by Javier Moro
Indira was trying to re-form her base, the party, which was divided between the unconditional followers, ready to go with her to the ends of the earth, and those who said that Sanjay was responsible for the disaster in 1977 and who did not want him in the organization. In addition to this there were numerous ministers who had betrayed her before the Shah Commission, confessing to lies in exchange for legal immunity. In those circumstances, re-forming the party became almost impossible. So Indira went to the root of the matter. She decided to split the organization and only hold on to the most loyal members. So she became the president of the Congress (I) Party—the I for Indira—and the logo chosen was the open palm of a hand, like a blessing. She also demanded loyalty to her son from her loyal people. “Those who attack Sanjay, are attacking me,” she had declared on several occasions. Her desire for power pushed her subconsciously to perpetuate herself in power, which is why the figure of Sanjay fed her dynastic ambitions.
Sonia thought she had already gone through the worst with the arrests, the harassment, the fiscal persecution of her husband, but from the moment that Indira announced the creation of her new political formation, life in Willingdon Crescent became much more irritating and uncomfortable. The house was open day and night. People came at any hour to visit Indira. The members of her party, with expressions that went from euphoria to anguish, came and went as if in their own homes. They would meet unexpectedly in secret, organize themselves, plan new strategies, and decide what tactics to use in each constituency. Added to all this there were the frequent visits from lawyers who continued to guide Indira and Sanjay through the ins and outs of the law. Sonia would suddenly come across members of the secret services in the dining room who had come to question her mother-in-law or her brother-in-law. She no longer knew if the people who swarmed through the rooms were allies or enemies. She found it hard to keep up with preparing cups of tea and snacks for the numerous visitors that Indira received on the lawn, under some improvised awnings in the garden or in the entrance hall of the house, which sometimes seemed like the waiting room at a train station. Indira seemed happy with so much hustle and bustle; the confusion did not bother her. She was in her element, in the atmosphere in which she had been brought up as a little girl. Furthermore, she had Sanjay with her. If he was not in jail or with his lawyers, he worked very closely with her, looking for a way to use the Youth Congress to boycott the work of the current Janata Party government.
“It reminds me of those days in Anand Bhawan when we were preparing some protest action or other…” said a delighted Indira to Sonia, who was on the verge of tears.
Neither she nor Rajiv could stand the lack of privacy. More than once it happened that they came across party members arguing heatedly in their bedroom because they had not found a better place to do it. The disorganized and unsettled atmosphere, the constant threats and the uncertainty of the future set their nerves on edge. That was not the life they had chosen for themselves and their children. Now their friends could not even come to see them. Where would they entertain them? All this confusion made Sonia fear for the safety of the little ones. “What if someone slips into the house with the intention of kidnapping them or hurting them,” she wondered. Besides, she was worried about the effect that the tension within the family would have on them. Sonia and Maneka had stopped speaking to each other because the latter was still not helping out with the household duties. Pupul, who was a privileged witness at that time, wrote: “It’s incredible that, in those chaotic circumstances, Sonia could deal with all the housework without it getting her down.”
The next step that Indira took was to stand for election in a small constituency in the south. She had heard rumours that the Janata government was preparing a law to sanction politicians who had committed crimes against the people, such as making it impossible for them to vote or be elected. If Indira managed to get into Parliament, she could be certain that these measures would not affect her as she would be protected by her parliamentary immunity. She had chosen the constituency with extreme care. Chikmaglur was a small district among the green hills of Karnataka, a state in the south west of India, where a Moslem saint had arrived from Mecca in the seventeenth century to plant some red seeds that were unknown until that time. It was the start of the cultivation of coffee, which was still being carried out three centuries later. For Indira, it was a perfect area: over half of the electorate consisted of women, of which half belonged to the so-called “lower castes”. In all, more than half the population lived below the poverty line. The area was also a bastion of the Congress Party. The MP for the district, who resigned in order to give his place to Indira, was an old, well-respected leader.
The little villages perched in the hills were surrounded by exuberant semi-tropical vegetation. Indira enjoyed the bucolic scenery. She visited the coffee plantations to speak to the harvesters and their families. They were simple people, satisfied with the little that they had, isolated from the political life of the rest of the country. Indira discovered that the news of her defeat in 1977 had still not reached the interior of the district. An old lady picking coffee there had still not heard that Indira was no longer Prime Minister. When they told her that she could end up in jail if they proved the charges against her, the old woman asked, with tears in her eyes, “What charges?”, as though the great people of this world could never do anything wrong. Those people were ingenuous and innocent.
Indira did not leave a single village unvisited. Everywhere she went the welcome was very warm. The women came up to her to touch her face because they had never seen such pale skin. Their eyes held a tacit understanding of what it meant to be a woman, to bear the weight of childbirth, children, hunger and death. The older ones thanked her because her government had set aid programmes in motion thanks to which they were able to eat rice for the first time. Before, they survived on the harvest of wild wheat, and many of them had no clothes to wear and went around dressed in banana leaves. That is how remote and backward Chikmaglur was, and that is how grateful the women there were.
While her rivals made speeches about democracy as opposed to dictatorship and reminded voters of the excesses of the state of emergency, Indira talked about the spiral in prices, the shortage of basic foodstuffs and the growing poverty. In that place, the Emergency had not been noticed. As if that were not enough, her adversaries smoothed the way for her by mocking her in a manner that could only occur in India. At a huge rally, they placed an enormous poster of Indira in which she was represented in the form of a menacing cobra. Underneath there were the words: “Look out. In these elections a powerful cobra is going to rise.” The effect was totally counter-productive. The authors of the campaign did not know that in Karnataka the cobra was venerated and considered an animal that protected the land. Another poster showed arrows from the Janata Party killing a snake called Indira. But in Chikmaglur, killing a cobra was considered a very bad omen.
It poured with rain on election day. Even so, three quarters of the population turned out to place their vote. Indira returned to New Delhi and two days later, while she was with Sonia and Rajiv in the Russian Embassy, celebrating the USSR’s national day, she was informed that she had won by an ample margin of seventy thousand votes. The ambassador raised his glass to toast Indira’s victory. In two years, the woman who had been beaten at the polls in such a humiliating way was returning as MP in Parliament for a remote constituency in the south.
Four days later, Indira was flying to London. She had managed to get a diplomatic passport for herself and she had wanted Sonia to go with her. She was the only one who could, since she had an Italian passport. She had invited her so that her daughter-in-law would have a change of air and also to thank her for her dedication to the family. In recent times, the discord at home had almost turned into hysteria. Maneka’s erratic and uncontrolled behaviour was a source of constant tension. She reacted to the pressure and uncertainty by bursting into frequent attacks of anger against everybody, including her husb
and. In one of those fights, Maneka pulled off the ring that Indira had given her for her wedding and thrown it on the floor in fury.
“How can you dare to do that?” Indira burst out. “That ring belonged to my mother!”
Maneka went out, slamming the door and Sonia bent over to pick it up.
“I’ll keep it for Priyanka,” she said, and in effect, years later, her daughter would wear her great-grandmother’s ring.
The marriage between Sanjay and Maneka was explosive, just the opposite to Rajiv and Sonia’s. In that unusual home, Sonia behaved like a perfect Indian daughter-in- law, and Maneka like an exuberant Neapolitan. “Chaos reigns supreme at home,” Indira confessed to her friend Pupul. “But Maneka is barely twenty-one… Sanjay still has long periods in jail ahead of him. We have to understand her and forgive her hysteria.” The witch hunt had made them all pay a high price in nervous tension, even Sanjay himself, on whom the thirty-five criminal charges brought against him by the Janata Party in two years had left a mark. One day, while the family were having breakfast at home with some relatives who were visiting them, Sanjay protested because the eggs were not cooked as he had requested and he threw the plate on the floor. Sonia was the one who had cooked them for him and she left the room angrily. Indira did not say a word in criticism of her son, although it was quite obvious that she was upset.
When Sonia had had enough, she went out with her friends, one of them a decorator and the other an editor, to have lunch in a small Chinese restaurant in Khan Market, or to the American Embassy Club where she was not recognized. Or she went out into the garden with a hoe in her hand to take care of the kitchen garden. The broccoli she had managed to grow was a sensation among her acquaintances.
The ten-day trip to London was not a holiday, but it did Sonia good to be out of the house. London brought her memories of a very happy time in her life. She had thought she would get away from the unbearable atmosphere of Indian politics, but that was not the case. Politics came after them. Indira had agreed to that trip in order to rehabilitate her battered reputation abroad, and she was greeted with great expectation and a lot of mistrust. She had been warned that she could find hostile audiences at the different acts that she would attend, so for the first meeting with MPs, Sonia feared the worst.
“Mrs Gandhi, what went wrong in your state of emergency?” one MP asked without any beating about the bush.
There was a long silence. Indira stood up, adjusted the skirts of her sari and took the microphone.
“We managed to alienate almost all sectors of society at the same time,” she replied in a simple, direct manner.
Her frankness caused general laughter and caused the tension in the atmosphere to evaporate. Among those present was a woman who, although she was on the opposing side of the ideological spectrum to Indira, she professed great admiration for her. It was Margaret Thatcher, who was about to become Prime Minister. Perhaps because she was a woman, she understood Indira’s mixture of fragility and firmness and saw the reason for many of her reactions during the exercise of power. The future “Iron Lady” had no qualms about admitting that she was facing a master. That trip served mainly to allow Indira to recover her democratic credentials.
What with meetings with the Press, with representatives of Indian communities and visits to English politicians—which irritated the Indian Ambassador exceedingly – there was hardly time to go to the theatre or the cinema or to go shopping in Woolworth’s and to look for books in Foyle’s, the famous bookseller’s. Those little strolls were like balm for Sonia. In those streets that shone with the rain, nobody recognized her, she felt safe and she did not have to depend on an escort and could go around on foot and not need to depend on a car… What a luxury! In spite of all the difficulties in recent times, her relationship with her mother-in-law was closer than ever. Sonia did not hesitate to admit that she loved her like a mother. Although Indira did not show it openly, her preference for Sonia was well-known. She inspired the kind of trust that Maneka could never inspire in her. But in spite of that, she always defended her, at least in public. “Maneka has to put up with a lot of pressure,” she said by way of excuse for her. The fact is that Maneka worked hard in her mother-in-law’s cause. She had managed to uncover a scandal that had affected the Janata Party. Photographers from her Surya magazine had obtained pictures of the Prime Minister’s son, a married man of 40, in bed with a teenager. In a country with such prim habits, that scandal had the effect of making the persecution of Sanjay by the Janata Party look ridiculous and of making the Prime Minister look ridiculous too. Maneka was very proud of having done her bit in this battle. But deep inside, she felt that she could never take the place that Sonia held in Indira’s heart, and that seemed to upset her.
While they were walking along Oxford Street, doing some last minute shopping for the children, neither Sonia nor Indira could imagine that in New Delhi the government was making a last, desperate attempt to shoot her down again. As her political resurrection became more certain, the investigatory commissions multiplied in number to try to link her to all kinds of crimes. The accusations went from the macabre to the absurd, from “conspiring to kill an ex-minister” (who had actually died a natural death) to “diverting public money and illegally getting rich” (which was obviously false). Perhaps the most absurd of the charges was that of having stolen four chickens and two eggs, an accusation which, as soon as she got back from London, forced her to travel to the distant state of Manipur, in the east of India, a journey of three thousand kilometres, to stand before the local judge. The case was dismissed and Indira was able to return to New Delhi.
In Parliament, where she was greeted with shouts and cheering, the Privilege Committee, a group that watched over the abuse of power among political leaders, had presented a motion against Indira, accusing her of having harassed four civil servants who were investigating Maruti Ltd, when she was Prime Minister. The report concluded that she was guilty, but before it could be processed in court, the leaders of the Janata Party decided to punish her, making use of their majority in the House. They passed a Parliamentary decree asking for “Indira to be jailed for one week and then expelled from the House.” Now the ones who were committing abuses were those in power themselves. They had condemned her before she had been judged. It was nothing but revenge, easily explained by the fear they felt that she might rise again. One thing was to have Indira travelling round the country, but it was very different to have her speaking out in Parliament. So they used a trick to get her out: first jail her, which was not entirely legal, and then apply the law that automatically expelled from Parliament anyone who had been sentenced to a term in prison. Actually they crossed the line of what was legal. And they did it on precisely the day that the ex-Prime Minister of Pakistan, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto stood before the Pakistani Supreme Court to defend himself from a death sentence passed by a lower court. It had been planned by Zia Ul Haq, a coup general who had organized a sham trial. The shadow of that unfair sentence reached as far as New Delhi, menacing Indira and her son. If those in power passed over the rules of play, everything became possible in that lynch-crowd atmosphere. By acting illegally, Indira’s enemies did away with the last vestiges of the moral superiority with which they had taken over power as representatives of a nation traumatized by the experience of the state of emergency. Suddenly, they were the ones who had become tyrants who locked people up without trial, thus subverting the will of the electorate.
Under the dome of Parliament, Indira defended herself with controlled passion and fury: “Never before in the history of any democratic country has one person, the leader of the main opposition party, been the object of such calumny, defamation of character and political vendetta on the part of the party in power.” Once again she said how sorry she was for the excesses of the state of emergency: “I have already expressed my regrets in many public arenas, and I do so again now.” Her words were frequently interrupted by an uproar of cheering and booing that echoed loudl
y in the concave dome of the building.
“I am a small person, but I have always been faithful to certain values and objectives. Every insult against me will turn against you. Every punishment you inflict on me will make me stronger. My voice cannot be silenced because it is not an isolated voice. It does not speak of me, a fragile, unimportant woman. It speaks of significant changes for society, changes which are the basis of a real democracy and greater freedom.”
Having finished her speech, Indira stood up and, turning her back on the MPs, walked towards the exit. When she reached the door, she turned and gave them a long, hard look. Some were sitting with their legs crossed, dressed in their white cotton kurtas and their pashmina shawls, others were wearing the characteristic hat that Nehru had used, others the Moslem fez, very few were dressed in Western clothes. It looked like a crowded, old Oriental court. She raised her arm, with her hand facing outwards, which was the symbol of her party:
“I’ll be back!” she said.
Sonia had made some exquisite pasta for dinner. There was also guava cream for dessert and little mango cakes from Allahabad, which Indira liked a lot because they reminded her of her childhood. She arrived an hour late, exhausted. Her features reflected the tension she had just experienced.
“They’ll come for me at any moment…” she told Rajiv and Sonia, before telling them what had happened in Parliament.
Sonia was unable to eat a thing. As often happens, the people who are closest suffer more than the victims themselves. Fear overcame her again, mixed with an unpleasant feeling of insecurity, as though they were living on quicksand that was ready to swallow them all up. Indira would be arrested again, and this time she would not sleep in a police station but in jail. Her enemies had won a battle. Rajiv and Sonia were downhearted.
“Why don’t you call Priyanka and we can play a game of Scrabble?” asked Indira at that point. She loved to play with her granddaughter, who was very sharp and won a good number of the times they played… What better company than that of her darling girl at those moments of uncertainty?