murky public life were legendary. It was only on emotional and “familial” grounds that she acquiesced in Rajiv Gandhi’s entry into politics when his mother, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, was left bereft by the death in a plane crash of her younger son and political heir, Sanjay. And when Rajiv was precipitated into the highest office by Indira Gandhi’s assassination, Sonia — who had cradled the dying prime minister in her arms — reportedly pleaded with him not to take the job. If anything, the killing of her husband in the midst of an election campaign justified her worst fears. Surely she wouldn’t dream of putting herself and her children on the firing line again, for a cause that had already cost them so much?
Indeed, the persistence of the question seems, at one level, strange. The Congress Party bosses offered Sonia the crown of thorns within forty-eight hours of her husband’s death. In the chaos and uncertainty following Rajiv Gandhi’s murder by a suicide bomber from the Tamil Tiger terrorist movement in neighboring Sri Lanka, they unanimously voted her to the party’s presidency. She was the only remaining adult symbol of the family that had ruled India for all but six of its forty-four years of independence, but Sonia, still devastated by grief and shock, turned them down flat. That, it had then seemed, was that: the end of the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty.
But it didn’t quite work out that way. Calls for Sonia Gandhi to change her mind were made every day. One nominee to the first post-Rajiv federal Council of Ministers, Rudra Pratap Singh, refused to take his oath of office until Sonia announced her entry into politics. She did not oblige, and he was dropped from the government, but his stand struck a chord. An incessant stream of political visitors, from the new prime minister on down, flowed to her New Delhi residence every day. Within weeks of her husband’s death, the political class stopped pretending that these were “condolence visits”; politicians wanted to seek her advice, her blessing, or at least her proximity, and critics began muttering darkly that the young widow was becoming “an extraconstitutional center of power.”
As the compromise prime minister, P. V. Narasimha Rao, slowly but surely consolidated his grip on office, Sonia Gandhi edged out of contention, but not out of the limelight. She remained the most visible symbol of the Congress Party’s link to its Nehruvian glory; she was invited to every function of national importance, from the Independence Day celebrations to the ceremonial “beating the retreat” by the massed bands of the Indian armed forces, and her presence or absence had the power to rock the government. Every political crisis, real or imagined, in Delhi was accompanied by calls for her to take on, at the very least, the presidency of the Congress Party. Five years after the chorus began, newspaper and magazine articles continued to suggest that, whatever Sonia’s personal hesitations, the pressure on her was too great to resist indefinitely.
And then there is, after all, in true dynastic tradition, the need to think of the aspirations of the next generation. Her son Rahul, born in 1970, and his reputedly more ambitious sister, Priyanka, two years younger and described by admirers as a clone of Indira Gandhi, would not always be too young to enter Parliament. Their father’s seat must, observers suggest, be kept warm for one of them — and who better to nurse the Amethi constituency he so successfully nurtured than Sonia herself?
At first Sonia Gandhi sternly resisted such temptations, but when she finally ran for her late husband’s seat in Parliament, she won handily. Elected President of the Congress Party, she soon became the unquestioned leader of the country’s largest political organization. Diffident at first, she learned the art of acquiring and wielding power, till, in 2004, she found herself anointed by the winning coalition as India’s next Prime Minister. In a remarkable act of renunciation reminiscent of her behaviour in 1991, she declined the honour, choosing to nominate Manmohan Singh instead. But while the respected economist served as an able chief executive, there remained no doubt as to where real political power in India lay — not at the Prime Minister’s house on Race Course Road, but at 10 Janpath, Sonia Gandhi’s residence.
A builder’s daughter from Torino, without a college degree, with no experience of Indian life beyond the rarefied realms of the prime minister’s residence, fiercely protective of her privacy, so reserved and unsmilin
g in public that she has been unkindly dubbed “the Turin shroud,” leading a billion Indians at the head of the world’s most complex, rambunctious, and violent democracy? This situation, improbable if it weren’t true, is proof again of the enduring appeal of the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty.
Politicians certainly have no doubt about that appeal. Congress Party members of Parliament whom I spoke to in 1991 were dismissive of Sonia’s disqualifications for the post. “The people don’t consider her a foreigner, or a Catholic, or otherwise unsuitable,” declared Mani Shankar Aiyar, a close aide to Rajiv Gandhi and a member of Parliament from the southern state of Tamil Nadu. “They think of her as the nation’s bahu, their collective daughter-in-law. I can’t address a meeting anywhere in my constituency without someone getting up and calling for Sonia Amma [Mother Sonia] to take over the party. It’s only the intellectuals who carp about dynastic rule. The Congress Party has always needed one unquestioned figure at the top where the buck stopped — a monarch, if you like, whose decisions were the last word. We don’t have such a figure in the party today. But if Sonia came into politics, we would.”
Aiyar is no country politico, but a former diplomat with a Cambridge degree and a rapier wit who is not known to suffer fools gladly. If people like him do not squirm at the prospect of pledging allegiance to a leader whose principal qualification to lead is the name on her marriage certificate, obituaries for the dynasty are premature indeed.
* * *
It all began, like so much else that is good, bad, and ugly in modern India, under the British Raj. Motilal Nehru (1861-1931), a prosperous Kashmiri lawyer in the northern city of Allahabad, became a leading light of the Indian National Congress (the principal vehicle of the nationalist movement) and the first of four members of his family to ascend to its presidency. But even at his peak he was only one among several Congress leaders of comparable stature, all of whom were dwarfed by the towering figure of their generation, Mohandas (“Mahatma”) Gandhi. When Motilal died at seventy, with Indian independence still a remote dream, he could scarcely have imagined he would one day be regarded as the founder of modern India’s preeminent political dynasty.
He had, it is true, done everything possible to bring his Harrowand Cambridge-educated son, Jawaharlal (1889-1964), a moody, idealist intellectual of Fabian socialist convictions, into the center of nationalist politics. Under his father’s tutelage, Jawaharlal became the youngest member of the Working Committee of the Indian National Congress in 1918. But it was the Mahatma who, for all the difference in their worldviews, saw the younger Nehru’s potential and made him his political protégé. Imprisoned for the first time in 1921, Jawaharlal spent eighteen years in British jails. In between he became Congress president in 1928, dominated the articulation of the party’s political, economic, and foreign policies, and ascended unchallenged, as Mahatma Gandhi’s nominee, to the prime ministry of an interim government in 1946, a post he retained upon full independence in 1947.
For the next seventeen years, Nehru was India. With the Mahatma’s assassination at the hands of a Hindu fanatic in 1948, Jawaharlal Nehru became the keeper of the national flame, the most visible embodiment of the freedom struggle, the spirit of Indian independence incarnate. Despite his dreamy, abstracted air and occasional Brahminical imperiousness, the masses adored him, and it did not hurt that he, rather than any of the committed Gandhians who came to oppose him, was the Mahatma’s chosen heir. Incorruptible, secular, a politician above politics, Nehru’s stature in the country at large was so great that all he needed to do if anyone opposed him was threaten to resign. The dissenters quickly pleaded with him to stay, and swallowed their dissent. Nehru usually got his way.
But for all that, he was a convinced democrat, a man so wary of the perils of autocracy that he once authored an anonymous article warning Indians of the dangers of giving dictatorial temptations to Jawaharlal Nehru. As prime minister he carefully nurtured the forms and institutions of democracy. He was always careful to treat the party as his master rather than the other way around, and to defer to its elders, paying careful deference to the country’s ceremonial presidency, writing regular letters to the chief ministers of India’s states explaining his policies, subjecting himself to cross-examination in Parliament by a fractious opposition. But he did little to cultivate alternatives to himself: he was, in the celebrated Indian metaphor, the immense banyan tree in whose shade no other plant could grow. Independent India’s policies, from nonalignment in the cold war to statist socialism at home, were thus unduly the reflection of one man’s vision. He became identified with them, and they with him.
The worldview of the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty was shaped, in its essentials, during India’s nationalist struggle against British rule, and was therefore founded above all on opposition to British (and, by extension, Western) imperialism. Whereas Motilal Nehru was an affluent lawyer, schooled in the institutions of the Raj, who fought — in the American phrase — for Indians to have “the rights of Englishmen,” Jawaharlal based his nationalism on a complete rejection of the British and all their works. His letters from Harrow and Cambridge reveal greater sympathy for the “extremists” in the Indian National Congress than for the “moderates” with whom his father was then politically aligned. And though he became a protégé of Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru’s political beliefs owed far more to the Russian Revolution than to Gandhi’s Hindu humanism.
Nehru, like many Third World nationalists, saw the imperialism that had subjugated his people as the logical extension of international capitalism, for which he therefore felt a profound mistrust. As an idealist deeply moved by the poverty and suffering of the vast majority of his countrymen under colonial capitalism, Nehru was inevitably more attracted to noncapitalist solutions for their problems. The ideas of Fabian socialism captured an entire generation of English-educated Indians; Nehru was no exception. In addition, the seeming success of the Soviet model — which Nehru admired for bringing about the industrialization and modernization of a large, feudal, and backward multinational state not unlike his own — appeared to offer a valuable example for India. Like many others of his generation, Nehru thought that central planning, state control of the “commanding heights” of the economy, and government-directed development were the “scientific” and “rational” means of creating social prosperity and ensuring its equitable distribution. Self-reliance was the mantra: the prospect of allowing a Western corporation into India to “exploit” its resources immediately revived memories of the British East India Company, which also came to trade and stayed on to rule.
In India, one of the lessons we learn from history is that history too often teaches the wrong lessons.
For all that, the political image of the Nehru dynasty was one of staunch anti-imperialism, a determination to safeguard India against foreign domination, and a commitment — at least in principle — to uplift the poorest sections of Indian society. In addition, the Nehrus were, by upbringing and conviction, completely secular. Not only did Indira Gandhi marry a Parsi, but her daughters-in-law were an Italian Christian and a Punjabi Sikh. The one strand of political opinion Nehru and his offspring abhorred was that of Hindu religious revivalism.
The Nehru legacy to India was thus a mixed one. It consisted of four major pillars — democratic institution-building, staunch secularism, nonalignment, and socialist economics. The first two were indispensable to the country’s survival; the third preserved its self-respect and enhanced its international standing without bringing any concrete benefits to the Indian people (who arguably might have fared better in alliance with the West); the fourth was disastrous, condemning the Indian people to poverty and stagnation and engendering inefficiency, red-tapism, and corruption on a scale rarely rivaled elsewhere.
On his desk, Jawaharlal Nehru kept two totems — a gold statuette of Mahatma Gandhi and a bronze cast of the hand of Abraham Lincoln, which he would occasionally touch for comfort. The two objects reflected the range of his sources of inspiration.
It says some thing about the narrowing of the dynasty’s intellectual heritage that both ended up in a museum—and his heirs just kept the desk.
* * *
When Nehru died, broken by the China war into which he had blundered, there was no obvious successor. The Congress Party bosses picked the leader who was least disliked by a majority of them, the diminutive but shrewd Lal Bahadur Shastri (1904-1966). In his low-key manner, Shastri began to evolve a collegial style of governance, one that might in time have seemed the natural way to rule a pluralist state that was constitutionally supposed to be federal. But he couldn’t see it through; less than two years after he assumed office, following a futile and bloody war thrust upon him by the military dictatorship in Pakistan, Shastri died of a heart attack in the Soviet city of Tashkent, where he had gone to make peace with Pakistan and signed away most of what his soldiers had won on the battlefield. Appalled by the pointlessness of the conflict and the waste of life and resources it involved, the good and decent Shastri died, quite literally, of a broken heart.
The Congress Party was thrown into confusion. None of the leaders rejected at the time of Shastri’s election could be picked without rousing the ire of others with equal or better claims. Casting about for a compromise, the party stalwarts, known as the Syndicate, performed a masterstroke. There was one candidate available who benefited from national recognition, had held political office, and yet could be counted upon to take instructions from the party: Nehru’s daughter.
Indira (1917-1984) had dropped out of college in Oxford and married a young Congress worker, Feroze Gandhi. Feroze was no relation to the Mahatma: indeed, he wasn’t even a Hindu, but a member of the tiny Parsi minority, descended from Zoroastrian refugees who had fled Muslim persecution in Persia in the eighth century AD. The Parsis settled originally in the coastal state of Gujarat, and many adopted Gujarati surnames, such as Gandhi or Patel. Others, however, took on surnames under the British that reflected their professions, so that there are Parsis called Engineer, Driver, Cooper, and Merchant, as well as Mistry (carpenter), Daruwalla, and Toddywalla (liquor traders both). Had Indira’s Parsi husband been a Toddywalla rather than so conveniently a Gandhi, I sometimes wonder, might India’s political history have been different?
India Page 5