ONE
India’s Third Prime Minister Is Chosen
Indira Gandhi was forty-six years old when her father, Jawaharlal Nehru, died on May 27, 1964. Since Independence she had been her father’s companion and hostess at New Delhi and had accompanied him on official visits abroad. In 1955 she had been appointed to the Congress Working Committee, the party’s executive, with charge of the women’s and youth wings, and had become a member of its two subsidiaries, the Central Parliamentary Board and the Central Election Committee, soon afterwards. These responsibilities placed her at the heart of election preparations for the second general election of 1957. Her emergence onto the scene of political and public endeavour took place during a period of marital strain and difficulty, and Nehru welcomed her increasing involvement in the party, both as the natural outcome of her background and as therapy for her troubled domestic life. The Congress party’s and his own championship of women’s rights had been instrumental in creating a climate of pride in women’s opportunities and achievements. It was a special satisfaction to him that his daughter, whose health and unhappy marriage had been a continuing anxiety to him, should now find a way to fulfil herself through national activity. He wrote to his sister Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit, who was India’s high commissioner in London, on March 12, 1957, from the family home at Anand Bhawan, Allahabad, where he had gone to cast his vote:
When voting finished today, large numbers of our Congress workers turned up at Anand Bhawan, including many women. Indu has specially shaken up the women, and even Muslim women came out. Indu has indeed grown and matured very greatly during the last year, and especially during these elections. She worked with effect all over India, but her special field was Allahabad City and District which she organized like a general preparing for battle. She is quite a heroine in Allahabad now and particularly with the women. Hardly eating and often carrying on with a handful of peanuts and a banana, she has been constantly on the move, returning at midnight, flushed, slightly gaunt but full of spirit and with flashing eyes.
In 1959, at the suggestion of its outgoing president, U.N. Dhebar, the Congress party accepted her as his successor. Nehru did not think it was time for this distinction. His reservations were rooted deep in his respect for the process—personal, political, social or economic—that lays sound foundations. Work was the crucible of human personality or political strength, and there were no shortcuts to excellence, a philosophy reflected in seventeen years of power that rejected the dramatic and the extreme and relied on the building of institutions. He was averse to hustle and haste. Part of a generation well and truly tried through the struggle for freedom and the years of nation-building afterwards, he believed in time and trial. He was also concerned about his daughter’s health and the inappropriateness of her holding the party’s highest office while he was prime minister. These considerations had to be balanced against his conviction that he should not stand in her way, a point of view pressed by Govind Ballabh Pant, home minister and close colleague. He decided not to intervene.
I gave a good deal of thought to this matter and I came to the conclusion that I should firmly keep apart from this business and try not to influence it in any way, except rather generally and broadly to say that it had disadvantages … normally speaking, it is not a good thing for my daughter to come in as Congress President when I am Prime Minister.1
Mrs Gandhi accepted the office with tears in her eyes, and it was an emotional occasion for many present at the party meeting. Her father and grandfather were among the illustrious names in Congress annals who had held the distinction before her. Her elevation to the party’s most prestigious post was its tribute to her family. After Independence, the Congress president was almost invariably chosen on the basis of his previous experience in government. All party presidents between 1951 and 1969 were chief ministers. Mrs Gandhi was the exception. Her earnestness was looked upon with favour and her inexperience with indulgence.
She occupied the office, normally a two-year term, for barely a year, though during this period she took two initiatives. She advised the division of Bombay state, convulsed at the time by agitations demanding its separation into Marathi- and Gujarati-speaking states. Bombay was divided, bringing Maharashtra and Gujarat into being on May 1, 1960. She also urged the Union government’s interference in Kerala, where the communist government formed in 1957 was locked in a confrontation with the Roman Catholic and Nair communities over the issue of state control of schools and colleges. President’s rule was established in Kerala, and fresh elections held in 1960, when an alliance of parties led by the Congress won a majority. There is a provision in the Indian Constitution that, if the President of India, on receipt of a report from the Governor of a state, is satisfied that a situation has arisen in which government cannot be carried on in accordance with the Constitution, he can intervene and bring the state under President’s, that is, the Union government’s, rule. Governors of states are Union appointees and represent the President. Mrs Gandhi believed that such a situation had arisen in Kerala and, when she was president of the Congress, advised the Union government to intervene and declare President’s rule in Kerala. The outcome vindicated Mrs Gandhi’s advice as immediately beneficial to the Congress. It also demonstrated her approach to ‘action’ as the surgical gesture to forestall possible developments. In contrast, Nehru’s temperament made use of the tentative in decision-making as an area of positive value in arriving at action. The overthrow of communist rule took note of the immediate situation, not of the meaning of the communist phenomenon in Kerala. Chief Minister E.M.S. Namboodiripad later remarked on Nehru’s reluctance to declare President’s rule. Nehru had written to his sister, Mrs Pandit, on March 12, 1957:
In another three or four days’ time we shall have ninety percent of the results, and this will give a clear picture of the States as well as of Parliament … Kerala is heading for a Communist majority. If so, there would presumably be a Communist government there. This will be the first occasion anywhere in the world when a Communist Party wins an election through democratic means… . They have toned down very much, and the programme they have issued is quite moderate. Nevertheless, this is an intriguing development.
Mrs Gandhi was not, as her father knew, well enough to carry an arduous responsibility and had been under strain for a long time. Writing to his sister in London from New Delhi, on January 11, 1955, Nehru had said, ‘Indira has been unwell for the last three weeks or so and mostly in bed. She has had rather a bad attack of anaemia brought on partly by too much work and rushing about. Behind that, of course, is worry and unhappiness.’ She gave up the Congress presidentship and, without defining her dissatisfaction, made it known she was not being allowed to do as she wished in the party. She was operated on for a kidney stone on February 17, 1960.
In 1964 she was still comparatively unnoticed in her own right, and not seriously considered a candidate for the succession to Nehru. She had had no training in a profession and no experience in government. Though her presence on the Working Committee indicated high status in the party, she had worked for the organization behind the scenes and of choice remained in the background. A mother, occupied with caring for her two sons, she was devoted and imaginative about their upbringing, always torn between domestic and public responsibilities. She correctly described herself as a ‘private’ person, so private indeed that no one knew her intimately. Her griefs were well sheltered, her joys restrained. There was almost a pathos about her personality for those who tried to break through to it. It was a personality that would not step out. Inevitably involved in politics, she had hung back from the ultimate political trial—an election, declining at her father’s death to stand for the by-election to the Lok Sabha from his constituency, Phulpur, in Uttar Pradesh. It seemed right and proper, an act of rededication to the values he had represented, for a member of the family to contest Nehru’s seat for the Congress in November 1964. Mrs Gandhi’s aunt, Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit, resigned as Governor of Maharashtra to contest and retain the constituency for her party, though not before she had made certain that her niece did not want the seat.
A year later, on December 6, 1965, she had occasion to write to her niece, now minister for information and broadcasting in Lal Bahadur Shastri’s cabinet:
I have a feeling that you are not happy about my being in Phulpur. I am conscious of the fact that this seat should have been yours by right. It is yours today should you wish to have it. Nothing would give me greater pleasure now or in 1967 to retire from this particular constituency for you and work elsewhere. You have only to say so and it will be done and, believe me, done willingly. There are rumours that you do not wholly approve of my political views. I have never made any declaration of where I stand because to me it seemed that adherence to Congress implied loyal acceptance of its basic policies and principles. I believe it is better in a country like our own to try and live according to one’s beliefs rather than talk about them. This I try to do. I have during the sixteen years when I had the privilege to serve India abroad tried to explain and implement India’s policies to the best of my ability and understanding. Since my return to public life here I have done what little I could to sustain the ideas and ideals which Bhai* gave to this country. It is true I have not joined any groups but this is because all groups today are founded on expediency and I do not approve of this.
I am a whole generation older than you are. I am at the end of my career and in the evening of my life. There is no desire in my mind to attempt to compete with the younger generation, least of all with you. Indeed this would be rather ridiculous.
I had hoped that my presence in the political field would give you strength and support. If the contrary is the case, then obviously there is something wrong and it must be remedied in the larger interest which both you and I have at heart.
With love,
Puphi
Mrs Gandhi herself had been elected unopposed to the Rajya Sabha after her cabinet appointment. Though she had taken part in election campaigns, she had never faced the electorate herself and did not do so until 1967, more than a year after she became prime minister, when the trial could no longer be postponed. She expressed a positive distaste for politics, replying to her aunt’s letter on December 7, 1965:
I do not know who has been talking to you but there is absolutely no foundation in the remark that I am not happy at your being in Phulpur… . It may seem strange that a person in politics should be wholly without political ambition but I am afraid that I am that sort of a freak … . I did not want to come either to Parliament or to be in Government. However, there were certain compelling reasons at the time for my acceptance of this portfolio. Now there are so many crises one after another that every time seems to be the wrong time for getting out… .
She had been an observer, albeit close to the fount of power, during her father’s lifetime. The party presidentship, like her earlier appointment to the Working Committee and its subsidiary bodies, had been bestowed on ‘Nehru’s daughter’; these were not positions she had earned through the rough apprenticeship of state politics with its numerous considerations of region, faction and caste. She had not had to work her way up through the vast amorphous organization, or show outstanding talent, in order to be singled out. And she had shown no desire to stand out as a political or public personality. Her predominant image was one of retreat and extreme reserve. The country knew her as her father’s companion and the mother of two boys. If her father was grooming her for prime ministership, there was not enough evidence of it in events or in his own avowed aversion to undemocratic procedure to make his colleagues unduly suspicious or jealous of the possibility, though some believed, nevertheless, that her presidentship of the party indicated he was doing so. Above all, her own personality had given them no cause for alarm.
Later she recalled her role as her father’s hostess:
When I went to live with my father at Teen Murti House, the residence of the Prime Minister, it wasn’t really a choice. My father asked me to come and to set up the house for him. There was nobody else to do it. So I set up the house, but I resisted every inch of the way about becoming a hostess. I was simply terrified of the so-called social duties. Although I met a large number of people, I wasn’t good at ‘socializing’ and small talk and that sort of thing … .2
She did not have the recognizable ingredients of public appeal or charisma. She was expected to play a greater role in national affairs, and her political involvement had grown to the gradual exclusion of her personal and private life, but front-rank leadership was not an idea easily connected with her. The imposing will and determination she later displayed in public life had as yet left their mark only on the family circle. At her father’s death, grieved and undecided about her immediate future, she made no move to enter the leadership fray. Nor did the party’s high command dwell on it as a possibility.
In order to avoid a contest for leadership that would present a picture of discord at Nehru’s death, senior leaders headed by Kamaraj, Congress president, worked to bring about a unanimous choice. The principle of consensus, not new to Congress politics, was used this way and defined as such for the first time, and Lal Bahadur Shastri was chosen prime minister as the neutral and most generally acceptable candidate.
Morarji Desai, cut out by this procedure, saw the situation differently. His standing in the party hierarchy was high and his ability proven during his chief ministership of Bombay state and his experience in Nehru’s cabinet as commerce and later finance minister. With a right based on his record to lead the country, he wanted an open contest that would set a healthy precedent for the post-Nehru Congress, enabling the party to throw up its own choice rather than one arranged behind the scenes by those who controlled votes and patronage. A man of definite views and stern character, he did not have the pliability the bosses considered an important qualification for the job. He accepted their verdict as a matter of party discipline, and Shastri became the leader. The consensus was welcomed in India and abroad as an impressive exercise in mature political functioning, along with the fact that the parliamentary system had been upheld during this critical transition period and thus strengthened. It had, however, acted as a brake on the ‘natural’ process of political selection.
Mrs Gandhi, who had declared no personal stake in the succession, was a potent, if passive, presence on the scene. Even after the consensus, she remained, as daughter of the charismatic Nehru, a figure whom his party could not comfortably ignore in the emotional aftermath of his death. Shastri gave her the portfolio of information and broadcasting in his cabinet, but her relations with him were cool and distant, and she made no secret of her disdain for a man she considered a minor character whom chance had made a leader. Interviewed on November 11, 1965,3 she said India had ‘swerved from the right path’ after Nehru’s death, and that socialism and non-alignment were being forgotten. She became a determined contestant for the succession when Shastri died suddenly at Tashkent in the Soviet Union on January 12, 1966, though she had described herself as ‘wholly without political ambition’ and continued to see herself this way.
When Mr. Shastri passed away, I really didn’t think of myself at all. When he had come to ask me to become a Minister, I had thought it was just a huge joke and I had told him that, firstly, I was not in the mood for jokes immediately after the death of my father, and secondly, that this was a ridiculous proposition… . I must say I was worried at the thought of Mr. Morarji Desai becoming Prime Minister, because his policies were so diametrically opposed to what we stood for and I feared that India would immediately change direction.4
Nehru’s daughter would be an important asset in the coming election of 1967, but her eligibility was linked chiefly to her party’s insistence on uncontroversial leadership, in the void so soon again left by Shastri’s death. Shastri’s nineteen-month tenure had been dominated by two wars with Pakistan. There had scarcely been time to survey the post-Nehru scene and assess its priorities. And the party needed a period of reconstruction to rebuild its declining reputation. Indira Gandhi had what mattered greatly to the group of leaders who masterminded her rise—a reticence that made her apparently content to stay in the background of events. She had never been embroiled in controversy or ambition, and her subdued public manner ensured respect for the principle of collective leadership. As between her and Morarji Desai, the other contestant, she looked colourless and manageable, the safer choice for a party whose political fortunes had suffered a severe setback with the Chinese attack in 1962 and needed to pull together. On her part Mrs Gandhi knew she needed the party bosses, who did not favour her so much as oppose Desai. She tactfully refrained from canvassing for votes or formally declaring her candidacy and said she would abide by Congress President Kamaraj’s wishes. Her reticence was noted and approved. After hearing from Kamaraj, she made her own moves to enlist support.
There was less visible hurry and strain in New Delhi than there had been on Nehru’s death. The Congress ruling clique felt that with its main crisis, the succession to Nehru, safely over, no other succession would present a critical problem. Desai’s insistence this time on a vote was conceded, but the ‘open contest’ proved, in effect, to be a trial of strength between him and the party bosses. There was little doubt that with the party machine behind Mrs Gandhi, with the general election just a year away, and most MPs anxious for tickets and support, they would follow their chief ministers’ orders to vote for her. The Congress Parliamentary Party elected its leader by a secret ballot on January 19, 1966. Mrs Gandhi, with the bosses and a coalition of chief ministers solidly behind her, won 355 votes to Desai’s 169 and became prime minister on January 24. There were other reasons for her election. Desai belonged to the old guard. Mrs Gandhi was young. Desai represented the Congress’s past, Mrs Gandhi its future. A man of ascetic habits and implacable opinions, Desai had a ‘grey eminence’ aura that could be forbidding. Mrs Gandhi would be modern and flexible. Through her, Congress radicals believed, the party would be regenerated.
The selection of a parliamentary constituency for Mrs Gandhi could no longer be postponed. She declined her aunt’s offer to vacate Phulpur and refused an invitation from Shastri’s constituency, Jumnapar, also near Allahabad, to represent it. She said she had offers from all over the country and would decide later. On August 28, 1966 Mrs Pandit (my mother) wrote to me from Allahabad:
I have filed my application for the Phulpur constituency after a talk with Indi† and her written consent … [she] is still hesitating. Two safe but inconspicuous seats are being prepared, but it is the general desire which I share that she should stand from Allahabad City and face any challenge that is offered.
The Phulpur question remained open, though Mrs Pandit’s application had by now been approved and filed. She wrote to me from New Delhi on September 18:
You must have seen from the papers that I offered Phulpur to the P.M. and she refused … I did this because I knew she has wanted it and because inspired rumours were being circulated that ‘the people’ want her there … . Before the meeting I spoke to Indi. She seemed pleased but said she would not permit me to make ‘this sacrifice.’ Or did I want something else? I said the offer was unconditional—there was no sacrifice… . When I announced my decision at the meeting, the very same people who had been turning around in circles carrying on a whispering campaign against me were a bit stunned and started saying I mustn’t make such a ‘sacrifice.’ … In her speech Indi said I should keep Phulpur but added that ‘these things’ were to be decided finally by Kamaraj. So we are held up until the end of October when the decision will be made.
Mrs Gandhi was reluctant to stand from Allahabad or its environs. The Samyukta Socialist Party concentrated its full fire on this Congress stronghold, Nehru’s birthplace and political base. ‘Dumb doll’, Ram Manohar Lohia’s mildly derisive description of Mrs Gandhi, signified an irreverence that refused to concede special status to the Nehrus or to treat Allahabad as their fief. Lohia, who could rub shoulders in camaraderie with the crowd, also had an intellectual’s appeal for the rebellious young. His language was incisive and brilliant, and Mrs Gandhi, unsure and apt to seek refuge in her family’s sacrifices for the national movement, was no match for it. She chose eventually to stand from Raebareli, the constituency of her late husband, Feroze Gandhi, and Mrs Pandit kept the rural Phulpur seat. Congress credit was low, and each known and respected party member who could win an election was needed. Mrs Pandit’s political base was Uttar Pradesh, where she had twice been minister for health and local government (1937 and 1946) and twice been elected to the Lok Sabha after Independence (1952 and 1964).
Following the country’s fourth general election in 1967, a little over a year after Mrs Gandhi became prime minister, the question of leadership became a live issue again. Mrs Gandhi’s year in power had jolted the high command. She had devalued the rupee in June 1966 on the advice of her inner circle or ‘kitchen cabinet’. Without the advance measures needed to cushion the economy against a drastic reduction of 57.5 per cent in the value of the rupee, prices had risen, with consequent hardship to the consumer. Angry criticism assailed devaluation from all sections of opinion in Parliament. To the men who had put her in power, this showed a reckless disregard for the homework hard economic decisions require. It had also been an abrupt departure from the concept of joint cabinet responsibility for decision-making and an indication that either she did not understand parliamentary method or had deliberately ignored it. Three days after devaluation, the party registered its disapproval of the action, though accepting it as a fait accompli. It marked a divide in Mrs Gandhi’s relations with Kamaraj. She now made it a point to distinguish between the party, as represented by its bosses, and the people, whom she identified with herself. Asked about her differences with Kamaraj in an interview with Kuldip Nayar before the 1967 election, she replied, ‘You see, here is a question of whom the party wants and whom the people want. My position among the people is uncontested.’ The publicly stated assumption of a privileged position distinct from, and even opposed to, her party made little impression on a party racked by election fever.
The election was a debacle for the Congress which lost power in five states, and in three others had a slender majority that did not last. In the Lok Sabha it was reduced to a small majority of about twenty-two, while in the states a new pattern emerged. Kerala and West Bengal formed Marxist (CPI-M)‡ led governments, while the Jan Sangh became the dominant party in the Hindi belt in the north. Some powerful Congressmen, including Kamaraj, lost their seats. Since 1963 there had been hard thinking and at least one concrete programme (the Kamaraj Plan) to revitalize and strengthen the party at the grass roots. The election revealed how inadequate these had been. The last lustre of the national movement had worn off the Congress. In these circumstances the party clung closer to ‘consensus’ to avoid the friction of a new leadership contest, proposing Mrs Gandhi remain prime minister and take Morarji Desai into her cabinet as deputy prime minister. There had been no deputy (number two in the cabinet) since Sardar Patel’s death in 1950. Mrs Gandhi, in a stronger bargaining position since Kamaraj had been defeated at the polls, agreed to Desai’s inclusion as finance minister, with the label of deputy, but not to ‘any duality of authority’. Her authority, she said, would be ‘unfettered’. In Nehru’s time a rank had been assigned to each minister. She dispensed with this practice, instituting alphabetical order, so that cabinet positions provided no opening for conjecture about future power line-ups.
*A reference to Nehru.
†Indi, like Indu, is an abbreviation of Indira.
‡The Communist Party of India-Marxist, known as the CPI-M, broke away from the Communist Party of India (CPI) in July 1964 as a consequence of the worldwide split in the party. Contemptuous of the CPI, which is accused of being lured by power and office, the CPI-M rejected ‘the hoax of parliamentarianism’ and believed it must ‘accomplish the people’s democratic revolution through revolutionary people’s war by uniting the fighting masses … on the basis of a worker-peasant alliance’.