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When Indira 'was India'
Remembering Mrs Gandhi
Who is Indira Priyadarshini Gandhi? On Monday, Nov 19, her birth anniversary, it could be a mistake to toss this question at bright-eyed students in college campuses. “The Mahatma’s daughter,” is how young college students responded in a recent survey conducted by a magazine on Free India’s iconic leader, daughter of Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, and the quintessential Amma to Rural India’s unwashed masses.
Know your history. Indira Gandhi was worshipped, abused, feared, loved, ridiculed, idolized, demonized, and eventually, gunned down to death. Two security guards she totally and personally trusted, pumped two dozen bullets into her frail body, inside India’s most protected residence.
Admired she was, by friends as well as foes. Former Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee, then a Jan Sangh MP in the early seventies, though bitterly opposed to Mrs Gandhi, hailed her as a ‘modern-day Durga”, when she as Prime Minister, inflicted a permanent scar on Pakistan in the ’71 war, by liberating Bangladesh. A Congress President D.K. Barooah famously said once, “Indira is India.” In a sense, it was true, never mind the sycophancy.
Indira, was a reporter’s worst nightmare come true. An average speaker, her staccato delivery left one rather cold, and her speeches, barring some inspired moments (and there were some) were often as interesting as a drain inspector’s report. Yet lakhs of people used to descend on her meetings, drawn to her like fillings to a magnet. They came to see her, period, not to hear her. Paradoxically, Indira was extremely articulate and successfully held her own against the likes of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger.
Her charismatic personality enchanted the young and the old, the rustic and the urbanite, the intellectual and the socialite, the classes and the masses. The cliché, darling of the masses, was perhaps created for her. She was that, in more than one sense of the word.
Mrs Gandhi’s longtime rivals like George Fernandes charged that she had absolutely no pretensions of being an idealist. Her only ideology, they taunted, was: I, Me, Myself. And of course the Family. Her family was the chosen one destined to rule the country, the means, only a means to her personal end. Her principal contribution to the political polemics of her era was a slogan ‘Garibi Hatao’!.
She governed by instinct. As she confessed once in an interview she gave to the American press, some of the most far reaching policies-like the withdrawal of privy purses, and nationalisation of banks was a product of her “stray thoughts”.
As Prime Minister, she ruled the country for nearly 12 years from 1969 to ’77 and ’80-84. And did she rule! The ‘gunghi gudiya” (the dumb doll) of ’69 first released the old Congress Party from the stranglehold of the Syndicate – the triumvirate of Kamaraj (who, ironically, plotted to make Indira PM, to thwart the ambitions of the irrepressible Morarji Desai), Nijalingappa and Sanjeeva Reddy.
Playing for high stakes, and putting her fledgling political career which was just beginning to bloom, on the line, Indira stabbed the Indian National Congress in the back by conspiring to bring her chosen man V.V. Giri into the Rashtrapati Bhavan, and broke the party to crown herself as the unquestioned empress of the breakaway Congress(I). The ’71 Bangladesh War was her masterstroke, and a mesmerized electorate deified her as a latter-day ‘Bharat Mata’.
But the euphoria evaporated soon enough. Unseated by the Allahabad High Court judgment for misuse of official machinery in her election campaign, Indira retaliated by clamping an Emergency in ’75, on the advice of her lackey Siddarth Shankar Ray, and her pugnacious son Sanjay Gandhi. The entire opposition was dumped in prison and the press gagged, while thousands of innocents suffered nationwide.
Nemesis followed 19 months later, with the non-Congress Parties joining hands to form the Janata Party. In the historic ’77 Lok Sabha elections, the Indira Congress suffered a humiliating loss all over the country, barring in the southern states. Her party’s scorecard in the cow-belt States resembled the batting average of a number eleven batsman in cricket: UP 0/85; Bihar 0/54; Rajasthan 1/25; MP 1/40; Haryana 0/10; Delhi 0/7; Punjab 0/13. The empress of India was humbled ironically by a political buffoon, viz. Lok Dal Leader Charan Singh’s chela, Raj Narain, in Rae Bareili, her pocket borough. As satirist Cho Ramaswamy was to say, “Even a lamp post or a donkey would have defeated Indira in the elections.”
Friendless, forlorn and alone in the Janata era, Indira and Sanjay were hounded day in and day out for their excesses committed during the Emergency. After a brief spell in the wilderness, the wounded tigress, smelt blood when a few Harijans were massacred in remote Belchi, and brilliantly exploiting the mass disenchantment with the failed Janata experiement, stormed back to power, literally on an elephant.
Predictably, she groomed her younger son Sanjay Gandhi to be her heir. But fate intervened in the form of an air crash. She then prevailed upon her other son, the gentler Rajiv, to take the plunge.
Perhaps, Mrs Gandhi’s insatiable lust for power proved her undoing. In Punjab, Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale, a rabble-rousing leader of Sikhs, proved to be her Frankenstein. Punjab went up in flames in the early eighties, the Sikhs momentarily flirted with the idea of a separate Khalistan, and eventually, Indira was forced to call in the army to flush out terrorists taking shelter in the much revered Golden Temple. Operation Blue Star was a military success, but Indira paid the ultimate price, when her Khalistani guards shot her at point blank range.
As a politician, Mrs. Gandhi was quite simply unparalleled; some would say, a law unto herself. Under her rule, the President of India, no less, used to meekly sign on the dotted line. Well, Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed signed the Emergency declaration, while having his bath. Another former president, Gyani Zail Singh publicly stated his willingness to scrub the floor, if Indira bade him to do so.
In her eyes, Cabinet ministers, chief ministers, governors, party veterans, et al, were like glorified errand boys. Despicable? But truth was, India used to vote for Indira, and only Indira. Also, the political pygmies in her party were more than eager to dance to her tunes. In the late seventies, a veteran Congressman – presently a former CM of a cow-belt State - once carried her son, Sanjay’s slippers on his forehead, while on his way to a public meeting! The Illustrated Weekly of India, a well known magazine of the time, edited by Khushwant Singh, an unabashed admirer of Sanjay Gandhi, captured it for posterity with a memorable cover on this.
Mrs Gandhi changed State chief ministers and governors, merely on a whim. In her view, democratic institutions and traditions were not cast in stone. Not surprisingly, the Constitution was amended a record number of times during her regime. While, the Congress party during her regime was one huge safety blanket for an assortment of sons, uncles, nephews, chamchas, and sycophants.
A ruthless realist, Indira Gandhi, had no belief in any particular ideology. More than her individual self, it reflected the political culture of the times. But she craved for Power, Absolute Power. Perhaps, she needed it to cloak her vulnerable self. Her famous last words? “Foreign hand” and “country is in internal danger”. She built a whole career on such inanities!
If she believed in anything at all, it was in “secularism”; it was totally genuine, and from the bottom of her heart. Intelligence officials pleaded with her not to employ Sikhs for her security, after Operation Blue Star. She refused to compromise and stood her ground, reposing total trust in her two security guards, her would-be killers. Ironically, the one core belief she ever had, proved her undoing.
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