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 unsmiling 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?
The marriage soon foundered, however. Nehru, a widower, wanted his daughter to live with him as his official hostess and political aide. Feroze, a fiercely independent Congress MP and anticorruption crusader, felt politically and personally stifled, and moved out of the prime minister’s residence. Indira chose her father over her husband, or, as she saw it, her duty to the nation over her loyalty to her marriage. She became Congress president for a year in 1959; Feroze suffered a heart attack at the wheel of his car and died young in 1960.
Indira served in Shastri’s cabinet in the minor portfolio of Minister for Information and Broadcasting, but her principal political asset remained her pedigree. One member of the Syndicate that made her prime minister thought she would be a goongi gudiya, a “dumb doll,” the presentable face of boss rule. For a year this indeed seemed to be the case, as Indira, inarticulate and tentative, overly reliant on advisers of dubious competence, stumbled badly in office. The party paid the price in the elections of 1967, losing seats around the country, and seeing motley opposition governments come to power in several states. The veteran Congress politician Morarji Desai (1896-1995) even challenged Mrs. Gandhi’s right to continue as prime minister, and had to be accommodated as deputy prime minister. The dynasty’s days appeared to be numbered.
At the brink of the abyss, Indira fought back. Many of the Syndicate had been defeated at the polls in the 1967 debacle; she now set about systematically reducing their influence in the party. Finding allies among socialists and ex-Communists, she engineered a split in the Congress in 1969 on “ideological” grounds (the two principal issues being the abolition of the subsidies paid to India’s erstwhile maharajahs, and the nationalization of banks, both of which the old guard opposed as unconstitutional). Having established a populist image and expelled the old bosses, she led her wing of the Congress to a resound ing victory in 1971, campaigning on the slogan Garibi Hatao: “Remove Poverty.” This was swiftly followed by the decisive defeat of Pakistan in the Bangladesh War that year. Her popularity soared; India’s leading modern painter, the Muslim M. F. Husain, depicted her as a Hindu Mother Goddess. The imagery was appropriate: indeed, at her peak, Indira Gandhi was both worshiped and maternalized.
As Nehru’s daughter and political heir, Indira Gandhi had imbibed his vision whole. As a child she was the recipient of his memorable letters from British jails that spelled out Nehru’s convictions and taught her his view of world history. Perhaps unsurprisingly, she took great pride in the fact that she was born in the year of the Russian Revolution. “The birth and development of socialism in the Soviet Union has been a major factor in shaping the course of world history,” she told a Moscow audience in 1975. “To many of us in the developing countries engaged in the task of consolidating political and economic freedom, your experience and success have been a stimulus.” From her father she had learned to be skeptical of Western claims to stand for freedom and democracy when India’s historical experience of colonial oppression and exploitation appeared to bear out the opposite. Nehru’s conclusion was to see a moral equivalence between the two rival power blocs, a position that helped create nonalignment. Indira went further than her father: when I interviewed her in 1977 on the subject of her foreign policy, she argued that while the Soviets had helped liberation struggles from Angola to Bangladesh, the West was “not on the side of freedom. [They] were against the freedom struggle in all countries, so far as I know. . . . It’s only when they thought that Russian influence was coming, and that freedom would come anyway, that they jumped in.” These convictions fitted in with her domestic left-wing political strategy, her need for Soviet support on the subcontinent against a U.S.-backed Pakistan-China axis, and her dark suspicion, born more out of personal insecurity than of any hard evidence, that the CIA was out to destabilize her government as it had done Allende’s.
Nonetheless, Indira Gandhi once memorably confessed to an American interviewer, “I don’t really have a political philosophy. I can’t say I believe in any ism. I wouldn’t say I’m interested in socialism as socialism. To me it’s just a tool.”
But tools are used for well-defined purposes, and it was never clear that Indira Gandhi had any, beyond the political short term. The 1971 electoral and military triumphs — the first over a sclerotic and discredited political establishment at home, the second over a sclerotic and discredited martial-law establishment next door — saw the Nehru-Gandhi mystique at its pinnacle. But it was not to last. Mrs. Gandhi was skilled at the acquisition and maintenance of power, but hopeless at the wielding of it for larger purposes. She had no real vision or program beyond the expedient campaign slogans; “remove poverty” was a mantra without a method. Her genuine convictions, as one observer put it, were “somewhere to the left of self-interest.” Prices, unemployment, and corruption rose; her standing in the nation fell. Mounting protests, led by the saintly Gandhian Jayaprakash Narayan, brought down one Congress state government and threatened others. As anarchy loomed, a high court judge in Allahabad convicted the prime minister, on a technicality, of electoral malpractice in her crushing 1971 victory. Mrs. Gandhi, it seemed, would have to resign in disgrace.
Instead, she struck back. Declaring a state of emergency, Indira Gandhi arrested opponents, censored the press, and postponed elections. As a compliant Supreme Court overturned her conviction, she proclaimed a “twenty-point program” for the uplift of the common man. (No one found it humorous enough to remark, as Clemenceau had done of Wilson’s Fourteen Points, that “even the good Lord only had Ten.”) Its provisions — which ranged from rural improvement schemes and the abolition of bonded labor to mass education and urban renewal — remained largely unimplemented. Meanwhile, her thuggish younger son, Sanjay (1946-1980), emphasizing two of the twenty points, ordered brutally insensitive campaigns of slum demolitions and forced sterilizations. The compact between the people and the dynasty was ruptured, even as a meretricious slogan spouted by a pliant Congress Party president proclaimed that “Indira is India and India is Indira.”
* * *
For many Indians of my generation, the Emergency was the seminal event of their political maturation. I went to the United States on a graduate fellowship soon after it was declared, and found myself traveling an even longer route to political awareness.
At first, like most foreign students in the United States, I instinctively thought it my duty to explain and defend my country to my not-always-well-disposed hosts. Ironically, I had had a minor personal taste of the petty tyranny inaugurated by the Emergency; soon after it was imposed, the censors who had moved into newspaper offices spiked an innocuous short story of mine that had been accepted by a Calcutta youth magazine and was, as luck would have it, slated to appear the week after the Emergency was declared. It was a detective story with a trick ending, and it was called “The Political Murder”; but the very thought that anyone might be murdered for political reasons was anathema to the Emergency censors, who tended to make up in zeal what they lacked in judgment. A big red stamp was duly applied on the manuscript, banning its appearance.
Soon afterward I left for the United States, where I had a scholarship to pursue graduate studies at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, the world’s oldest school of international affairs, administered by Tufts University in cooperation with Harvard. There I found myself being greeted, by liberals and conservatives alike, as if I had just arrived from Ceauşescu’s Romania or Pinochet’s Chile. A lot of their criticisms of the Emergency were excessively formalistic, or so it seemed to me at the time; they seemed much more concerned about what Mrs. Gandhi had done to the trappings of democracy — press, Parliament, judiciary— than about those whom democracy was meant to benefit, the common men and women of India. They assumed that as a newly banned writer breathing the air of American freedom, I would agree, but I found myself arguing (with the reflexive chauvinism that strikes most Indians when they first come abroad) that I was precisely the sort of Indian who was least entitled to object to the Emergency: I belonged to the tiny minority that could write and publish and be banned, whereas the Emergency — however cynical Mrs. Gandhi’s reasons for imposing it — was working for the betterment of the vast, toiling multitudes for whom such rights meant little. Their bread was more important than my freedom.
I nearly convinced myself with this argument for a while, but I soon came to realize how hollow it was. My roommate at Fletcher was a journalist, and he brought me daily the wire service copy about the latest atrocities — the slum demolitions, the bulldozings of homes and livelihoods, the compulsory sterilization schemes and the arbitrary quotas assigned to them, the arrests and beatings, the torture in jail of young student activists. Travelers from India brought me copies of underground newsletters, cyclostyled or badly printed on cheap paper, their ink smudged but their message clear, eloquent testimony both to the people’s despair and their defiance. (The very thought that India, famously overflowing with a free and irresponsible press, even produced “underground” literature shamed me utterly.) Most of the real victims of the Emergency were among the poorest classes of Indians — the ones who, I came to realize, most needed the protections of democracy. For all its chaos and confusion, our parliamentary system and its inefficient trappings were all that stood between them and the absolute power of the state — a state that could seize them in the bazaars or in the fields and cart them off to have their vas deferens cut off in a sterilization camp.
Middle- and upper-class Indians, except for the handful who sought to resist, largely carried on as before; their newspapers may have been blander, and opinions usually expressed at the tops of their voices may have had to emerge in stage whispers, but little really changed in their daily lives. If anything, many saw improvements: the proverbial trains ran on time, prices held steady as hoarders and black marketeers lay low, there were fewer strikes, demonstrations, and other disturbances, and the habitual absenteeism in government offices fell so dramatically that the bureaucracy suffered a crippling shortage of chairs and desks to accommodate the number of personnel who unexpectedly reported for work. For most Indians of the middle and upper classes, the Emergency was by and large a Good Thing. For me, living and studying in America, the discovery that my country, which had so proudly described itself as the world’s largest democracy, was now descending into becoming the world’s second largest banana republic was more than I could bear. I read about the outspoken Indian student in Chicago whose passport the embassy refused to renew because of his anti-Emergency activities, and burned with shame that the regime I had been defending had sunk to this: I had associated my Indian passport with the right to express myself freely on any subject I chose to, and now it was a document denied to one who had exercised that basic right of every Indian.
And so the Emergency became the defining experience of my political consciousness. By starting out defending it and then coming to realize why it was indefensible, I learned one more thing about what it was that I cherished about the country I had grown up in, and why I would never be able to accept that “Indira is India and India is Indira.”
* * *
Sadly, Nehru’s daughter betrayed her father’s legacy. But his instincts reasserted themselves in her first big error of judgment. Blinded by the mirrors of her sycophants, deafened by the silence of the intimidated press, Mrs. Gandhi called an election in March 1977, expecting vindication in electoral victory. Instead she was routed, losing her own seat and the reins of office to an opposition coalition, the Janata (People’s) Front, under her old nemesis Morarji Desai.
But the fractious Janata government could not hold together. By their mistakes, ineptitude, and greed (cynically, if artfully, exploited by Mrs. Gandhi and Sanjay), they opened the way for her improbable comeback. In January 1980, Mrs. Gandhi, having split the Congress once more and unembarrassedly renamed her faction after herself (as Congress-Indira, or “Congress-I”), was prime minister of India again.
The rest of the story is more familiar, and all tragic. Sanjay, recklessly flying a stunt plane in defiance of local regulations (and shortly after engineering the dismissal of the upright director general of civil aviation, retired air marshal Zahir, who had tried to curb his illegal joyrides), killed himself within months of returning to power. One editor wrote trenchantly that had he lived, Sanjay would have done to the country what he did to the plane. Mrs. Gandhi, having systematically alienated, excluded, or expelled any leader of standing in her own party who might have been a viable deputy (and thus a potential rival) to her, drafted the only person she could entirely trust — her self-effacing, nonpolitical, and deeply reluctant elder son Rajiv (1944-1991) — to fill the breach.
Rajiv had barely begun to grow into the role when Mrs. Gandhi was assassinated by the forces of Sikh extremism, forces she had herself primed, along with Sanjay, for narrow partisan purposes. In 1977 the Congress Party had been ousted in Punjab by the Sikh Akali Dal Party, an ally of Janata; Mrs. Gandhi typically decided to undermine them from the quarter they least expected, by opponents even more Sikh than the Akalis. So she encouraged (and reportedly even initially financed) the extremist fanaticism of a Sikh fundamentalist preacher, Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale. Bhindranwale soon tired of assassinating cleanshaven Sikhs for their apostasy and instead took up the cause of an independent Sikh state, Khalistan. As the murders mounted, Mrs. Gandhi had little choice but to destroy the monster she had herself spawned, and she finally violated a basic tenet of the Indian state by sending armed troops into a place of worship, the historic Golden Temple in Amritsar, to flush out the terrorists holed up there. Bhindranwale and his immediate cohort of gunmen were killed in “Operation Bluestar,” but so were a number of unarmed civilians trapped in what was, after all, the Sikhs’ most important place of worship; great damage, not all of it repairable, was done to the temple itself. By the time she acted, Mrs. Gandhi probably had no choice (though many wished she could have starved the killers into submission rather than assaulting their sanctified stronghold), but her real fault lay in having created the problem in the first place and in letting it mount to the point where the destructive force of “Operation Bluestar” seemed the only solution.
The assault on the Golden Temple deeply alienated many Sikhs whose patriotism was unquestionable; the Gandhi family’s staunchest ally in the independent press, the Sikh editor Khushwant Singh, returned his national honors to the government, and a battalion of Sikhs, the backbone of the army, mutinied. Two years earlier, when a Sikh deputy inspector general of police, A. S. Atwal, was murdered in the Golden Temple — shot in the back as he came out of the sanctum sanctorum after saying his prayers with his eight-year-old son by his side — the outrage within the Sikh community against Bhindranwale’s thugs was so great (and the extent of his defenses in the temple so much more limited) that an appeal to Sikh soldiers and police to volunteer to cleanse their own shrine of these killers might have been enough to make a later Bluestar unnecessary. But Mrs. Gandhi, as ever tentative in wielding the power she was so skilled at acquiring, hesitated to respond to the Atwal killing, and the moment passed.
Mrs. Gandhi never understood the extent to which so many Sikhs saw Bluestar as a betrayal. She refused to draw the conclusions her security advisers did, and to her credit turned down their recommendations to remove Sikhs from her personal guard detail. Two of them, men sworn to protect her with their lives, turned their guns upon her instead. It was a cool Delhi morning in October 1984, when the sun had just begun to warm the crisp autumnal air, but her killing flamed hot in the streets of Delhi, in the horror of the anti-Sikh riots that followed it, which saw whole families burned alive for the sin of sharing the religion of her assassins.
Mrs. Gandhi’s death reverberated through the country like an earthquake; but her martyrdom came at the end of an inglorious second term of office, at a time when the prospects of reelection looked remote. Yet her death, in these terrible circumstances, preserved her dynasty. Her son Rajiv was sworn in as prime minister within hours of her killing, to the dismay of those Indians who, like me, thought the nation could find someone more qualified than a forty-year-old airline pilot with no experience of government to rule us.
But the Congress, atrophied under Indira, had no one better. Certainly no other name could match the vote-catching potential of Rajiv Gandhi’s. And the choice was ratified by the electorate in a sweeping sympathy vote that gave Rajiv a greater parliamentary majority than any Indian prime minister had ever had.
Then our dismay briefly turned to hope, as Rajiv proceeded to overturn all the drift and expedient cynicism that had marked his mother’s era. For a year or so the winds of change blew across the country like a tropical cyclone. Rajiv was India’s first purely technocratic politician. He led a generation that had hardly been aware of the British colonial presence in India but had become familiar with the West on its own terms. Education, language, and cultural affinities turned such Indians naturally westward; they admired Western technology, economic advancement, and political freedom, and had correspondingly fewer illusions about the Soviet system. (One should not overstate the importance of education, though: Rajiv dropped out of his engineering course at Cambridge; Sonia, the inheritor of his legacy, was in Cambridge to study English as a second language, not political philosophy.) Rajiv’s initial enthusiasm for change and reform of India’s bureaucratized statism foundered not on ideological grounds but as the result of a series of political compromises with the entrenched establishment.
At first Rajiv rode a wave of national enthusiasm not seen since the heady days of his mother’s triumph in 1971. Then the rot set in; what was good for the nation was not necessarily good for the Congress Party, and Rajiv — a latecomer to politics, without the sureness of touch that comes from having climbed the ropes rather than having merely pulled them — soon decided politics was more important than statesmanship. Compromise followed sellout as New Delhi returned to business as usual. Charges of corruption in a major howitzer contract with the Swedish arms manufacturer Bofors tarnished the mystique of the dynasty: little children sang, Galli-galli mein shor hai / Rajiv Gandhi chor hai: “Hear it said in every nook / Rajiv Gandhi is a crook.” The Rajiv regime’s distance from the masses, both figurative (he remains to this day the only Indian prime minister ever to have been photographed in jeans and a Lacoste T-shirt) and literal (thanks to the overzealous security measures imposed upon him after his mother’s assassination) exacted a further political price. The 1989 elections brought yet another anti-Congress coalition to power. And yet again it fell apart, seemingly paving the way for a resurrection of the dynasty.
But this time it was not to be.
* * *
Every assassination comes as a shock, but the bomb blast that murdered Rajiv Gandhi took more than his life and those of others around him. The elections in which he was running were briefly postponed, then rescheduled and held; Parliament sat, a new prime minister was sworn in, the business of governance went on; but in a real sense the killing disenfranchised Indians.
The India that killed Rajiv was not the India I grew up in. In April 1975, as a college student and freelance journalist of nineteen, I went to Parliament House in New Delhi to interview Prime Minister Indira Gandhi for a youth magazine. A friend from my college hostel asked whether he could accompany me; as his excuse, he carried a tape recorder in a shoulder bag. We strolled unchallenged past the guards and into the prime minister’s outer office, where a cheerful shambles reigned.
Supplicants, officials, and hangers-on sat around, walked in and out, and brought tea and conversation to the private secretary, who told an irreverent anecdote about the uncannily plausible portrayal of an Indira Gandhi-like figure in a current Hindi film.
After a while, the press secretary, the reflective and erudite H. Y. Sharada Prasad, emerged from Mrs. Gandhi’s inner sanctum to call me in. I asked if my friend could join me. “Why not?” he said, and we both walked into the prime ministerial presence. The shoulder bag might have contained a bomb, but no one bothered to check. The thought wouldn’t even have occurred to them. Despite the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi twenty-seven years before, Indians didn’t order their affairs that way.
Within a decade of this encounter, religious and sectarian violence had inflamed India. When Rajiv ascended to power following his mother’s assassination, he carried out his public duties clad noticeably in a bulletproof vest. He addressed crowds from behind a Perspex screen, a security cordon of Black Cat commandos around him
In a country where any individual could join the breakfast throng at the prime minister’s residence to seek a favor or benediction, even members of Parliament had to pass through intensive security checks. Some complained about how demeaning it was to be frisked before meeting their prime minister, but the complaints were muted. After what had happened to Indira Gandhi, security precautions became unavoidable.
And yet old habits die hard, and democracies, especially one as freewheeling as India’s, are not instinctively good at protecting their leaders. Security became an issue in itself; the distance that safety considerations obliged Rajiv Gandhi to keep from the people cost him votes. The prime minister came to be seen as an aloof and remote figure. The trappings of security created, in many voters, eyes, an imperial prime ministry, occupied by an imperious prime minister. It was this, as much as anything, that cost him the 1989 election.
So it was hardly surprising that the next time around, in 1991, Rajiv Gandhi threw safety to the winds in his campaign. He reveled in casting his bodyguards aside and plunging into the throng; he asked the crowds to flock into the empty spaces in front of the podium that were sectioned off for security purposes. His every gesture reaffirmed the vital premise, so necessary to all democrats, that they are safest among their own people; that to be touched by the Indian masses was, for an Indian leader, to be in touch with the sources of his own power.
In India, as in all true democracies, elections legitimize the system not merely through the casting of votes, but through the process itself, the self-renewing exchange of hopes and promises, demands and compromises, that make up the flawed miracle of democracy.
India’s voters had repeatedly proved -- and were in the process of demonstrating again -- that a democracy offers other ways of manifesting disagreements with one’s leaders. Despite the spiraling violence, the growing criminalization of politics, the increasing num ber of fringe groups who found bombs more effective than debate, Indians had never ceased to believe in themselves. The bomb that killed Rajiv Gandhi shook that self-belief by attacking its very basis: that Indians could choose their rulers, and preserve a way of doing things that offers meaning and value to that choice.
Soon after the killing, the platitudes flowed like blood: the end of a dynasty, a life cut short in its prime, the bullets triumph over the ballot. I mourned, too, for the India I grew up in. I had no doubt that India would survive, that Indians would find the resilience to transcend one more national calamity. But it will never again be an India where freedom is untrammeled by fear, an India where a student can walk in uninvited upon his prime minister.
* * *
I could not have voted for Rajiv Gandhi’s party in the elections that took his life. But I grieved his loss. I grieved, of course, for his family, for a nation plunged again into mourning. I grieved for the hopes he had once raised in me, for the frustration and disappointment he had later evoked, for the potential he still represented till the moment of his passing. And I grieved because his death, and the manner of it, again shook, in a very different way from the Emergency, my sense of what, as an Indian, I could always take for granted.
Rajiv Gandhi had had no obvious qualifications for office, but in the frenzy and chaos that followed India’s first major political assassination since that of Mahatma Gandhi in 1948, the Congress Party clamored for the stability and reassurance of a familiar vote-catching name at the helm. Its leaders chose Rajiv Gandhi not for himself, but for his lineage. His genes justified their ends.
So I was dismayed. But within weeks my dismay dissolved into hope. For the unexpected ascent of Rajiv Gandhi had brought to power the kind of Indian almost completely unrepresented in Indian politics. My kind of Indian.
There are many of us, but, among India’s multitudes, we are few. We have grown up in the cities of India, secure in a national identity rather than a local one, which we express in English better than in any Indian language. We rejoice in the complexity and diversity of our India, of which we feel a conscious part; we have friends of every caste and religious community, and we marry across such sectarian lines. We see the poverty, suffering, and conflict in which a majority of our fellow citizens are mired, and we clamor for new solutions to these old problems, solutions we believe can come from the skills and efficiency of the modern world. We are secular, not in the sense that we are irreligious or unaware of the forces of religion, but in that we believe religion should not determine public policy or individual opportunity.
And, in Indian politics, we are pretty much irrelevant.
We don’t get a look in. We don’t enter the fray because we can’t win. We tell ourselves ruefully that we are able, but not electable. We don’t have the votes: there are too few of us, and we don’t speak the idiom of the masses. Instead we have learned to talk about political issues without the expectation that we will be able to do anything about them.
Until Rajiv Gandhi, the accidental prime minister, came to power.
The only time I ever met Rajiv Gandhi was at a gathering of expatriate Indians in Geneva, Switzerland, in June 1985, six months after the election landslide that had vindicated his party’s cynical faith in genealogy. He spoke softly but fluently, without notes, for forty-five minutes about the situation in India and his plans for the country. When he finished there was a light in even the most skeptical eye. I should know, for I was blinded by mine.
Rajiv Gandhi was unlike any Indian political figure I had ever met. He had nothing in common with the professional politicians we had taught ourselves to despise, sanctimonious windbags clad hypocritically in homespun who spouted socialist rhetoric while amassing private wealth through the manipulation of political favors. Instead of the visionless expediency that had been his mother’s only credo, Rajiv offered transparent sincerity and conviction. Instead of the grasping opportunism of careerists who saw politics as an end in itself, he was a reluctant politician thrust unwillingly into public office but determined to make something of it — the very antithesis of his brother Sanjay.
For one exhilarating year, those of us who had thought ourselves alienated from the Indian political process were swept up in the unfamiliar excitement of having one of our own as prime minister. In every step Rajiv Gandhi seemed determined to stem the drift, to find urgent solutions to the perennial problems of India. He pledged to shed the shopworn socialist dogmas that had consigned the economy to stagnation and left workers and consumers alike to the mercy of the permit/license/quota-granting bureaucracy. In place of the tired reiteration of sterile slogans, he spoke of liberalization, of technology, of modernity, of moving India into the twenty-first century. He even chose the self-congratulatory occasion of the Congress Party’s centenary celebrations in 1985 to assail the corruption and complacency that had made the party atrophy into an unresponsive behemoth.
Nor did the politicians themselves escape his cleansing fervor. He shunted aside the old-timers and the time-servers, brought in fresh professional faces from the private sector (including energetic entrepreneurs who had made their fortunes in the United States, but wished to serve their homeland), and outlawed the unprincipled “defections” that had made party labels a matter of convenience. Best of all, he made peace with rebellious Sikhs in Punjab, agitating students in Assam, and unreconciled guerrillas in Mizoram, bringing them back into an electoral process they had preferred to subvert. To Indians like me, this was heady stuff.
It was also too good to last. Rajiv Gandhi became the victim of his own success. His actions strengthened the country, but undermined his party. His peace accords, by bringing disaffected minorities into the mainstream, gave them power at the expense of the Congress. The veteran politicians rumbled in complaint: Rajiv Gandhi, they said, was indulging his personal predilections at the party’s expense. And because he had not worked his way up the political ladder, Rajiv Gandhi was uniquely vulnerable to the charge, leveled by those who had, that his instincts were the wrong ones. He gave in.
Within two years of his coming to power, it was back to business as usual. Politics was elevated above performance, the national interest subordinated to the party interest. When a seventy-five-year-old divorced Muslim woman, Shah Banu, won a Supreme Court case obliging her husband of forty-three years to give her the equivalent of five dollars a month in alimony, Rajiv Gandhi bowed to outraged Muslim orthodoxy and sponsored a law officially named, with breathtaking cynicism, “The Muslim Women’s (Protection of Rights Upon Divorce) Act,” placing Muslim widows outside the purview of the country’s civil codes. He had initially taken the opposite view, but was persuaded by the opportunists in his party that that would cost him “the Muslim vote.” As compromise followed compromise, promises to Punjab were broken to appease neighboring Haryana; economic liberalization was stifled to preserve political control; resources that could have gone to providing clean drinking water and electricity to the villages of India flowed into arms purchases; the investigators of governmental corruption were fired rather than the corrupt. The fresh faces quickly faded away, the party hacks returned. Rajiv Gandhi was no longer one of us.
He was, instead, trying hard to be what he was not — a traditional Indian politician. In having to operate the levers of Indian democracy, he had lost sight of where he had intended the engine to go.
Is a democracy best served by leaders whose pulse throbs with the passions and prejudices of their people, or by those who transcend the limitations of their followers? Sitting on the sidelines, I had no doubt about the answer; caught in the vortex, Rajiv Gandhi couldn’t even ask the question.
I learned the humbling lesson that the give and take of democracy does not always produce the results sought by its impatient observers. Rajiv Gandhi’s charisma was no substitute for experience: where a veteran politician might have been able to trust his instincts and lead with vision, the tyro was pressured into retreat. And despite all his compromises, Rajiv Gandhi — isolated from his natural constituency, counseled into political opportunism, and protected from the public by a security phalanx — still lost the next election.
So I couldn’t have supported him the next time; my disappointment still stuck too raw in my throat. But I was glad to have him in the fray, because I hoped that someday he might more effectively give voice to the convictions of his own upbringing. And at a time when casteists and religious fanatics were attempting to redefine India and Indianness on their own terms, I was proud to have an Indian leader who belonged to no single region, caste, or community, but to the all-embracing India I called my own. By simply being Rajiv Gandhi, he represented a choice it was vital for India to have.
An assassin’s bomb deprived India of the right to exercise that choice. With Rajiv Gandhi’s passing, there was no longer any Indian political leader of whom it could be said that his appeal was truly national, and in the spectrum of alternatives available to Indians, that loss was disenfranchisement indeed.
It was not true, of course, despite the fatuous pronouncements of some TV commentators in the sound-bite-ridden West, that the assassination demonstrated India’s unfitness for democracy, any more than the shootings of John and Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. made the United States an unsuitable place for freedom. Indian democracy survived, as it has survived other calamities. But though violence cannot destroy democracy, it can weaken its most vital premise: that democrats do not need to be shielded from their own people.
Rajiv Gandhi tried to overcome his literal and figurative distance from the people by mingling with the crowds in his campaign. His successors would now hesitate to do that; the bulletproof vest, the protective screen, the commando escort, the roads cleared before every VIP convoy, would become an ineluctable part of the Indian political scenery. And so barriers have come to be erected between India’s leaders and her people — if not in the hustings, then intangibly, in every Indian mind. That, too, has disenfranchised India.
Perhaps the ultimate reflection of both the extent and the limitations of Rajiv Gandhi’s appeal lay in the decision of his Congress Party to offer his place to his widow, Sonia. Behind the extraordinary selection of an Italian-born nonpolitician — and though she turned it down — lay the implicit judgment that Rajiv Gandhi’s value as a leader lay not in his qualities but in his name. From the party he led to his death, this was an unworthy epitaph.
The assassination of Rajiv Gandhi took from Indians, of whatever political coloration, part of the glory of their Indianness. The knowledge of our freedom of opinion and choice was something that we lit inside ourselves like a flame. Now its glow was forever dimmed by the knowledge that, in the election of 1991, the most important verdict was delivered not in a ballot box, but in a coffin.
* * *
When Rajiv fell at the hands of Sri Lankan Tamil assassins, his party looked likely to emerge as the largest single political force in the new Parliament, but well short of a viable majority. Ironically, it was the outpouring of support after his assassination — Rajiv’s death, psephologists estimate, swung some forty seats to his party — that enabled Congress even to form a minority government. Had he lived, as one aspiring prime minister among many, Rajiv might well have presided over the terminal decline of the dynasty. But in death he focused the minds of the nation again on the sacrifices made by his family, and so revived its mystique.
What, then, is this mystique made of, that it can make an Indian ruler out of an Italian whose only patrimony is matrimony?
Mystiques are, almost by definition, difficult to analyze, since they are suffused with a magic that is greater than the sum of their ingredients. Salman Rushdie saw the Nehru-Gandhi mystique as the stuff of myth: “We have poured ourselves into this story, inventing its characters, then ripping them up and reinventing them. In our inexhaustible speculations lies one source of their power over us.” Perhaps Rushdie’s is the best way to see the dynasty, as a sort of collective dream of all Indians, a dream from which the nation periodically seems about to wake, before fitfully relapsing into oneirodynia.
But there is more to the dynasty’s appeal — more meat to the myth — than that. Perhaps the most important characteristic of the Nehrus and the Gandhis is that, though their parliamentary seats may lie in the populous northern heartland around Allahabad, they are truly national figures. The New York Times’s Abe Rosenthal reported about Jawaharlal’s visits around the country that “it was always as if Nehru was looking into the eyes of India and India was just one soul.” When Ved Mehta first met Nehru, he wrote, “I feel I am confronting Sanskrit, Mughal, and English India at the same time . . . . I feel the real secret of free India lies in the prime minister. His character reconciles the various Indias.” Displaced Kashmiris to begin with, the Nehrus’ family tree sports Parsi, Sikh, and now Italian branches, and its roots are universally seen as uncontaminated by the communal and sectarian prejudices of the Hindi-speaking “cow belt.” Nehru himself was an avowed agnostic, as was his daughter until she discovered the electoral advantages of public piety. All four generations of Nehrus in public life remained secular in outlook and conduct. Their appeal transcended caste, region, and religion, something impossible to say of any other leading Indian politician.
Then there were the inestimable advantages of underdevelopment. In a country as vast, as multilingual, as illiterate, and as poorly served by communications as India, national name recognition is not easily achieved. Once attained, it is self-perpetuating; for any rival to catch up on decades of Nehru-Gandhi dominance is virtually impossible. The public mind has, since the heady days of the onset of independence, identified the family with Indian nationalism. It is a perception that gives any member of the dynasty a headstart over anyone else. Even Sanjay’s teenage son, Feroze Varun Gandhi, whose mother, Maneka, is a bitter opponent of the Congress Party, is spoken of as a future political leader.
Nor can we forget the negative reasons for the lack of viable alternatives to the dynasty: Nehru’s failure to groom a successor, Indira’s ruthless elimination of rivals, and the desiccation of the Congress under her into a complacent instrument of dynastic despotism (there were no intraparty elections in the Congress for two decades: all the officebearers were appointed by Indira, Sanjay, or Rajiv). If the Congress could not produce a convincing alternative, the opposition parties’ collective failure has been worse: on three of the four occasions when the electorate has allowed them to supplant the dynasty, the non-Congress governments have collapsed in a partisan scramble for office. Rajiv’s successor, the ostensibly colorless P. V. Narasimha Rao, surprised India as much as the world by leading a stable Congress government through its full term (1991-1996). But as the 1996 elections halved the Congress’s parliamentary majority and its future seemed less and less certain, the calls arose again for Sonia Gandhi to take her rightful place at the helm of the party.
And so the mystique glows on. Sonia overcame her reluctance and took power; after some initial mistakes, notably in misjudging her support in Parliament when she brought down the first BJP government, she became increasingly assured in her leadership of the party. Her son Rahul, smart and charismatic like his father but with far more grassroots experience, became a skilled political operative in the family’s traditional political base of Rae Bareli and Amethi in Uttar Pradesh. Talk of his ascending to ministerial office or taking on more senior responsibilities in the party mounted; by the time the next elections are due in 2009, he would be almost the age his father was when Rajiv was thrust into the Prime Ministry in 1984. And that is not all. As early as at Rajiv’s funeral, the correspondent of the London Sunday Times could not resist praising the “dry-eyed fortitude” of the “so appealing” Priyanka Gandhi, “composed, dignified and beautiful in her grief.”
A novelist, seeking to tell the story of Sonia Gandhi, might be forgiven for seeing a fairy-tale element in the narrative. Beautiful foreigner comes to strange new land and marries handsome prince. They enjoy years of bliss, until the prince is obliged, in painful circumstances, to take over the kingdom and discovers the harsh realities of ruling a turbulent realm, culminating in the unspeakable tragedy of his own murder. The queen retreats into silence and mourning, until the insistent supplications of her courtiers compel her to emerge and once again take the destiny of the kingdom into her hands. Bliss to triumph to tragedy to triumph again — a classic tale: I should have begun this paragraph with the words “Once Upon A Time.
And yet — there is a twist in the tale. For the queen, offered the crown on a brocade cushion, turns it down. She prefers to remain behind the throne, walking with the common peasantry, rallying the people but leaving power in the hands of her grey-haired viziers. They don’t write fairy-tales like that, not even for the woman once dubbed in the Piedmont the “Cinderella of Orbassano.”
The story of Sonia Gandhi is remarkable at every level, and the fairy-tale metaphor barely begins to scratch the surface of its extraordinariness. But which is the most important story? That of the Italian who became the most powerful figure in a land of a billion Indians? That of the reluctant politician who led her party to an astonishing electoral victory that not even her own admirers could have foretold? That of the princess, used to privilege, who became a national symbol of renunciation? That of the parliamentary leader who rejected the highest office in her adoptive land, one she had earned by her own hard work and political courage? That of the woman of principle who demonstrated that one could stand for the right values even in a profession corroded by cynicism and cant? That of the novice in politics who became a master of the art, trusted her own instincts and discovered she could be right more often than her jaded rivals could ever have imagined?
For years in the 1990s and after the turn of the century, the party of Nehru and Indira Gandhi sat at the margins of governance, a prop rather than a pillar of the polity of independent India. As it leads a coalition government today, the Congress once more seems poised to reassert its standing as the natural party of governance, with the prospect one day of another Gandhi at the helm. Sonia Gandhi’s stewardship of the party, many believe, aims to assure just that. And yet the woman now starring as the custodian of the legend of the dynasty knows only too well that fairy tales, like Hindu myths, don’t always have a happy ending.