Authors: Patrick French
The new prime minister, Lal Bahadur Shastri, told her he needed a Nehru in the cabinet to maintain continuity, and offered her a seat in the Rajya Sabha (the upper house of Parliament) and a position as minister for information and broadcasting. Indira Gandhi accepted, knowing this would give her a salary and a roof over her head.
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Her elevation revealed new ambition. When she flew to Kashmir to visit troops during a stand-off with Pakistan, she was lauded in the newspapers as the only man in the cabinet. With a coterie of supporters forming around her, she made little effort to hide her contempt for some of the new prime minister’s decisions.
In 1965 the Pakistani leader, the self-appointed Field Marshal Ayub Khan, sent tanks across the border and India fought an unwanted but successful war. During subsequent peace talks in Tashkent, Shastri died from a heart
attack. At this moment of surprise, Indira Gandhi’s entourage suggested she make a bid for power. The most obvious candidate for prime minister, the respected southern politician K. Kamaraj, declined to stand with the plaintive question: “No English, no Hindi. How?” Another likely leader, Morarji Desai, had too many opponents. For Mrs. Gandhi, the opportunity was irresistible: a woman who had long felt unappreciated was being offered an extraordinary chance. She had no experience of governing, but had watched her father at close quarters for years. Her late husband had been a theoretical socialist, even a soft Marxist, and Indira had observed his political ideas and developed her own alongside them. She knew everyone and could present herself to her father’s colleagues as a unifying force. For the durable politicians of Congress, she looked like a suitable and malleable stopgap. Indira Gandhi would be a figurehead, drawing the nation together in the spirit of her late father while the party machine made the important decisions.
It was a fatal misjudgement by the party’s high command. Mrs. Gandhi thrived in power, trouncing both her enemies and her backers, and dividing Congress. To the world, Nehru’s daughter appeared to be a glamorous new leader. Fluent in English and French and looking unlike the elderly males who were running the world, she seemed an exemplar in international affairs. Her handling of the crisis that led to the creation of Bangladesh (the people of East Pakistan fought for independence from West Pakistan with help in the later stages from the Indian military) was assured. But her premiership was to leave two principal marks on India: socialism and conflict, as the state tried to make the people submit to its will. If things were not working out in the way the founders had hoped, it seemed easier to push their policies harder rather than to re-evaluate. If central planning had turned the economy stagnant, might it not be better to execute planning more carefully and vigorously, perhaps through nationalization of essential services? The country was suffering from drought, famine and a shortage of rice when she took over the job of prime minister, and she decided with encouragement from her advisers to become more radical.
Using her father’s legacy and reputation, she tried to push through new policies centred around redistribution. She encouraged a nuclear programme, and later went to the trouble of amending the Constitution to turn India into a “Socialist Secular Democratic Republic.” A key achievement was to develop a new agricultural strategy known as the Green Revolution, which had been started under Lal Bahadur Shastri in an effort to end
the periodic mass famines that had disfigured India under British rule. By using high-yielding forms of rice and wheat, Indian agriculture was transformed, particularly in the northern states. Some farmers made sufficient profits to invest in technology and irrigation, and gained political clout with their new prosperity. The Green Revolution turned India into one of the world’s largest agricultural producers.
The traits that made Indira Gandhi vulnerable, and afraid of internal political rivals, determined her style of leadership. She was a weak parliamentary performer, bad at thinking on her feet, and was nicknamed “goongi gudiya,” or dumb doll. Not long after she became prime minister she was shouted down at a big party meeting in Jaipur. Her reaction was revealing. Lying in bed being massaged by a maid, she told a friend that her father’s sister, Vijayalakshmi, had been responsible for destroying her confidence in childhood: “She called me ugly, stupid. This shattered something within me. Faced with hostility, however well prepared I am, I get tongue-tied and withdraw.”
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As a woman in a male political world, she was isolated from the start. Her reaction was to avoid Parliament when she could, and to depend on the advice of a close entourage. She liked to reach out directly to the public, accepting petitions wherever she travelled, trusting crowds more than she trusted individuals.
With Indira Gandhi, the personal was nearly always political. In her letters to Dorothy Norman—opening herself up to a friend who came from a different culture—she was often exasperated, depressed, vigilant, and facing difficulty from greedy, mean and petty people. Any attack on her or her administration was deemed a calumny. She drew strength from the masses who greeted her when she was campaigning, seeing the light in their eyes as a sign that she, despite everything, was on the true path and must not be deflected. A recurring trait throughout her premiership was the conviction that with so many things going wrong in India, only she could be trusted to put them right. Every order had to emanate from the prime minister’s office. When she made a decision like accepting U.S. food aid, which seemed to go against her proclaimed principles, she balanced it with a more populist act, such as confiscating the former princes’ privy purses, a symbolic move which generated paltry revenue. Her methods were autocratic. A senior bureaucrat recalled being summoned to her office in 1969: “She simply said, ‘For political reasons, it has been decided to nationalize the banks. You have to prepare within twenty-four hours the bill, a note for the Cabinet and a speech to make to the nation on the radio tomorrow evening.’ ”
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Mrs. Gandhi
was not instinctively democratic, and lacked the necessary detachment of the good leader—the ability to distance herself from the whirl of events and take a dispassionate view.
During her time as prime minister, the way in which politics was conducted in India altered. She was respected, admired and even feared, but her lack of faith in institutions led her to move away from the emphasis on consensus and common endeavour of the 1950s. To implement policy, it became necessary to place increasing demands on the mechanisms of the state, and to limit the latitude of the individual. The political system no longer depended on the moral authority of Congress, although even as its status declined, the myths of the freedom movement were boosted, with criticism of the founding parents becoming unacceptable and public buildings being named after them. Party politics in New Delhi became more of a negotiation, whether with regional leaders or with other parties and political movements. This was where Indira Gandhi showed a particular, destructive talent. During her father’s premiership and her own time as Congress party president, she had been able silently to assess the weaknesses of her potential opponents, and she now put this knowledge to use. More than ever, politics at a state level came to depend on “contractors” who could deliver packs of voters using money or muscle.
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As the optimism of the past gave way to a more fragmented climate in the 1970s, with new political forces spinning off from the once monolithic Congress party, Indira Gandhi’s response was to try to tighten the reins of power and micro-manage politics in a way her father had never attempted. This created lasting conflict, particularly in the states of Punjab, Assam and Kashmir.
In 1971 she won the general election with the slogan “Garibi Hatao”—“Abolish Poverty.” It was a democratic victory, but behind the triumph lay a country that was failing. A mass movement led by the veteran socialist Jayaprakash Narayan promised strikes and “total revolution” against her administration. At first Mrs. Gandhi seemed paralysed by the agitation (Narayan’s wife, Prabha, had been a close friend of her mother, Kamala). In 1975, she declared a state of emergency. Opposition groups were banned, newspapers shut down and more than 100,000 people arrested. It looked as if India might be moving towards a new form of government—dictatorship. “I want something done,” she informed a senior colleague, Siddhartha Shankar Ray, shortly before the Emergency. “I feel that India is like a baby and just as one should sometimes take a child and shake it, I feel we have to shake India.”
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Most of her ministers were too surprised and in awe of her to raise any serious objection. Vijayalakshmi Pandit made it clear publicly
that she thought Indira was betraying the Constitution and the legacy of Jawaharlal Nehru.
Indira Gandhi’s chief adviser was her son Sanjay—prematurely bald, with extravagant sideburns and a pendulous lower lip. Previously, he was famous only for getting a licence to run a car factory which was unable to produce cars. After being given the opportunity to tour vehicle manufacturers in West Germany, Czechoslovakia and Italy, Sanjay expressed his own version of swadeshi, or self-reliance: he said he had nothing to learn from foreigners about car making. The Maruti project sucked in money for years from nationalized banks and private investors, with Indira Gandhi’s connivance, and produced nothing but a few prototypes and some car parts. One visitor to Sanjay’s amateur foundry described it as looking like “a dirty indoor barbecue.”
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During the Emergency, while his brother, Rajiv, stepped back from the action, worried about the dubious influence Sanjay was having on their mother, he was given the freedom to operate largely as he liked. Indira said later that nobody had shown her such selfless love as Sanjay.
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Sanjay Gandhi was a decisive operator, setting up a parallel operation alongside the mechanisms of government. He treated the Republic of India as if it were his personal fiefdom, with bribery becoming endemic. A friend of the family, the writer Khushwant Singh, remembered arriving at a meeting with him and watching a pair of supplicatory businessmen deliver two suitcases full of banknotes. “I found it hard not to like Sanjay,” he admitted, “but I have to say he was a thug, and he was corrupt.”
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Mrs. Gandhi tolerated his conduct, although it appears she did not profit directly from the transactions. In the view of Sanjay’s wife, Maneka, the benefits of the Emergency were later forgotten: “For a little while, things did work better and faster. Traders were ordered to put prices on their goods, and it’s remained the same ever since—before that, you would have to haggle over a bottle of tomato sauce.”
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One of his particular concerns was the rapid rise of India’s population, which had almost doubled since independence. Notoriously, men were sterilized by a team led by one of Sanjay’s friends, the jewellery designer Rukhsana Sultana. The population controllers paraded through the streets of Delhi, drumming up recruits. In numerous cases the operation was done without consent, although the usual reward was a tin of cooking oil, a transistor radio or Rs120.
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“All our vasectomies,” Sultana told the travel writer Bruce Chatwin, “were done in a lovely air-conditioned cellar. I and my workers had to sweat it out on the street.”
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Across India, several million
men were sterilized. In Delhi, Lucknow and other cities, ancient buildings were knocked down as part of Sanjay’s slum clearance project. Standing by Turkman Gate in Delhi’s old city, he told a government official he wanted to be able to see the Jama Masjid, the main mosque. Over a period of six days the command was implemented and, according to the
Times of India
, 150,000 shacks were knocked down.
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The police fired on a group of homeless protestors near Turkman Gate, killing several.
After less than two years, whether out of a belief she was still popular or a residual attachment to democratic principles, Indira Gandhi called an election.
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This went against the wishes of her son Sanjay, who also objected when she ended press censorship and released political prisoners. Many government ministers, sequestered in their Lutyens bungalows in New Delhi, were truly surprised when Congress lost at the polls. Nehru’s old colleague Morarji Desai, a rigid personality with a devotion to autourine therapy and cow protection, became prime minister in 1977. He tried to chart a new political course, cancelling the decrees of the Emergency and improving relations with the U.S. and China. Owing to the squabbling of the opposition parties in the governing coalition, Mrs. Gandhi was voted back into office in 1980, and her son looked set to return to power. Almost thirty years after India’s first general election, the Congress party, though weakened, remained the eclectic and dominating force in electoral politics. As Karnataka’s chief minister, Gundu Rao, said in self-abasement: “We are the actors of the Indira–Sanjay drama troupe.”
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Only five months after her election victory, the newly ascendant prime minister faced a heartrending shock. To the relief of the nation and the terrible grief of his doting mother, Sanjay Gandhi crashed while performing aerobatics over Delhi—illegally, one morning—in a Pitts S-2A light aeroplane.
It was now that the story of Indira Gandhi, played out increasingly in public, took on elements of tragedy and farce. Feeling more isolated than ever, and profoundly destabilized by the loss of her son, she turned to her remaining family. The household consisted of a clique of oddball advisers and hangers-on: Rajiv the pilot, who was now drafted into politics reluctantly; his shy Italian wife, Sonia, and their young children, Priyanka and Rahul; Sanjay’s widow, Maneka, and baby Varun (she was only twenty-three when her husband died, and her son was 100 days old); and from time to time a handsome if highly dubious swami named Dhirendra Brahmachari, who ran a gun factory, did yoga performances on national television and knew how to perform some of the more obscure Tantric rituals. So it was that the daughter of the great religious sceptic Jawaharlal Nehru had
shadowy rites performed to see off her enemies and counteract their evil intentions. When a friend told her she was devoting far too much attention to astrology and superstition, she answered, “It is because we did nothing and ignored what they said, that this happened to Sanjay. They had foretold the actual date.”
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Like many Indians, the prime minister believed her fate was preordained.