India (7 page)

So the past becomes a part of the present, and ancient history is linked to everyday life in a way that is unmatched in any other world culture, in a form that is wholly unselfconscious. A seal found at the ancient city of Mohenjo-daro dating to around 2000
BCE
shows a figure, seated in a yogic position, which seems to be a representation of the deity Shiva. To a Hindu today (who might sit in that very yoga position each morning) the pose, the trident, the bull and the phallus would be immediately familiar: a similar representation of Shiva might be found painted on a roadside rock or dangling from a truck’s rearview mirror. Many Indians, conscious of their timelessness but often with no informed idea of their own history, are connected to their distant ancestral past every day. Modernity is converted to a purely Indian form.

The founding parents laid down the Constitution, but would the children follow it? A Delhi lawyer said to me while discussing the high ideals of Nehru and his fellows, “The problem with India is Indians.” He meant that the rules were all there, but nobody obeyed them. Indians do not go by the book.

I
N THE FALL
of 1962 the dream of India as a secure, democratic nation which impressed the rest of the world with its peaceful values and ancient traditions took a savage knock. Nehru’s docile policy of “Hindi-Chini bhai-bhai,” Sino-Indian brotherhood, was trampled upon by tens of thousands of Chinese soldiers as they poured into north-east India and Ladakh in a violent attempt to resolve a Himalayan border dispute. Nehru, ageing and broken, went on All-India Radio to express his sorrow to the people of Assam, speaking as if they were lost forever because the hordes had breached the Se La, an impregnable mountain pass. Unexpectedly, his daughter Indira seized the headlines by deciding to fly to Assam and advance by helicopter to the front. The prime minister was aghast, worrying privately she might be kidnapped: “She is being very obstinate. Her visit is very dangerous, she should not go.”
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Indira Gandhi, a striking woman with an angular face, already a widow in her mid-forties, took no notice of her father’s fears and flew off in a plane stuffed with Red Cross supplies. She had been an admirer of Joan of Arc since childhood and made a rousing speech only thirty miles from the Chinese positions, ordered administrators back to work and commended the local tribals for their refusal to flee; then she flew to Delhi, picked up more supplies and went back again. The war was a humiliation for India
even though the Chinese withdrew from Assam, but at least the press had a new heroine, a counterweight to the unpopular defence minister Krishna Menon, who was soon forced to resign. Mrs. Gandhi felt appreciated by the people of India. Krishna Menon referred to her as “that chit of a girl, Indira.”
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More than any politician in modern Indian history, Indira Gandhi’s behaviour was conditioned by her personal story. In the early 1930s, her mother, Kamala, had joined the protests against the British in their home city of Allahabad. Nehru, who was then in prison, was astounded to hear his shy wife had addressed public meetings, encouraged women to break purdah and even been hurt during a demonstration. One of Kamala’s followers was Feroze Gandhi, a young chancer from a Parsi family who took it upon himself to become her attendant, helping out with household chores and political organization. He became part of the furniture at the family house, Anand Bhawan. Feroze grew close to the lonely Kamala, confiding that he admired her sixteen-year-old daughter and would like to marry her. Kamala discounted the proposal; Indira was still a schoolgirl at Shantiniketan in Bengal, a self-consciously Indian school started by the poet and philosopher Rabindranath Tagore, where lessons were taken beneath the trees. More importantly, she knew the heavyweights of the Nehru family, with their patrician aspirations, would never agree to such an unlikely match.

Kamala was a stubborn woman with intense feelings and a devotion to a mystical kind of religion. This led to the end of her sexual relationship with her husband in 1935; Nehru noted in his diary: “Apparently I am not to come in the way of God.” The following year she became seriously ill, and was sent to Europe for treatment, accompanied by Indira. Around this time Nehru told their daughter he was handing over Anand Bhawan to his sister Vijayalakshmi and her husband: “The whole house will be at their disposal,” he wrote. “If you want to put any of your personal effects apart, you may put them in my room.” Indira was now homeless, aged eighteen, with her possessions in storage. Nehru added that she would have to shift for herself, and should remember her famous family had given her “a certain public position which you may have done nothing to deserve.”
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His own energy would be devoted to the freedom struggle. When Kamala died months later in a Swiss sanatorium, Indira was left alone, vulnerable and frail. She was probably suffering from tuberculosis, and now pursued a range of medical treatments in Switzerland and Britain.
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After his wife’s death, Jawaharlal Nehru was taken up by a love affair
with the buxom Congress politician Padmaja Naidu, and even more by his devotion to the cause of India’s freedom: his passion was politics, and he was better at performing the self-regarding role of Chacha Nehru, loving all the children of India, than being a father to the teenage Indira. Later, he regretted the insensitivity with which he had treated his wife and daughter at this time. All of these events had the cumulative effect of leaving Indira feeling bruised, resentful and lost; she was both privileged and neglected, and felt her childhood had been “invaded” by politics. She went to Oxford University but dropped out, conscious of her lack of brilliance compared to other, better-educated Indian students. Her one solace, her anchor, was Feroze Gandhi, to whom she became secretly engaged in Paris. Quite what he was doing in Europe is unclear. He was supposed to be studying at the London School of Economics—his fees were paid initially by his aunt, who went by the name of Dr. Commissariat—and to make ends meet he had a job in a factory. He was busy, fleshy, outgoing and sensual, enjoyed Western classical music and had social abilities Indira lacked. They ate hot chestnuts on cold wartime nights on the London streets. Feroze made himself indispensable, as he had with Kamala. Indira kept the relationship secret from her father.

In 1941 she secured a passage on a ship sailing via South Africa to Bombay, with nightly blackouts for fear of the bombing. Back in India she stayed with friends and relations, filled with resentment but dutiful in her support for her busy, absent father. Although her grandmother pointed out that Feroze came from a different religious community and a different social class and had no money, she was determined to marry him: she wanted happiness, children, a quiet and private life. Her family, and it sometimes seemed the whole nation, were against the marriage. She found herself being interrogated by Mohandas Gandhi—who was a personal friend of her father as well as the guardian of the Congress conscience—about her desire for Feroze. When she told him that her feelings ran much deeper than physical attraction, the Mahatma suggested she might take a penitential vow of celibacy after marriage since “sex-pleasure” was no proper basis for a relationship. “I told him, ‘You can ask a couple not to get married [but] to ask them to live a life of celibacy, makes no sense. It can result only in bitterness and unhappiness.’ ”
⁵
The couple married in 1942, with Nehru’s pained, partial consent.

The strange thing about Feroze Gandhi is that having attained a position many men would have coveted—entering the family of the probable future prime minister of independent India—he remained resolutely his own person.
He was a keen drinker and philanderer, and effectively unemployed, although he worked occasionally and with flair as an editor and journalist. His zest and unsuitability continued to attract Indira, although even before their second son, Sanjay, was born in 1946, he had got too close to Indira’s first cousin, Chandralekha Pandit, and fallen in love with a woman from an aristocratic Muslim family.
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It was an intense, damaged marriage, which continued unhappily, with occasional rapprochements.

All her life, Indira had been in the public eye—when she was arrested not long after her wedding, the policemen laid their turbans at her feet in apology—but Feroze found it impossible to adapt to being the nation’s son-in-law.
⁷
He was elected as MP for Rae Bareli in Uttar Pradesh at the first general election, and was a vigorous lawmaker who worked to expose corruption and took special pleasure in targeting his incorruptible father-in-law’s sleazier associates. As the prime minister’s hostess, Indira had constant obligations, and Nehru was signally undiplomatic in failing to include his son-in-law in events at his house. As Indira’s confidante Pupul Jayakar wrote: “Feroze was low in protocol and often found himself below the salt.” Humiliated, he refused to attend official functions and shifted to his own house “where he cultivated roses and held his own ‘durbars.’ ”
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Jayakar believed their two sons, Rajiv and Sanjay, had a happier time with their father than with their mother. Feroze gave them his full attention and encouraged them to share his interest in carpentry and mechanics. The prime minister’s residence was impressive and formal, a warren of working offices, although Indira made efforts to introduce childish pleasures like a garden of pets. Sanjay’s favourite animal was a crocodile, but it was sent to a zoo after it nearly took off his mother’s hand. The boys were brought up in large part by servants, including a stern Danish governess who insisted on cold showers and raw vegetables.
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The two children were very different in character. Rajiv was described by his mother as quiet and sensitive, a child who had trouble making friends. Sanjay was more outgoing, though at the age of six he had not yet learned to speak.
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Lively, arrogant and sometimes amusing, he was feared when he was a boarder at the upper-class colonial-style Doon School. He bit a chunk out of the ear of a fellow student who is now an eminent national politician. When I asked a Doon School contemporary—the Maoist revolutionary Kobad Ghandy, who was to take a very different road—how he remembered Sanjay, he replied with a period putdown: “He was a lumpen element.” It was not an unreasonable judgement: by his late teens, Sanjay was being accused of stealing and joyriding cars around Delhi.
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With her children away at boarding school, Indira Gandhi had more time to worry. She experienced feelings of anger and vengeance, and some days she felt tormented, thinking of giving up on Delhi and going away to live in London. Through all this she was surrounded by people who deferred to her as the prime minister’s daughter and a possible source of patronage. She had a strong aesthetic sense, an eye for a hand-woven sari, and an eclectic interest in film, ballet, opera and passing intellectuals. Yet from early on, she had a peevishness and lack of proportion, particularly over those who crossed her, even in the mildest way. Having previously held minor positions, she was elected as president of the Congress party for a year in 1959, at the instigation of politicians who saw her as a potential route to the prime minister, and a possibly useful tool. She turned out to be more energetic, engaged and assertive than expected. Nehru’s reaction was ambiguous. He had never rated his daughter’s talents highly, but when she presided over a party meeting he said, “At first Indira Gandhi had been my friend and adviser, then she became my companion and now she is my leader.”
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Feroze was outraged, particularly when his wife persuaded a reluctant Nehru to topple an elected communist state government in Kerala and to invoke president’s rule—the first time this had happened since independence—claiming the southerners were working with the Chinese.

In 1960, at the age of only forty-seven, Feroze Gandhi died from a heart attack. Despite their unhappiness as a couple, Indira felt isolated afterwards in a way she had never been before. Feroze was the one person who had stayed close to her at the worst point in her life, the years after the death of her mother. She resented many of the members of her father’s family, and in particular her aunt, Vijayalakshmi Pandit, who was by now an influential politician in her own right, having served as president of the UN General Assembly and Indian ambassador to several countries. Her children were growing older, and would soon be going abroad. Sanjay, obsessed by speed, was apprenticed to Rolls-Royce in England, where his delinquent tendencies quickly alienated his employers. Asked to account for one of a series of mistakes, he told his supervisor: “You people mucked up my country for 300 years, so what’s the big deal if I muck up Rolls-Royce?” When Sanjay finally quit his job, a Rolls-Royce executive said they were glad to see the back of him: “All he was interested in was booze and women.”
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Rajiv’s approach was different. He lived a carefree life at Cambridge University, studying in a desultory fashion, growing a temporary beard, tinkering with
car engines, learning to do the Twist, taking odd jobs as a fruit picker, ice-cream seller and baker at the Cambridge Co-Op, where he was assigned to the bread section with responsibility for stacking the hot loaves when they came out of the oven. Neither son came away with a qualification.

In the last months of Nehru’s life, Indira Gandhi became his gatekeeper, supervising not only visitors but the government files that were brought to him. The modern Indian state had been made with his imprint, and now he was fading, leaving a hole at the heart of government. In the absence of precedent, it was not hard for his daughter to take a commanding position, issuing decisions about what the prime minister would and would not do. The process of transition between administrations was new for everyone. Sometimes Indira’s only urge was to escape. “I feel I must settle outside India at least for a year or so and this involves earning a living and especially foreign currency,” she wrote to her American friend Dorothy Norman weeks before her father’s death. “The desire to be out of India and the malice, jealousies and envy, with which one is surrounded, are now overwhelming.”
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After he had passed away, she felt as if she was caught in a vacuum: the prime minister’s house was being turned into a memorial museum and library, and she thought she was being made to leave in a hurry. Within ten days of his death, civil servants had migrated and workers were removing the office furniture. It gave her horrible echoes of losing her childhood home at Anand Bhawan, a hurt she had carried down the years. She was now an orphan as well as a widow, and her sons were away in England, pretending to study. The attention she had received for years as the only child of the most famous living Indian was evaporating, as power shifted. Indira Gandhi had long been a defensive and insecure person, and now she had good reason to feel unprotected.