India is not done with Indira Gandhi. The election of 1977 decisively rejected her rule, and the government it brought to power undid the amendments she had made to alter the Constitution. But the party she created in her own image— named the Congress-Indira in 1978—returned to power in 1980 and dynastic succession, which was an article of faith with her, was accepted by her party after her assassination in 1984. To date, the party has not questioned it.
Indira herself remains a fascinating paradox. Asia is the continent of women leaders and the cradle of family culture. Hindu, Muslim, Buddhist, liberal or traditional Asian families have given rise, in a masculine world, to a series of women in power. She is one of that procession, yet uniquely herself among them. Though she came into politics as of right, by the classic route of family, she stepped out of the family mould and carved a political space entirely her own.
The paradox extends to her policy. Her scant regard for democratic processes at home—to the extent of suspending habeas corpus, freedom of the press and civil liberties during the Emergency—contrasted vividly with a foreign policy that championed democracy for East Bengal and entered the fight for it. Her finest hour came with the intervention that gave birth to Bangladesh. It was not only the most successful military intervention in history—restoring an elected government to power and calling a unilateral halt to hostilities at the earliest possible moment—it dealt heroically with a humanitarian crisis on a scale the world had never seen. India sheltered one crore refugees fleeing from genocide and persecution and made it possible for them to return to Bangladesh after the war. Compared with the Western interventions we have seen, in Lebanon, Kosovo, and more recently the search for non-existent weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and the prolonged and messy hunt for al-Qaida bases in Afghanistan, it stands out as a model of international behaviour. She is remembered and admired across the political spectrum for her steadfast leadership during the prolonged uncertainty and danger of partnering East Bengal, and for victory in that war, as much as she is criticized for her flawed democratic record at home.
She was no feminist, and nor was she a leader who took any significant step forward on behalf of women, yet she probably has no equal in politics as an inspirational figure for women both in India and abroad. Her election as prime minister made exceptional news in the West unlike at home where Indians took a woman in power for granted. I was living in Bombay at the time when Betty Friedan, the American feminist and author of The Feminine Mystique, rang me from Delhi to say she would be interviewing Mrs Gandhi on a plane journey from Delhi to Jaipur. She said she was excited about the prospect but wondering what questions she should ask a woman prime minister. This was a dilemma that would never have occurred to me. I advised her simply to ask whatever questions she would ask a prime minister.
To the onlooker the heart of the paradox may well have been Indira Gandhi’s belief that she was following in her father’s footsteps, when in fact her behaviour in power marked a complete break from his. She did not see it this way. Once she became the country’s leader she saw herself as the guardian of Congress tradition in the face of opposition attempts to attack or weaken it, whether that opposition came from within or outside the Congress party. The opposition to her within it was her first concern. I have an earlier memory of walking with her in the garden behind Teen Murti House. It was late evening in May 1964, a few days after Nehru’s death, and our grief was still raw. We were both close to tears, saying little, desolately aware of the passing of an era and the man who had dominated it, one who had been a principal actor in our lives. Love was not a word that described what Indira, or I and our immediate family, had felt for Nehru. He was a love in a class apart from other loves. When Indi (as I called my cousin) broke down and said,‘It was such a privilege to have known him,’ I wept with her.
During the days after Nehru’s death the house had been a gathering place for family and friends but also for political confabulation and speculation. The question ‘What next?’ was on our minds—not who would be prime minister as that succession was soon settled by consensus, but what changes this might mean for the country. Nehru’s India had chosen non-alignment and equidistance from the two hostile blocs that ruled the world. At home his pragmatic vision had refused to be boxed into ideological confines.At Independence the new socialist republic had opted for a mixed economy and Nehru, in his own words, had improvised his way forward, adjusting to the needs of a developing situation. Now, Indira was afraid that the Congress party—some of whose major figures were socially and economically conservative—would reverse his political direction and undo his economic framework.
There in the garden Indira recalled she had come up against the old guard’s refusal to allow her a free hand when she became Congress president in 1959. I asked her why she had quit the presidentship after a year when the post had a two-year term and she replied,‘Because they wouldn’t let me do what I wanted to do.’ The men who she said had prevented her from following her own judgement, or others like them, would now be in charge. She was disdainful of the portfolio of information and broadcasting she was offered by the new prime minister, Lal Bahadur Shastri, and when I congratulated her, she said,‘Whatever for?’ She was inclined to turn down the offer but in the end accepted it.
Three years later, as prime minister, finding herself without free rein in the party, she solved the problem by declaring that ‘party’ was different from ‘people’ and her own link was with the people. She put this into effect by bypassing her party with a presidential ordinance nationalizing fourteen banks. A split followed in the Congress in November 1969 that then brought part of it under her individual command. The element of high political risk the split involved did not strike me at the time though it must have been like diving off a dizzyingly high board into incalculable depths below, and the end result might easily not have gone her way. Leading national newspapers expressed shock. The grand old party had fallen apart. Wise leadership in the past had been able to contain differences within it. Fringes had certainly dropped off to make new formations, but the party itself had stayed stable. Alarming, they said, was the populist storm that had preceded the split. Mature political behaviour had been tossed to the winds and this was bad news for the country. This adverse reaction was up against a jubilant view that hailed the split and called it the party’s rebirth. The dead wood—old men who were blocking the nation’s progress—had been chopped off. The rallies around the prime minister’s house after the nationalization of the banks, condemned as rabble-rousing by influential newspapers, were seen as thrilling evidence of the people’s support for the prime minister. ‘Never have there been such stirring times in the capital of Bharat as in these swinging days since bank nationalization,’ wrote the Sri Lankan journalist Trevor Drieberg,‘Daily mass rallies outside No. 1 Safdarjung Road... to thank the prime minister for this act and to exhort her to perform more of a like nature.’ Delhi was rocked and riven by two conflicting views. In life as in fiction, point of view decides which way the story goes and both stories found their convinced reading public. Until the Emergency, when opinion mounted against her, commentators might have been dealing with two different Indira Gandhis. What both views had in common was that the turn now taken for better or worse had opened a new page in politics, Mrs Gandhi’s own. She stood in no one’s shade or shadow.
The woman who had accomplished this feat had not come to politics only by entitlement. Politics had been her entire upbringing. A cherished only child, with a family’s devotion and attention lavished on her, hers had nevertheless been a solitary girlhood in a household where her mother often lay ill and from which her father, publicly acclaimed and adored, was often absent. Outside home, Britain ruled India and one-fifth of the world, an arrangement that looked as permanent as the solar system. In an occupied country, a rebel family pledged to overthrowing British rule—like all similarly committed families in the country—was in a position of being at war, however non-violently, against the imperial power. It meant living under threat of imprisonment, on the edge of risk, in a climate of economic austerity and emotional stress and strain. With a father repeatedly in jail and a once luxurious household cut down to bare necessities, political awareness came early and was part of growing up. The picture Indira recalled of these years was a dark and brooding one. Later her mother’s death by tuberculosis in February 1936 when Indira was eighteen made for long and deep mourning. At the Badminton School in Bristol, where her father sent her to prepare for entry to Oxford, a schoolmate, Iris Murdoch, remembers her as a girl grieving for her mother, ‘very unhappy, very lonely, intensely worried about her father and her country and thoroughly uncertain about the future’.1 Indira’s impressions of the school were that ‘despite a terribly anti-fascist and pacifist [atmosphere] imperialism seems to be inherent in the bones of the girls [though] they hate to hear you say so.’2 Those for whom politics is merely a chosen profession do not have what Indira had—a feel for the territory and an instinctive sleepwalker’s acquaintance with it. The recently released Jacqueline Kennedy tapes show that Mrs Kennedy did not like Indira Gandhi, describing her on her visit to Washington with her father in 1961, as ‘a real prune—bitter, kind of pushy horrible woman... It always looks like she’s been sucking a lemon.’ One can sympathize with Indira trapped in the purdah of Mrs Kennedy’s ladies’ lunch in the living room while the men discussed what mattered in the dining room. Mrs Kennedy, unacquainted with political women, might as well have invited Mrs Mao Tse Tung to a domestic chit-chat while Mao and Kennedy got on with world affairs.
Reserve was natural to Indira and simplicity was her lifestyle. She disliked fuss and clutter around her. She had an eye for beauty but no liking for opulence in food, clothes, furnishings or possessions, and this was not a matter of policy or discipline but because she was made that way. She ate wisely, did not smoke or drink, and dressed in impeccable taste, always in khadi. Her interests extended far and wide, over art, crafts, classical music, theatre and literature. A play she had enjoyed in New York during Nehru’s first visit to the US was South Pacific and one of her favourite novels was her old schoolmate Iris Murdoch’s An Unofficial Rose. India’s festivals abroad, conducted by Pupul Jayakar, were inspired and backed by Indira’s personal interest. India took the lead in promoting handicrafts—the local product—when these were not the fashion worldwide. In her personal capacity she was sensitive and caring. Years before she came to power she had taken responsibility for a lame girl whom I often saw at the house though she did not live there. She was soft-spoken and restrained in private life—unlike the fire and fever she could display on the public platform—and like many introverted temperaments she was drawn to people who were open, warm and outgoing. One of these was Mrs Harivansh Rai (Teji) Bachchan, wife of the famous Hindi poet, in whose home Rajiv and Sanjay spent much time, as Teji’s sons, Amitabh and Ajitabh, did at Teen Murti. I attended Sonia’s ‘mehendi’ at Teji Bachchan’s house before her marriage to Rajiv in 1968. The marriage itself was a brief and simple civil ceremony. Compared with today’s overblown ostentatious weddings, it seems like the last echo of a Gandhian legacy.
I don’t know if Indira’s sense of humour was much in evidence on public occasions but she once told Parliament about a farmer who bought an arid piece of land that had never produced so much as a twig. He laboured on it until it bloomed. The local priest, passing by, declared, ‘What wonders you and the Lord have wrought, my son’ to which the farmer replied,‘But you should have seen it when only the Lord was in charge!’ Her party work even before she became prime minister must have left little time for frivolities but on a plane journey we shared, returning from New York in 1962 or ’63, we looked through glossy magazines and exclaimed over the fashions in Vogue. She described her student days in London, recalling an incident:‘I was in a taxi and I started doing my eye exercises. I was making the most awful faces when suddenly I saw the driver gaping at me in the mirror. I don’t know what he must have thought!’
She did not hold with privilege and it is not surprising that princely privileges and privy purses were abolished early on in her first term in spite of the covenant with the princes that the purses would be gradually reduced. This populist measure may well have suited her pact with ‘the people’ but it also accorded with her personal and political preference. I have often wondered what she made of the polemics and the colourful communist language that surfaced in national discourse for the first time as an accompaniment to her measures when she took the Communist Party of India (CPI) as partner and adviser.‘Right reactionaries’,‘Left adventurists’, ‘reactionary conspirators’, ‘counter-revolutionaries’ were no part of her vocabulary, but they served her purpose, as did efficient communist management for ‘upsurges’ and street arousal when called for. Meanwhile regardless of her radical posture the Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPI-M) was targeted for ruthless elimination. Its members filled jails along with others of the Opposition during the Emergency.
She worried about her sons being brought up in the protected atmosphere of the prime minister’s (her father’s) house and often wished they had more experience of ordinary life. She would have liked them to travel third class by train as she had done all her childhood. She did not want to send them to the Doon School and would have preferred Rishi Valley. Doon was Feroze Gandhi’s choice because he felt it would be better for job opportunities later. Her own education had not been continuous. She had attended schools in Allahabad, Switzerland, Poona, Shantiniketan and England, depending on the political situation and family considerations at the time, and she never completed her course at university. Yet her father’s books, two of them written for her, and his letters to her, apart from the circumstances of her life, had given her a richer and more varied education than most young people have access to. Her formal schooling showed careful selection. The small, private Pupils’ Own School in Poona was chosen for its Indian (as opposed to Anglo-Indian) and nationalist environment. It was run by a Parsi couple, the Vakils, who had strong ties with Shantiniketan. Then there was Shantiniketan itself. And in England, the pioneering Quaker educationist, Miss Baker, who ran the Badminton School, was a socialist and a feminist. Indira was well read, spoke fluent French and had been fed as much on European and Asian as on Indian politics. Her sons, by contrast, had no comparable training nor special gifts. It is again a paradox that, in view of her earnest desire for ordinary living for them, her own house as prime minister continued to be home for both her married sons and she eventually planned—on the privileged basis of family entitlement—to pass on her job first to one and then the other.
Rare is the marriage that has no marital problems. Hers in its unusual circumstance of separate living had more than its fair share. It was painful, particularly for her father, to watch the loneliness and heartbreak to which her troubles with Feroze consigned her. It is a commonplace today that marriage partners, both professionals, do live and work apart without damage to their relationship. Living apart was hardly known then, and it became the subject of comment, yet it was Feroze’s implacable attitude rather than the unconventional social situation that made the breach almost beyond repair. Always welcome at Teen Murti, he chose to treat himself as an outsider and behaved with scant courtesy when he came to a meal or to spend time with his sons. The mark he made in Parliament in an often oppositional role towards his own government had a tone of personal bitterness and attack at times. Fortunately the breach healed and the couple were able to spend a summer together before Feroze’s untimely death in 1960. Nehru was much moved by Feroze’s large following of supporters who streamed into Teen Murti to pay their last respects and by Indira’s passionate mourning of her husband’s death.
I have heard it said that Indira had no political philosophy, that she had, in fact, no ideology.While it is true that realpolitik describes important turns she took, she was as much a socialist and a product of socialist thought as large numbers of her own and her parents’ generation. Apart from those who were convinced socialists, to many unpolitical people it would have seemed plain common sense to be left wing at a time when dictators—Hitler, Mussolini Franco, Salazar—held the fort in Europe and the imperial West raised no voice against them. In our present market-obsessed climate it may be hard to imagine another outlook occupying centre stage when many of the best-known and most brilliant minds—in politics, literature, experimental theatre and the arts—were leftist, and socialism for them was the creed that represented the most civilized human instincts. I never heard socialism talked about in our family home. It did not need to be. It was taken for granted as the atmosphere and culture of our lives.
Mid-morning on October 31, 1984, at her house in Dehradun, my mother, Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit, was preparing to receive Princess Anne of Britain who was fulfilling an engagement in Mussoorie. The princess and her entourage were to stop for a cup of coffee on their return from Mussoorie before going on to Delhi but the coffee break did not take place. Word had come that Indira Gandhi had been assassinated and Princess Anne took my mother, my sister and myself to Delhi in her plane. On reaching Delhi we parted ways. My mother was taken to her host’s residence, while my sister and I got into a taxi to go to our younger sister’s apartment in Jangpura. Numbed by the horror of the assassination, we were shaken when our taxi was surrounded by raucous men brandishing iron rods and swinging bicycle chains, and the door was wrenched open by one of them. On conferring they must have decided our short hair showed we were not Sikhs and we were allowed to go. The next two days and nights, locked in the safety of the Jangpura apartment, we heard the terrified screams of less lucky victims and saw and smelled thick smoke rising from what fires we could not tell.
There are different views about what imperatives of policy influenced Indira Gandhi to order Operation Blue Star and send an army into the Golden Temple in June 1984, but it seems certain she could not have anticipated the extent or fallout of the operation. It is believed that the army itself did not foresee the bloodbath or the scale of destruction it would involve, and did not prepare the prime minister for it.
Why, against advice, and in spite of being warned of the danger, did she insist on retaining her two Sikh bodyguards? Why didn’t they refuse to serve instead of killing her in cold blood? I remembered what Sarojini Naidu had said to someone crying after Mahatma Gandhi’s assassination,‘Stop snivelling. Would you have wanted him to die of old age and decay? This was the death for him.’ If assassination can ever be called a fitting end to a dramatic life, Indira’s murder lit up an act of great personal courage when, in retaining her Sikh bodyguards, she chose to hold fast, against overwhelming odds, to her secular faith.