I grew up in a home of Nehru admirers and, as a six-year-old, recall being among the throng of mourners, along with my parents and grandmother, at his funeral. A year later, in 1965, my parents gave me to read India’s Quest , an Asia Publishing House imprint: it contained the letters Nehru had written to Indira Gandhi on Indian history, extracted from his Glimpses of World History . I turned eight and, less than a month later, Indira Gandhi became Prime Minister and, barring the 33 months of Janata Party rule in between, continued to be so till I was 24.

Through my growing-up years, I recall my parents and their friends having heated political discussions at home, many of which centred around Indira Gandhi. Unlike her father, who was still worshipped by the middle classes, she was a controversial figure who somehow did not measure up to his memory.

In 1972 — or it could be 1973 — Indira Gandhi, then at the height of her powers, not long after the creation of Bangladesh, stopped by in Allahabad, where my father, an Air Force officer, was stationed at the time: our bungalow faced the gate of the Bamrauli Airport. In the morning, when Congressmen lined up on the tarmac to greet her, a group of pre-teens who lived in the Bamrauli Air Force Station precincts ran to join them, curious to see Indira Gandhi. My sister, then just eight or so, was among them. A little later, she returned home breathless and triumphant, wearing an expensive sandalwood garland that hung down almost to her knees: the politicians had garlanded Indira Gandhi and she, in turn, had garlanded the children. Shortly after lunch, someone from the PM’s entourage showed up at our door: Indira Gandhi wanted to rest for a while, but there were no pillows at the airport — could we lend one? My mother went into a flap, looking for something suitable on which Indira Gandhi could rest her head!

Clearly, this was a time when security and protocol mattered very little — even for someone who was then as powerful as Indira Gandhi.

Cut to 1977, Delhi: I was in my final year at college, and I used to stay up late to study. But on March 20, I was up all night, so that I could tune into All India Radio early in the morning to get the election results. And then the news came in: Indira Gandhi had been defeated in Rae Bareli, her son Sanjay in Amethi. Excited, I ran to wake my parents to give them the news: in those days, as a student — even at the apolitical Lady Shri Ram College — we were all anti-Emergency, ardent Janata Party supporters, convinced as only the young can be, of a new dawn, a new Independence awaiting us.

The only voice of dissent came from our cook: she said, “don’t celebrate, Indira Gandhi is a good woman, she will be back”.

In less than three years, Indira Gandhi was indeed back as Prime Minister, and remained so till her violent end in a hail of assassins’ bullets on October 31, 1984. I remember that day, too, clearly: I was then a journalist at TheIndian Express in Bombay. After an early morning assignment, I entered the office to see everyone huddled around the teleprinter machines. Indira Gandhi, someone said, had been hit by 16 bullets. Another voice retorted: “It will take a lot more than that to kill her.”

She was India’s Iron Lady, indomitable, tough, resilient, who had risen from the ashes of a humiliating defeat in 1977 to return with a full majority in 1980. Physically, she was slight, but no one could believe that she could die.

****

Today, on the eve of Indira Gandhi’s 100th birth anniversary, as one looks back at how the Indian Republic has fared since her death, at the succession of prime ministers who followed her and how they dealt with the challenges they faced, she stands out. The intelligentsia might continue to revile her for the Emergency, but the masses across the country still hold her in high regard. Even in 1977, the election she lost after the Emergency was lifted, the Congress won 154 seats, more than three times its tally in 2014 after 10 years of Congress-led UPA rule. If the party was wiped out in the Hindi heartland, the Emergency had no impact in the North-East, Jammu and Kashmir, the entire south, half of Maharashtra and parts of Odisha and Gujarat, even though the last was the site of the students-led anti-corruption Navnirman agitation that felled the ruling State government.

Clearly, she was — after Mahatma Gandhi — the greatest mass leader the country has seen, criticised by the middle class for her autocratic ways but connecting with the ordinary man and woman on the street (like our cook) or in far-flung villages in a way that no one has since, including the current Prime Minister. When she died there were reports from villages in the then united Andhra Pradesh of people fasting for a day in mourning — this was something that had been witnessed in many parts of the country after the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi.

And almost two decades after her death, a senior Congress leader told me that while campaigning in the tribal areas of Chhattisgarh, he would introduce himself as belonging to Indira Gandhi’s party, in order to make a connect. Barring the Emergency period, Indira Gandhi was loved, not feared by the people at large.

How did she achieve this? She was not the most gifted of public speakers, but she spoke in a language that was simple, direct and easily understood. She was born in an aristocratic family, and grew up in the shadow of the stalwarts of the freedom struggle, but she had the common touch, connecting easily with the poor and disadvantaged, whom she met on her frequent travels across the country.

Visit the museum built in her memory at Delhi’s 1, Safdarjung Road, where she lived as Prime Minister, and see the throngs of ordinary people who come and gaze at her photographs and the blood-stained sari she died in — a grisly reminder of her violent end. Similarly at Anand Bhawan, in Allahabad, where she grew up, you can spot a steady stream of people, many among them villagers, viewing with interest the pictorial exhibition of her life and times.

***

Indira Gandhi was in office for 16 years — from 1966 to 1977, and again from 1980 until her assassination in 1984. The Emergency lasted all of 19 months, but the subversion of public institutions, suspension of civil rights and the use of state power against the most vulnerable sections of society cast such a shadow over her legacy that it took close to two decades after her death for a closer look at that period, first by PN Dhar, who headed the PM’s secretariat through the 1970s when Indira Gandhi was in power, and then by historian Bipin Chandra. In their accounts, while Indira Gandhi of course comes in for blame, Jayaprakash Narayan, who had mounted a campaign against her rule and gone so far as to asking the police and army to revolt against her, is seen as equally culpable in the imposition of the Emergency.

Granville Austin, who wrote a seminal book on the working of the Indian Constitution, stated that while the Emergency was imposed for the purpose of “saving one individual’s office”, the move was “not utterly without justification. Opposition parties’ frustration had boiled over. The two sides’ behaviour had combined to stretch democracy until it snapped”, adding in another place, “Ugly as the Emergency was, New Delhi in 1976 was not Berlin under Adolf Hitler”.

There is also evidence to suggest that Indira Gandhi regretted what she had done: Siddhartha Shankar Ray, one of the prime movers of the Emergency, told me in an interview before his death that she was very concerned about the negative international response. And in 1976, she urged a Youth Congress delegation heading to Vienna to tell members of the Socialist International that she was forced to impose the Emergency but that it was not intended to be permanent, just “a bitter pill for a disease”, a delegation member told me many years later.

But Indira Gandhi’s political opponents — especially those currently in power, for whom the battle against the Emergency was their equivalent of the freedom struggle in which they had not participated — would like her legacy to be defined by those grim 19 months. True, the Emergency has had a long-lasting impact on the Indian state, with several civil servants of that period telling me that it made many administrators believe that there was nothing sacrosanct about the rule of law. On the other hand, those who succeeded Indira Gandhi also did little to change that mindset.

But with the passage of time, and the many violations of civil rights since, including state-sponsored pogroms, attacks on the media, et al, her admirers seek to point to a list of remarkable achievements on virtually every front, whether it was domestic policy, foreign affairs, or her concern for the environment and wildlife. Her high point was, undoubtedly, the creation of Bangladesh.

***

In an essay written after the general elections in 2004, her biographer Inder Malhotra stated: “She had come to power in the wake of two successions, two wars (1962 and 1965) and two years of devastating drought. Heart-rending food shortage had made the country dependent on American shipments of PL 480 wheat. The then United States President, Lyndon Johnson, had put these on a humiliatingly tight leash because of New Delhi’s criticism of the Vietnam War. Indira Gandhi declared that the country must feed itself and she made good this promise, thanks to the Green Revolution. Implicit in the question “After Nehru, What” were widespread doubts whether India would remain in one piece or stable. She answered the question decisively. Other major accomplishments of hers have to be summarised tersely. In her time India became the third largest reservoir of highly- skilled scientific and technical manpower, the fifth military power, the sixth member of the nuclear club, the seventh to join the race for space and the 10th industrial power.”

Twelve days after she was sworn in for the third time, after a spectacular victory in the 1971 general election, the Bangladesh crisis exploded. On March 26, the then Pakistan President Yahya Khan, following the general elections in his country in which Mujibur Rahman’s Awami League won a majority, outlawed the League and banned all political parties in Pakistan, declaring Rahman and his party men traitors. He ordered his Armed Forces to restore the authority of the government in East Pakistan. A reign of terror and repression was unleashed and, by March 28, East Pakistanis (Bangladeshis) started pouring into India to escape the mass killing, rape and destruction there. “New Delhi,” Malhotra wrote, “did not have even a contingency plan to deal with the situation but that is a different story. What matters is that she handled the Bangladesh problem, both diplomatically and militarily, so brilliantly that people still consider her a symbol of Shakti.” Atal Behari Vajpayee, then in the Jan Sangh, was moved to describe her as “Durga”: she had clearly come a long way since another major Opposition leader of the time, Ram Manohar Lohia had described her as “ goongi gudia ” (dumb doll).

Malhotra lists two attributes that make her stand out among those who have ruled India since the 1960s. “One was her absolute refusal to compromise with India’s sovereignty, unity, supreme interests, honour and autonomy; the other, her matchless empathy with the poor. Whatever one might say about her radical rhetoric, the poor always believed that she cared. They still do, to her party’s great advantage, as was underscored by the fate of the BJP’s simulated hype over “India Shining” [in the 2004 Lok Sabha poll].”

Indeed, her decision to nationalise banks (which paved the way for ordinary people to open bank accounts), end the system of privy purses for the feudal elite, initiating radical land reforms, and her clarion call of ‘Garibi Hatao’, a slogan that resonates even 46 years later, all contributed to establishing her pro-poor persona and made her the darling of the masses. She stood up to the Americans, but simultaneously signed the Indo-Soviet Treaty as a counterweight; she signed the Simla Accord with Pakistan and, though she is criticised for the annexation of Sikkim, both PN Dhar and K Shankar Bajpai (the then political officer in Sikkim) explain the larger security rationale for it.

Indira Gandhi was not just a practitioner of yoga (like her father), but she also wore a rudraksha mala, and was a deeply religious Hindu (unlike her father) given to visiting temples: yet, her public image was that of a staunch secularist. She was truly a pan-Indian leader, drawing her strength from all communities. She was never seen as attempting to divide people along religious lines to gain power — she was too much Nehru’s daughter to do that. Her power also came from the elections she won not just at the hustings — in 1967, 1971 and 1980, but also within her party.

After she defeated Morarji Desai in a party election to become Prime Minister in 1966, the Congress remained a divided house. As differences grew between the Old Guard and the more radical elements around her, the then President, Zakir Husain, died suddenly in May 1969. Indira Gandhi’s opponents in the party seized the opportunity and proposed Sanjiva Reddy — a known foe — for the presidency. She retaliated by backing VV Giri and mobilised support to ensure his victory. A few months later, she was expelled from the party for “grave acts of indiscipline”. Unfazed, she dismissed it as an illegal act by those opposed to her socialist programmes, and the very next morning the Congress Party in Parliament gave her a vote of confidence. Again, after her electoral defeat in 1977, she broke away to form Congress-I (for Indira) in early 1978.

While she consolidated her hold on the party each time she was challenged, only to emerge stronger as the “real” Congress, she however failed to rebuild the party’s organisational structure — an omission for which it is paying even today.

Indira Gandhi was not just a messiah of the poor, as the Congress would like her to be remembered, nor is she only the villain of the Emergency, as the BJP and assorted socialists would have it. She was a complex figure who presided over the fate of the nation at a time of great change, both in India and across the world, which, as historian Srinath Raghavan puts it, “at once impinged on Gandhi’s politics, and were impacted by them”. She must, therefore, he says, be judged in that context.

Indeed, there are valuable lessons that today’s leaders can learn from her: one, a leader can be strong without being divisive, and, two, can protect national interests — fiercely, as she did — and still be at ease among the world’s most powerful leaders.

Smita Gupta is a political journalist based in Delhi

Related Topics
comment COMMENT NOW