by Javier Moro
They both nodded.
The visit of the Indian Foreign Secretary served to get the Russians to send a fleet to the Bay of Bengal. In a few days it was following in the wake of the American ships. The situation had reached a critical point. From the White House, Nixon launched furious attacks against “Indian aggression”. His administration announced a halt to economic and military aid to India, but continued to send war material to Pakistan, something which was denounced even in the American Press. Indira wrote him an emphatic letter: “This war could have been avoided if the nations, especially the United States, had used their influence, their power and their authority to find a political solution. As President of the United States and representative of the will, aspirations and idealism of the great American people, at least let me know exactly where we have gone so wrong that your representatives and spokesman treat us with such harsh language.” Indira spent the day wondering whether or not to send the letter. At night she decided she would. The American President would have yet another reason to hate her even more.
On December 13th, when his army was at the gates of Dacca, General Manekshaw sent an ultimatum to his Pakistani counterpart in which he gave him three days to surrender. At five in the afternoon on 16th, Indira was being interviewed by a reporter from Swedish television who was more interested in finding out what clothes she liked to wear and what her childhood had been like than in the progress of the war, when the phone suddenly rang. It was Manekshaw: “Ma’am, we have beaten them. They’ve just surrendered. Dacca has fallen.” Indira shut her eyes and squeezed her fists.
“Thanks, Sam,” she said.
She finished the interview in a hurry and went to Parliament. Before the assembly of expectant MPs, she began saying: “Dacca is today the free capital of a free country…” But a warm ovation mixed with cries of jubilation drowned out the rest of her speech. “We’ve won!” even the opposition MPs shouted. “Let’s crush the enemy forever!” said others. “Long live Indira Gandhi!” cried the people.
Later she met with the army chiefs. The balance for the Indians was 42 planes and 81 tanks destroyed; the Pakistanis had lost 86 planes and 226 tanks. The greatest difference lay in the number of prisoners. The Pakistanis had taken a handful of prisoners in the fighting in the west. India held 94,000 Pakistani prisoners. Indira attempted to calm down her generals, who were not in agreement with the unilateral ceasefire that she was calling for. The high command echoed a large part of public opinion: to go on collecting victories “until the enemy is totally defeated”. But Indira was pragmatic: “We have to stop once we have achieved our aims, we cannot give either China or the United States excuses to intervene. We must hand back the prisoners and put a stop to the conflict now.” The generals cleared their throats, except for Sam, who listened imperturbably, with his long nose pointing at each person as they spoke. Indira explained that her position was based on a political appreciation of the situation and that she spoke with the authority provided by the support of a unanimous cabinet. Once she had finished, the generals got up, saluted and said they would carry out the government’s instructions. “This is something that could not have happened in many countries, and not only in the Third World,” Indira would remember.
Indira’s strategy of gaining time, her perfect sense of opportunity, the excellent relationship she had with General Manekshaw, and her almost maternal way of speaking to the troops were qualities recognized unanimously by all sectors of society. The international Press spoke of her in grandiose terms. The goddess Durga had become the “Empress of India”.
Indira had called Nixon’s bluff. She was right that the Americans could not rush to save their ally the Pakistani dictator because they could not afford to open up another front in Asia. Nixon was furious with the outcome of the war. “We’ve been too soft on that damned woman,” he told Kissinger. “Look how she’s done that to the Pakistanis when we’d warned that old bitch not to get involved.” These were his exact words. Kissinger was annoyed with himself for having underestimated the military strength of the Indians. “The Indians are such poor pilots that they don’t even know how to get their planes off the ground,” he had told his boss during Indira’s visit. A comment that Rajiv would not have found at all amusing. But the opinion of the American people, and of the American Press, disagreed with its leaders. In an opinion poll, Indira Gandhi was classed as the most admired person in the world.
Indira’s decisive action saved the life of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, who had been condemned to death in Pakistan. One of the conditions of the armistice agreement was the immediate liberation of the leader of the new Bangladesh. On January 11th, 1972, Rahman made a stopover at Palam Airport, New Delhi, on his way back to Dacca. He had come to thank Indira, and they both gave speeches full of emotion: “His body was locked up, but no one could lock up his spirit, which continued to inspire the people of Bangladesh…” she said. “Indira Gandhi is not only the leader of a country, she is a leader of mankind,” declared Sheikh Mujibur. It was a moment of intense euphoria after the tension accumulated over the recent months.
In the following days and weeks, thousands of baby girls born in India were named Indira by their parents. One of them, however, born a day after Sheikh Mujibur Rahman’s triumphant visit to New Delhi, was not called that. Her parents, Sonia and Rajiv Gandhi, gave her the name of Priyanka, which in Sanskrit means “dear to the sight”.
ACT II
THE EXTERMINATING ANGEL
What can the river do against fire, the night against the sun, the dark against the moon?
Sanskrit aphorism
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Usha phoned Indira, who was on tour in the state of Bihar, to tell her the good news. A year and a half after the birth of Rahul, they were proud to have a new member of the family. The Prime Minister was radiant. What more could she ask for? She was the undisputed leader of the country, her position was unassailable, and on top of everything life was giving her the gift of a granddaughter, like a coronation. She was ready to spoil her a lot, and she always kept herself informed of her needs. In line with her style, she sent messages to Sonia from the most unexpected places with questions like: “How did the baby sleep last night?” or “Has Rahul still got a runny nose?” That moment of joy reminded her of another, equally intense moment, when she had decided to get married to Firoz. “I feel a serene happiness deep inside which nothing or no one can steal from me,” she had written to her father. Nehru had written back to her from jail, tempering his daughter’s enthusiasm from the height of his years and experience: “Happiness is something rather fleeting. Being fulfilled is perhaps a more lasting feeling.” Nehru knew, and Indira had already learned it, that happiness is as fragile as the finest of porcelains. It is better to preserve it and enjoy it while it lasts, because it can be broken—or stolen.
Indira certainly felt fulfilled, and in full possession of her faculties. She had become used to power, not because of what she got out of it in material terms, because her few needs were amply covered and she lacked ambition in that sense, but because of the feeling of plenitude it gave her. The feeling that she was true to her destiny because she belonged to the family into which she had been born. The deep conviction that she was doing her duty, which did not arise out of personal choice, but from the moral legacy she had received from her father, and he from his father before him. In the end, the Messianic feeling that Nehru had instilled in her had filtered down to the depths of her spirit.
But Indira had also learned that power, fame and popularity do not last forever. How could she go on growing when she had reached the top? Or was it that once at the top, the only direction left was down? These were thoughts that came to her more and more frequently at difficult moments. “I feel like a prisoner,” she wrote to her friend Dorothy Norman in June 1973, “because of the security team, who think they can hide their incompetence by surrounding me with more and more people, but above all because I realize that I have come to the end of a road, and that I ca
nnot grow any more in that direction.” In fact, she would rather have concentrated exclusively on questions of international politics, because that was what she really liked. She felt she had the soul of a statesman: great matters and great challenges inspired her. She had signed an agreement with Bhutto which guaranteed long-lasting peace with Pakistan; she wanted to solve the conflict over Kashmir, the land of her forefathers; she was seeking normalization of relations with the Chinese. On the other hand, internal politics, the squabbling between parties, the betrayals, the forced alliances, the hustle and bustle of public life in India weighed heavily on her. “There are no normal days for a Prime Minister of India,” Sonia heard her say as she served tea to Indira and her friend Pupul. “On a good day, there may be two or three very urgent problems. On a bad day, there might be a dozen. After a time, you manage to live with it, although you never really get used to it. If you do, then it’s best if you leave the job. As Prime Minister one must always feel a little uncomfortable, always seeking to find one’s balance.”
On a personal level, the goddess Durga went on living in her austere way. She hardly wore any jewels, a reflection of her frugal personality. Her most highly valued saris were those that her father had woven in prison. However she had a nice collection of saris which she used “politically”, in the sense that she wore them according to the place and population she was intending to visit. She had them from all over the sub-continent. Also in her wardrobe there were regional costumes which she wore when she went on tour in the north-eastern territories, to make it clear that the sari was not the only item of clothing that women wore in India.
Sonia learned to recognize all those clothes and helped her to choose them before each journey. During the Bangladesh conflict, Indira had leaned towards the colour red, as though the war had heightened her sensitivity to that colour, which traditionally was not for widows. Indira had confessed during that time that she saw everything as though through a red filter and that this colour had been with her throughout the whole war. But afterwards she went back to her usual tastes, that is, all colours except mauve and violet. She preferred bright tones to pastel tones, especially green. As it was difficult for her to go shopping, Sonia and Usha brought saris home for her. Indira quickly chose the ones she liked. She knew how to wear them with style, and looked as elegant in a simple hand- woven cotton sari as in a heavily embroidered one, made out of Benares silk.
Sonia had become an indispensable presence in that house. Indira loved her like the daughter she had never had. Now that there were more receptions and dinners for foreign dignitaries, Sonia took on with her mother-in-law the role that Indira had taken on with her father when she lived in Teen Murti House. She was very conscientious when it came to choosing the menus, in which beef and pork were never included. Hindu vegetarians did not eat eggs, but they did eat dairy products, and the strictest ones, the vegans, would not eat anything of animal origin. She also prepared halal food for the Moslems and kosher for the Jews. Ensuring that everything was in perfect order was not an easy task, especially when foreigners were coming. It was difficult to obtain essential products for a good Western menu, even in the American Embassy store. Sonia learned to plan the meals with great care, mixing Indian and European dishes according to the availability of the ingredients. The worst thing was that once again there was a shortage of basic foodstuffs. After six years of abundant monsoons, the rains had failed again. The cloud of dust that suffocated New Delhi was so dense that Sonia did not go out without her inhaler. She could see the disorder in the streets from inside her white Ambassador with dark windows. There were demonstrations all over, streets blocked off, people protesting. “Indira isn’t getting ready of poverty!” said a man armed with a megaphone in front of a small crowd at a crossroads in New Delhi, alluding to Indira’s electoral slogan, “She’s getting ready of poor people by starving us to death!” The victory had not let the winner off the hook, and India was wounded. Dealing with the refugees had emptied the country’s granaries. The State’s coffers were empty. The worldwide oil crisis had made the price of crude oil rocket, and inflation was out of control. If before it took Sonia twenty minutes to get to Connaught Place, now she had to allow more than double that because of the complicated route she had to take, such was the turmoil in the streets. It was paradoxical to have to go round the city shopping for luxury banquets while the poor were starving in the streets. That was a reality that Sonia could not get used to. Back home, she made sure that every light bulb worked, and that the taps in the bathroom did not drip. She made certain any tall guests would have suitable chairs and that the shorter ones could be sure of a footstool.
When she was at home, whenever she could, Indira continued to use her little study on the veranda, by her bedroom, even though she had a large office available to her at Akbar Road, about fifty metres away. But inside the house, she could feel the presence of her family around her, she could hear the hustle and bustle of domestic life, she could see Sonia walk by with the baby in her arms and that made her life sweeter. For her, work, leisure and family duties were not compartmentalized activities, but flowed into each other. She got more out of herself when she did several things at the same time. “The more you do, the more you find you can do” was her favourite saying. Her mental powers all worked at the same time, and that perhaps was the secret that allowed her to deal with much more work than normal people. Sonia observed that work and rest were not separate periods for her mother-in-law. It was a question of doing something different, even if only for a short time, such as reading, arranging bouquets of flowers, organizing books or clothes, or talking to the family. Sometimes Indira would complete a crossword over lunch, which seemed strange with the number of problems awaiting her. “It helps me to relax and organize my ideas,” she would say. At home, she continued with the custom of leaving notes: “Today you missed a nice photo,” she wrote to Rajiv one day. “This morning in Akbar Road, two parakeets sat for a long time on the branch of a tree. There was also a pair of woodpeckers fluttering around all the time.”
Sonia learned a lot from her, because of the loving relationship they had formed with each other which was getting stronger all the time. Indira’s problems, which were largely the problems of India, ended up being discussed at home. They did not talk so much about the routine things in political life as about the large issues: the severe economic crisis that had begun in 1972 and which was threatening to become the most serious of them all, the overpopulation which was choking the country’s development, the eternal tension between religious communities, the encroachment by slum-dwellers of public areas in all cities or the effects of natural disasters, age-old companions of man’s existence in Asia. The love that Indira felt for the common people infected Sonia too, and she was moved by her mother-in-law’s role as champion of the poor, an echo of her adolescent dreams of heroic missionaries. Besides, she admired her, not so much because of her successes in political life, but because she was spontaneous and informal, and totally lacking in arrogance. Sonia appreciated “her capacity for loving and giving”. “For us, she was someone who generously shared her broad knowledge, her warmth and her presence. When she went away on a trip, she would write to us about the people she met and her experiences. When she was here, she watched over each and every one of us.” Indira took very seriously the little events in the day to day lives of her grandchildren, like their first tooth or their first steps. She was amazed at the extraordinary phenomenon, as old as humanity itself and yet always new, of how a child develops his knowledge of the outside world, with that endless sense of adventure, that passion for investigating everything around him… “You will see that very quickly a child goes through millennia of human history, and unconsciously, and in part consciously too, will live within himself the history of his race”, her father had once written to her, and she had wanted to show Sonia the letter. She was touched that in spite of all the pressure from the outside world which Indira received, she was still sensitive t
o the spectacle, small and grandiose at the same time, of seeing her grandchildren growing.
In spite of keeping a close eye on her mother-in-law’s well-being, Sonia kept up her private life with Rajiv. The fact that there might be a dinner in the main dining room did not mean that they had to attend as well. Sometimes they did, other times they did not. They had their family life very well organized, and it was as stable as their relationship was. “They always loved each other a lot; I’ve never seen a couple so united since the day they met,” Christian would say, the friend who had introduced them in Cambridge. “Our marriage always worked very well, right from the start. Sonia was always very understanding,” confessed Rajiv, who had risen to pilot and now flew an English plane, the Avro HS-748, another worthy successor of the famous Dakota DC-3. Among his colleagues in the airline, he was regarded as a good professional, although sometimes they teased him for being too meticulous with flight plans, technical problems and timetables. He could not stand to make a poor job of anything, and he was always prepared to take over a flight if for some reason a colleague asked him to do him a favour and stand in for him. He was a good workmate, good-natured and indifferent to the hierarchy.
15
The one Indira was worried about was her other son, Sanjay. “Rajiv has a job, but Sanjay does not and he’s involved in an expensive venture. He is very like me when I was the same age—with the rough edges too—to such an extent that it makes me feel sad to see the suffering he has to go through.” Two years after having won the government licence to manufacture a 100% Indian car, Sanjay’s company had still not produced a single saleable vehicle. There was no shortage of help, owing to the privileged position which his mother’s increasing success gave him. He had managed to get some politicians and businessmen to invest large sums of money in his company, in the hopes they would ingratiate themselves with Indira. They knew that if they should lose their investment they could ask for political favours. From Bansi Lal, the head of the government of Haryana, a chubby individual with glasses, who was trying as hard as he could to get closer to the party leadership, he got fifty hectares of agricultural land in the outskirts of Delhi. “When you hunt the calf, it is certain that its mother will be following it,” Bansi Lal had declared with crushing logic to a friend. When the Press uncovered the fact that it had been necessary to relocate over a thousand peasants in order to build the Maruti Factory, Parliament reacted virulently to what it called another act of “flagrant nepotism”. The price paid was suspicious, and the location of the land, near an old army arsenal, violated the government’s laws which prohibited the building of an industrial factory less than a kilometre from defence installations. But they were never able to prove there had been any bribery. Indira kept her mouth shut, as though it had nothing to do with her, although her chief advisor, a trusted consultant, had warned her about the ingenuousness of her son’s plans and his inexperience with industrial projects.