India

by Patrick French

  All her life, Indira had been in the public eye—when she was arrested not long after her wedding, the policemen laid their turbans at her feet in apology—but Feroze found it impossible to adapt to being the nation’s son-in-law.7 He was elected as MP for Rae Bareli in Uttar Pradesh at the first general election, and was a vigorous lawmaker who worked to expose corruption and took special pleasure in targeting his incorruptible father-in-law’s sleazier associates. As the prime minister’s hostess, Indira had constant obligations, and Nehru was signally undiplomatic in failing to include his son-in-law in events at his house. As Indira’s confidante Pupul Jayakar wrote: “Feroze was low in protocol and often found himself below the salt.” Humiliated, he refused to attend official functions and shifted to his own house “where he cultivated roses and held his own ‘durbars.’ ”8 Jayakar believed their two sons, Rajiv and Sanjay, had a happier time with their father than with their mother. Feroze gave them his full attention and encouraged them to share his interest in carpentry and mechanics. The prime minister’s residence was impressive and formal, a warren of working offices, although Indira made efforts to introduce childish pleasures like a garden of pets. Sanjay’s favourite animal was a crocodile, but it was sent to a zoo after it nearly took off his mother’s hand. The boys were brought up in large part by servants, including a stern Danish governess who insisted on cold showers and raw vegetables.9

  The two children were very different in character. Rajiv was described by his mother as quiet and sensitive, a child who had trouble making friends. Sanjay was more outgoing, though at the age of six he had not yet learned to speak.10 Lively, arrogant and sometimes amusing, he was feared when he was a boarder at the upper-class colonial-style Doon School. He bit a chunk out of the ear of a fellow student who is now an eminent national politician. When I asked a Doon School contemporary—the Maoist revolutionary Kobad Ghandy, who was to take a very different road—how he remembered Sanjay, he replied with a period putdown: “He was a lumpen element.” It was not an unreasonable judgement: by his late teens, Sanjay was being accused of stealing and joyriding cars around Delhi.11

  With her children away at boarding school, Indira Gandhi had more time to worry. She experienced feelings of anger and vengeance, and some days she felt tormented, thinking of giving up on Delhi and going away to live in London. Through all this she was surrounded by people who deferred to her as the prime minister’s daughter and a possible source of patronage. She had a strong aesthetic sense, an eye for a hand-woven sari, and an eclectic interest in film, ballet, opera and passing intellectuals. Yet from early on, she had a peevishness and lack of proportion, particularly over those who crossed her, even in the mildest way. Having previously held minor positions, she was elected as president of the Congress party for a year in 1959, at the instigation of politicians who saw her as a potential route to the prime minister, and a possibly useful tool. She turned out to be more energetic, engaged and assertive than expected. Nehru’s reaction was ambiguous. He had never rated his daughter’s talents highly, but when she presided over a party meeting he said, “At first Indira Gandhi had been my friend and adviser, then she became my companion and now she is my leader.”12 Feroze was outraged, particularly when his wife persuaded a reluctant Nehru to topple an elected communist state government in Kerala and to invoke president’s rule—the first time this had happened since independence—claiming the southerners were working with the Chinese.

  In 1960, at the age of only forty-seven, Feroze Gandhi died from a heart attack. Despite their unhappiness as a couple, Indira felt isolated afterwards in a way she had never been before. Feroze was the one person who had stayed close to her at the worst point in her life, the years after the death of her mother. She resented many of the members of her father’s family, and in particular her aunt, Vijayalakshmi Pandit, who was by now an influential politician in her own right, having served as president of the UN General Assembly and Indian ambassador to several countries. Her children were growing older, and would soon be going abroad. Sanjay, obsessed by speed, was apprenticed to Rolls-Royce in England, where his delinquent tendencies quickly alienated his employers. Asked to account for one of a series of mistakes, he told his supervisor: “You people mucked up my country for 300 years, so what’s the big deal if I muck up Rolls-Royce?” When Sanjay finally quit his job, a Rolls-Royce executive said they were glad to see the back of him: “All he was interested in was booze and women.”13 Rajiv’s approach was different. He lived a carefree life at Cambridge University, studying in a desultory fashion, growing a temporary beard, tinkering with car engines, learning to do the Twist, taking odd jobs as a fruit picker, ice-cream seller and baker at the Cambridge Co-Op, where he was assigned to the bread section with responsibility for stacking the hot loaves when they came out of the oven. Neither son came away with a qualification.

  In the last months of Nehru’s life, Indira Gandhi became his gatekeeper, supervising not only visitors but the government files that were brought to him. The modern Indian state had been made with his imprint, and now he was fading, leaving a hole at the heart of government. In the absence of precedent, it was not hard for his daughter to take a commanding position, issuing decisions about what the prime minister would and would not do. The process of transition between administrations was new for everyone. Sometimes Indira’s only urge was to escape. “I feel I must settle outside India at least for a year or so and this involves earning a living and especially foreign currency,” she wrote to her American friend Dorothy Norman weeks before her father’s death. “The desire to be out of India and the malice, jealousies and envy, with which one is surrounded, are now overwhelming.”14 After he had passed away, she felt as if she was caught in a vacuum: the prime minister’s house was being turned into a memorial museum and library, and she thought she was being made to leave in a hurry. Within ten days of his death, civil servants had migrated and workers were removing the office furniture. It gave her horrible echoes of losing her childhood home at Anand Bhawan, a hurt she had carried down the years. She was now an orphan as well as a widow, and her sons were away in England, pretending to study. The attention she had received for years as the only child of the most famous living Indian was evaporating, as power shifted. Indira Gandhi had long been a defensive and insecure person, and now she had good reason to feel unprotected.

  The new prime minister, Lal Bahadur Shastri, told her he needed a Nehru in the cabinet to maintain continuity, and offered her a seat in the Rajya Sabha (the upper house of Parliament) and a position as minister for information and broadcasting. Indira Gandhi accepted, knowing this would give her a salary and a roof over her head.15 Her elevation revealed new ambition. When she flew to Kashmir to visit troops during a stand-off with Pakistan, she was lauded in the newspapers as the only man in the cabinet. With a coterie of supporters forming around her, she made little effort to hide her contempt for some of the new prime minister’s decisions.

  In 1965 the Pakistani leader, the self-appointed Field Marshal Ayub Khan, sent tanks across the border and India fought an unwanted but successful war. During subsequent peace talks in Tashkent, Shastri died from a heart attack. At this moment of surprise, Indira Gandhi’s entourage suggested she make a bid for power. The most obvious candidate for prime minister, the respected southern politician K. Kamaraj, declined to stand with the plaintive question: “No English, no Hindi. How?” Another likely leader, Morarji Desai, had too many opponents. For Mrs. Gandhi, the opportunity was irresistible: a woman who had long felt unappreciated was being offered an extraordinary chance. She had no experience of governing, but had watched her father at close quarters for years. Her late husband had been a theoretical socialist, even a soft Marxist, and Indira had observed his political ideas and developed her own alongside them. She knew everyone and could present herself to her father’s colleagues as a unifying force. For the durable politicians of Congress, she looked like a suitable and malleable stopgap. Indira Gandhi would be a figurehead, draw
ing the nation together in the spirit of her late father while the party machine made the important decisions.

  It was a fatal misjudgement by the party’s high command. Mrs. Gandhi thrived in power, trouncing both her enemies and her backers, and dividing Congress. To the world, Nehru’s daughter appeared to be a glamorous new leader. Fluent in English and French and looking unlike the elderly males who were running the world, she seemed an exemplar in international affairs. Her handling of the crisis that led to the creation of Bangladesh (the people of East Pakistan fought for independence from West Pakistan with help in the later stages from the Indian military) was assured. But her premiership was to leave two principal marks on India: socialism and conflict, as the state tried to make the people submit to its will. If things were not working out in the way the founders had hoped, it seemed easier to push their policies harder rather than to re-evaluate. If central planning had turned the economy stagnant, might it not be better to execute planning more carefully and vigorously, perhaps through nationalization of essential services? The country was suffering from drought, famine and a shortage of rice when she took over the job of prime minister, and she decided with encouragement from her advisers to become more radical.

  Using her father’s legacy and reputation, she tried to push through new policies centred around redistribution. She encouraged a nuclear programme, and later went to the trouble of amending the Constitution to turn India into a “Socialist Secular Democratic Republic.” A key achievement was to develop a new agricultural strategy known as the Green Revolution, which had been started under Lal Bahadur Shastri in an effort to end the periodic mass famines that had disfigured India under British rule. By using high-yielding forms of rice and wheat, Indian agriculture was transformed, particularly in the northern states. Some farmers made sufficient profits to invest in technology and irrigation, and gained political clout with their new prosperity. The Green Revolution turned India into one of the world’s largest agricultural producers.

  The traits that made Indira Gandhi vulnerable, and afraid of internal political rivals, determined her style of leadership. She was a weak parliamentary performer, bad at thinking on her feet, and was nicknamed “goongi gudiya,” or dumb doll. Not long after she became prime minister she was shouted down at a big party meeting in Jaipur. Her reaction was revealing. Lying in bed being massaged by a maid, she told a friend that her father’s sister, Vijayalakshmi, had been responsible for destroying her confidence in childhood: “She called me ugly, stupid. This shattered something within me. Faced with hostility, however well prepared I am, I get tongue-tied and withdraw.”16 As a woman in a male political world, she was isolated from the start. Her reaction was to avoid Parliament when she could, and to depend on the advice of a close entourage. She liked to reach out directly to the public, accepting petitions wherever she travelled, trusting crowds more than she trusted individuals.

  With Indira Gandhi, the personal was nearly always political. In her letters to Dorothy Norman—opening herself up to a friend who came from a different culture—she was often exasperated, depressed, vigilant, and facing difficulty from greedy, mean and petty people. Any attack on her or her administration was deemed a calumny. She drew strength from the masses who greeted her when she was campaigning, seeing the light in their eyes as a sign that she, despite everything, was on the true path and must not be deflected. A recurring trait throughout her premiership was the conviction that with so many things going wrong in India, only she could be trusted to put them right. Every order had to emanate from the prime minister’s office. When she made a decision like accepting U.S. food aid, which seemed to go against her proclaimed principles, she balanced it with a more populist act, such as confiscating the former princes’ privy purses, a symbolic move which generated paltry revenue. Her methods were autocratic. A senior bureaucrat recalled being summoned to her office in 1969: “She simply said, ‘For political reasons, it has been decided to nationalize the banks. You have to prepare within twenty-four hours the bill, a note for the Cabinet and a speech to make to the nation on the radio tomorrow evening.’ ”17 Mrs. Gandhi was not instinctively democratic, and lacked the necessary detachment of the good leader—the ability to distance herself from the whirl of events and take a dispassionate view.

  During her time as prime minister, the way in which politics was conducted in India altered. She was respected, admired and even feared, but her lack of faith in institutions led her to move away from the emphasis on consensus and common endeavour of the 1950s. To implement policy, it became necessary to place increasing demands on the mechanisms of the state, and to limit the latitude of the individual. The political system no longer depended on the moral authority of Congress, although even as its status declined, the myths of the freedom movement were boosted, with criticism of the founding parents becoming unacceptable and public buildings being named after them. Party politics in New Delhi became more of a negotiation, whether with regional leaders or with other parties and political movements. This was where Indira Gandhi showed a particular, destructive talent. During her father’s premiership and her own time as Congress party president, she had been able silently to assess the weaknesses of her potential opponents, and she now put this knowledge to use. More than ever, politics at a state level came to depend on “contractors” who could deliver packs of voters using money or muscle.18 As the optimism of the past gave way to a more fragmented climate in the 1970s, with new political forces spinning off from the once monolithic Congress party, Indira Gandhi’s response was to try to tighten the reins of power and micro-manage politics in a way her father had never attempted. This created lasting conflict, particularly in the states of Punjab, Assam and Kashmir.

  In 1971 she won the general election with the slogan “Garibi Hatao”—“Abolish Poverty.” It was a democratic victory, but behind the triumph lay a country that was failing. A mass movement led by the veteran socialist Jayaprakash Narayan promised strikes and “total revolution” against her administration. At first Mrs. Gandhi seemed paralysed by the agitation (Narayan’s wife, Prabha, had been a close friend of her mother, Kamala). In 1975, she declared a state of emergency. Opposition groups were banned, newspapers shut down and more than 100,000 people arrested. It looked as if India might be moving towards a new form of government—dictatorship. “I want something done,” she informed a senior colleague, Siddhartha Shankar Ray, shortly before the Emergency. “I feel that India is like a baby and just as one should sometimes take a child and shake it, I feel we have to shake India.”19 Most of her ministers were too surprised and in awe of her to raise any serious objection. Vijayalakshmi Pandit made it clear publicly that she thought Indira was betraying the Constitution and the legacy of Jawaharlal Nehru.

  Indira Gandhi’s chief adviser was her son Sanjay—prematurely bald, with extravagant sideburns and a pendulous lower lip. Previously, he was famous only for getting a licence to run a car factory which was unable to produce cars. After being given the opportunity to tour vehicle manufacturers in West Germany, Czechoslovakia and Italy, Sanjay expressed his own version of swadeshi, or self-reliance: he said he had nothing to learn from foreigners about car making. The Maruti project sucked in money for years from nationalized banks and private investors, with Indira Gandhi’s connivance, and produced nothing but a few prototypes and some car parts. One visitor to Sanjay’s amateur foundry described it as looking like “a dirty indoor barbecue.”20 During the Emergency, while his brother, Rajiv, stepped back from the action, worried about the dubious influence Sanjay was having on their mother, he was given the freedom to operate largely as he liked. Indira said later that nobody had shown her such selfless love as Sanjay.21

  Sanjay Gandhi was a decisive operator, setting up a parallel operation alongside the mechanisms of government. He treated the Republic of India as if it were his personal fiefdom, with bribery becoming endemic. A friend of the family, the writer Khushwant Singh, remembered arriving at a meeting with him and watching
a pair of supplicatory businessmen deliver two suitcases full of banknotes. “I found it hard not to like Sanjay,” he admitted, “but I have to say he was a thug, and he was corrupt.”22 Mrs. Gandhi tolerated his conduct, although it appears she did not profit directly from the transactions. In the view of Sanjay’s wife, Maneka, the benefits of the Emergency were later forgotten: “For a little while, things did work better and faster. Traders were ordered to put prices on their goods, and it’s remained the same ever since—before that, you would have to haggle over a bottle of tomato sauce.”23

  One of his particular concerns was the rapid rise of India’s population, which had almost doubled since independence. Notoriously, men were sterilized by a team led by one of Sanjay’s friends, the jewellery designer Rukhsana Sultana. The population controllers paraded through the streets of Delhi, drumming up recruits. In numerous cases the operation was done without consent, although the usual reward was a tin of cooking oil, a transistor radio or Rs120.24 “All our vasectomies,” Sultana told the travel writer Bruce Chatwin, “were done in a lovely air-conditioned cellar. I and my workers had to sweat it out on the street.”25 Across India, several million men were sterilized. In Delhi, Lucknow and other cities, ancient buildings were knocked down as part of Sanjay’s slum clearance project. Standing by Turkman Gate in Delhi’s old city, he told a government official he wanted to be able to see the Jama Masjid, the main mosque. Over a period of six days the command was implemented and, according to the Times of India, 150,000 shacks were knocked down.26 The police fired on a group of homeless protestors near Turkman Gate, killing several.