Indira Gandhi

  Mrs Gandhi’s appears to have been as much a search for a secure personal identity as it has represented the road to personal power. Her style, more than most, has been shaped by the traits and inhibitions of her personality—its solitariness, its reserve, its suspicion of the outsider. She thought of her childhood in terms of two kinds of people, those identified with the struggle for freedom and all the rest, and life remained for her a stark and narrow weave, unlike the many-textured fabric of her father’s personality and growth. The vital human difference between them made for very different political values and expression. Nehru’s temperament was the fireside at which many warmed their hands, took strength and went on their way to personhood, more confident for the encounter with him. Indira’s was the flame—lone, dependent on shelter for its glow and survival, leaving its surroundings dark. Nehru nurtured the institutions that would safeguard a democratic future. Indira’s confrontations with democratic institutions shook established norms and finally found expression in the Emergency of 1975–77. Nehru, effortlessly a leader of men, had the self-confidence of which equal relationships, personal and political, are born. Indira clung to ‘family’ as anchor, making it a platform for superiority. Though her style represented a clear departure from that of her predecessors, it resembled that of a number of Third World leaders who saw themselves as the saviour of their people. She has, however, been the only one to get her son accepted by her party as her successor—a feat that she may accomplish a second time.

  In May 1964, when Nehru died, dynasty was by no means a goal with her. But ideas like this do not spring full-blown from a void. Indira frankly believed she was uniquely qualified to lead the country, and in some respects better qualified than her father, whose civilized attributes could, she believed, be a disadvantage in politics. Yet it was the Congress party, not Indira, that planted the seed of dynasty when, in January 1966, it backed her to succeed Lal Bahadur Shastri, convinced that as prime minister she would be its best vote-getter in the approaching general election of 1967. The seed found fertile soil in an imagination nourished on patriotism, with a belief that her family had played an exclusive role in the fight for freedom and with an exaggerated view of her own. After seventeen years of Nehru government, and over a decade of Indira’s it was not surprising that her relatives too spoke, not always jokingly, of belonging to the royal family. These and other beneficiaries of the family cult have been glad to fan the feudal flame and keep it alive. Yet the idea of family succession as a birthright, tragic and retrograde for a republic, will, if it succeeds, provide an ironic ending to a heroic experiment in democracy, unique in Asia.

  *The National Security Ordinance provides that the detainee must be given grounds for his detention, but not if it is against the public interest to disclose these. Detention is to last for three months at one time, or a maximum of twelve months, but it can go on being extended by three months at a time, so long as a government functionary thinks this is necessary.

  †In October 1981, President’s rule was established in Kerala when the communist-led coalition lost its majority with the withdrawal of its two main coalition partners.

  Completing the Picture

  India is not done with Indira Gandhi. The election of 1977 decisively rejected her rule, and the government it brought to power undid the amendments she had made to alter the Constitution. But the party she created in her own image— named the Congress-Indira in 1978—returned to power in 1980 and dynastic succession, which was an article of faith with her, was accepted by her party after her assassination in 1984. To date, the party has not questioned it.

  Indira herself remains a fascinating paradox. Asia is the continent of women leaders and the cradle of family culture. Hindu, Muslim, Buddhist, liberal or traditional Asian families have given rise, in a masculine world, to a series of women in power. She is one of that procession, yet uniquely herself among them. Though she came into politics as of right, by the classic route of family, she stepped out of the family mould and carved a political space entirely her own.

  The paradox extends to her policy. Her scant regard for democratic processes at home—to the extent of suspending habeas corpus, freedom of the press and civil liberties during the Emergency—contrasted vividly with a foreign policy that championed democracy for East Bengal and entered the fight for it. Her finest hour came with the intervention that gave birth to Bangladesh. It was not only the most successful military intervention in history—restoring an elected government to power and calling a unilateral halt to hostilities at the earliest possible moment—it dealt heroically with a humanitarian crisis on a scale the world had never seen. India sheltered one crore refugees fleeing from genocide and persecution and made it possible for them to return to Bangladesh after the war. Compared with the Western interventions we have seen, in Lebanon, Kosovo, and more recently the search for non-existent weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and the prolonged and messy hunt for al-Qaida bases in Afghanistan, it stands out as a model of international behaviour. She is remembered and admired across the political spectrum for her steadfast leadership during the prolonged uncertainty and danger of partnering East Bengal, and for victory in that war, as much as she is criticized for her flawed democratic record at home.

  She was no feminist, and nor was she a leader who took any significant step forward on behalf of women, yet she probably has no equal in politics as an inspirational figure for women both in India and abroad. Her election as prime minister made exceptional news in the West unlike at home where Indians took a woman in power for granted. I was living in Bombay at the time when Betty Friedan, the American feminist and author of The Feminine Mystique, rang me from Delhi to say she would be interviewing Mrs Gandhi on a plane journey from Delhi to Jaipur. She said she was excited about the prospect but wondering what questions she should ask a woman prime minister. This was a dilemma that would never have occurred to me. I advised her simply to ask whatever questions she would ask a prime minister.

  To the onlooker the heart of the paradox may well have been Indira Gandhi’s belief that she was following in her father’s footsteps, when in fact her behaviour in power marked a complete break from his. She did not see it this way. Once she became the country’s leader she saw herself as the guardian of Congress tradition in the face of opposition attempts to attack or weaken it, whether that opposition came from within or outside the Congress party. The opposition to her within it was her first concern. I have an earlier memory of walking with her in the garden behind Teen Murti House. It was late evening in May 1964, a few days after Nehru’s death, and our grief was still raw. We were both close to tears, saying little, desolately aware of the passing of an era and the man who had dominated it, one who had been a principal actor in our lives. Love was not a word that described what Indira, or I and our immediate family, had felt for Nehru. He was a love in a class apart from other loves. When Indi (as I called my cousin) broke down and said,‘It was such a privilege to have known him,’ I wept with her.

  During the days after Nehru’s death the house had been a gathering place for family and friends but also for political confabulation and speculation. The question ‘What next?’ was on our minds—not who would be prime minister as that succession was soon settled by consensus, but what changes this might mean for the country. Nehru’s India had chosen non-alignment and equidistance from the two hostile blocs that ruled the world. At home his pragmatic vision had refused to be boxed into ideological confines.At Independence the new socialist republic had opted for a mixed economy and Nehru, in his own words, had improvised his way forward, adjusting to the needs of a developing situation. Now, Indira was afraid that the Congress party—some of whose major figures were socially and economically conservative—would reverse his political direction and undo his economic framework.

  There in the garden Indira recalled she had come up against the old guard’s refusal to allow her a free hand when she became Congress president in 1959. I asked her why she had qui
t the presidentship after a year when the post had a two-year term and she replied,‘Because they wouldn’t let me do what I wanted to do.’ The men who she said had prevented her from following her own judgement, or others like them, would now be in charge. She was disdainful of the portfolio of information and broadcasting she was offered by the new prime minister, Lal Bahadur Shastri, and when I congratulated her, she said,‘Whatever for?’ She was inclined to turn down the offer but in the end accepted it.

  Three years later, as prime minister, finding herself without free rein in the party, she solved the problem by declaring that ‘party’ was different from ‘people’ and her own link was with the people. She put this into effect by bypassing her party with a presidential ordinance nationalizing fourteen banks. A split followed in the Congress in November 1969 that then brought part of it under her individual command. The element of high political risk the split involved did not strike me at the time though it must have been like diving off a dizzyingly high board into incalculable depths below, and the end result might easily not have gone her way. Leading national newspapers expressed shock. The grand old party had fallen apart. Wise leadership in the past had been able to contain differences within it. Fringes had certainly dropped off to make new formations, but the party itself had stayed stable. Alarming, they said, was the populist storm that had preceded the split. Mature political behaviour had been tossed to the winds and this was bad news for the country. This adverse reaction was up against a jubilant view that hailed the split and called it the party’s rebirth. The dead wood—old men who were blocking the nation’s progress—had been chopped off. The rallies around the prime minister’s house after the nationalization of the banks, condemned as rabble-rousing by influential newspapers, were seen as thrilling evidence of the people’s support for the prime minister. ‘Never have there been such stirring times in the capital of Bharat as in these swinging days since bank nationalization,’ wrote the Sri Lankan journalist Trevor Drieberg,‘Daily mass rallies outside No. 1 Safdarjung Road... to thank the prime minister for this act and to exhort her to perform more of a like nature.’ Delhi was rocked and riven by two conflicting views. In life as in fiction, point of view decides which way the story goes and both stories found their convinced reading public. Until the Emergency, when opinion mounted against her, commentators might have been dealing with two different Indira Gandhis. What both views had in common was that the turn now taken for better or worse had opened a new page in politics, Mrs Gandhi’s own. She stood in no one’s shade or shadow.

  The woman who had accomplished this feat had not come to politics only by entitlement. Politics had been her entire upbringing. A cherished only child, with a family’s devotion and attention lavished on her, hers had nevertheless been a solitary girlhood in a household where her mother often lay ill and from which her father, publicly acclaimed and adored, was often absent. Outside home, Britain ruled India and one-fifth of the world, an arrangement that looked as permanent as the solar system. In an occupied country, a rebel family pledged to overthrowing British rule—like all similarly committed families in the country—was in a position of being at war, however non-violently, against the imperial power. It meant living under threat of imprisonment, on the edge of risk, in a climate of economic austerity and emotional stress and strain. With a father repeatedly in jail and a once luxurious household cut down to bare necessities, political awareness came early and was part of growing up. The picture Indira recalled of these years was a dark and brooding one. Later her mother’s death by tuberculosis in February 1936 when Indira was eighteen made for long and deep mourning. At the Badminton School in Bristol, where her father sent her to prepare for entry to Oxford, a schoolmate, Iris Murdoch, remembers her as a girl grieving for her mother, ‘very unhappy, very lonely, intensely worried about her father and her country and thoroughly uncertain about the future’.1 Indira’s impressions of the school were that ‘despite a terribly anti-fascist and pacifist [atmosphere] imperialism seems to be inherent in the bones of the girls [though] they hate to hear you say so.’2 Those for whom politics is merely a chosen profession do not have what Indira had—a feel for the territory and an instinctive sleepwalker’s acquaintance with it. The recently released Jacqueline Kennedy tapes show that Mrs Kennedy did not like Indira Gandhi, describing her on her visit to Washington with her father in 1961, as ‘a real prune—bitter, kind of pushy horrible woman... It always looks like she’s been sucking a lemon.’ One can sympathize with Indira trapped in the purdah of Mrs Kennedy’s ladies’ lunch in the living room while the men discussed what mattered in the dining room. Mrs Kennedy, unacquainted with political women, might as well have invited Mrs Mao Tse Tung to a domestic chit-chat while Mao and Kennedy got on with world affairs.

  Reserve was natural to Indira and simplicity was her lifestyle. She disliked fuss and clutter around her. She had an eye for beauty but no liking for opulence in food, clothes, furnishings or possessions, and this was not a matter of policy or discipline but because she was made that way. She ate wisely, did not smoke or drink, and dressed in impeccable taste, always in khadi. Her interests extended far and wide, over art, crafts, classical music, theatre and literature. A play she had enjoyed in New York during Nehru’s first visit to the US was South Pacific and one of her favourite novels was her old schoolmate Iris Murdoch’s An Unofficial Rose. India’s festivals abroad, conducted by Pupul Jayakar, were inspired and backed by Indira’s personal interest. India took the lead in promoting handicrafts—the local product—when these were not the fashion worldwide. In her personal capacity she was sensitive and caring. Years before she came to power she had taken responsibility for a lame girl whom I often saw at the house though she did not live there. She was soft-spoken and restrained in private life—unlike the fire and fever she could display on the public platform—and like many introverted temperaments she was drawn to people who were open, warm and outgoing. One of these was Mrs Harivansh Rai (Teji) Bachchan, wife of the famous Hindi poet, in whose home Rajiv and Sanjay spent much time, as Teji’s sons, Amitabh and Ajitabh, did at Teen Murti. I attended Sonia’s ‘mehendi’ at Teji Bachchan’s house before her marriage to Rajiv in 1968. The marriage itself was a brief and simple civil ceremony. Compared with today’s overblown ostentatious weddings, it seems like the last echo of a Gandhian legacy.

  I don’t know if Indira’s sense of humour was much in evidence on public occasions but she once told Parliament about a farmer who bought an arid piece of land that had never produced so much as a twig. He laboured on it until it bloomed. The local priest, passing by, declared, ‘What wonders you and the Lord have wrought, my son’ to which the farmer replied,‘But you should have seen it when only the Lord was in charge!’ Her party work even before she became prime minister must have left little time for frivolities but on a plane journey we shared, returning from New York in 1962 or ’63, we looked through glossy magazines and exclaimed over the fashions in Vogue. She described her student days in London, recalling an incident:‘I was in a taxi and I started doing my eye exercises. I was making the most awful faces when suddenly I saw the driver gaping at me in the mirror. I don’t know what he must have thought!’

  She did not hold with privilege and it is not surprising that princely privileges and privy purses were abolished early on in her first term in spite of the covenant with the princes that the purses would be gradually reduced. This populist measure may well have suited her pact with ‘the people’ but it also accorded with her personal and political preference. I have often wondered what she made of the polemics and the colourful communist language that surfaced in national discourse for the first time as an accompaniment to her measures when she took the Communist Party of India (CPI) as partner and adviser.‘Right reactionaries’,‘Left adventurists’, ‘reactionary conspirators’, ‘counter-revolutionaries’ were no part of her vocabulary, but they served her purpose, as did efficient communist management for ‘upsurges’ and street arousal when called for. Mean
while regardless of her radical posture the Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPI-M) was targeted for ruthless elimination. Its members filled jails along with others of the Opposition during the Emergency.