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Review Essay |
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INDIRA: The
Life of Indira Nehru Gandhi,
Indira Gandhi was a remarkable leader by the highest standards of leadership. Some may even call her a colossus who ‘bestrode’ from the time she first became prime minister, to the time she was assassinated by her Sikh bodyguards. Ever since January 24, 1966, when she was sworn in as the Prime Minister of India, Indira exemplified an amoral kind of leadership. Unlike her father, she was ruthless as a stateswoman and went for the jugular; she could plot her moves quietly and relentlessly. Sadly, what brought her down was hubris. Fate plotted against her on behalf of those who had had enough of her. As in all traditional Indian families, ‘Indu’s’ grandparents had hoped for a boy from their son, Jawaharlal Nehru. And when Indira’s arrival in the world was announced by a monosyllable ‘Hua’ (it happened) to Motilal, her grandfather, and J. Nehru, ‘an unmistakable wave of deflation and disappointment swept through the crowd on the veranda.’ Overshadowed quite early by her great aunt, inconspicuous in childhood, she was not an important family member. Her cousin, B.K. Nehru, who grew up in Allahabad and lived in Anand Bhawan during the 20s, once asked Indira when she became Prime Minister where she had been during those years; he had no recollection of her. ‘I was right there,’ she answered, ‘but no one ever noticed me.’ Indira’s own earliest memories were highly political, and like her father she was divided between "two fathers" - J. Nehru and Mohandas Gandhi. She was just three, when she joined the drive for Indian self-rule in the non-cooperation movement underway which involved boycotting British institutions and foreign goods. ‘Indira’s first memory is of a bonfire of English apparel and imported cloth on the veranda of Anand Bhawan. By the time Indira Gandhi recalled these childhood memories in 1980, she knew that her life had had more than its share of these burning milestones – and comebacks. She chose its controlling metaphor of fiery destruction and resurrections.’ And yet her start in life was most unpromising. She was a lonely, insecure and extremely diffident girl. Born into a rich family of Kashmiri Brahmins, she ought to have had everything going for her. The ‘Anand Bhavan’ at the time of her birth was a veritable palace, ‘an elaborate replica of an English country estate … bifurcated between East and West’, with a retinue of almost a hundred people in the house, including servants. Kamala Nehru, her mother was a frail, sickly woman who was sneered at by Indira’s superior and bullying ‘phupphis’ – the paternal aunts- while Jawaharlal Nehru, the father, was largely an absence, away either campaigning for the Indian National Congress, or incarcerated in jail. His contact with his daughter was through the letters he wrote to her, which most Indians have read as a textbook in school. These have been published and make a subject for another review. Mrs. Gandhi was acutely aware of her extremely insecure childhood, ‘because we did not know from day to day who would be alive, who would be in the house, what would happen next.’ She was made all the more insecure when her home was handed over to her aunt, Nan, who called Indira ‘ugly and stupid’, and who was a source of tension and heartache because of her hostility to Kamala Nehru. Nan was only a year younger than Kamala, adored Jawaharlal and resented her sister-in-law from the moment Kamala married him in 1916. The jealous atmosphere at Anand Bhawan was only slightly alleviated when Nan married Ranjit Pandit in 1921. The slights and insults continued, and things became even worse in later years when Jawaharlal was away from home in prison much of the time, and when Kamala’s health deteriorated and Indira herself became the target of her aunt’s hostility. Jawaharlal himself, for a long time at least, seems to have been too self-preoccupied to be aware of the volatile and unhappy relations among his mother, sisters and wife. Indira’s father was regarded as an intellectual giant, and despite the learned letters he wrote to her, and her educational stints in Tagore’s Shantineketan, Switzerland and later Oxford, Indira remained a proud, reserved and silent girl without any noticeable academic or mental achievement. It was her damning lack of promise that was most noticed by those who met and spoke with her. Who would have suspected that from her silence and diffidence she would emerge as a feared and powerful leader of the world’s largest democracy? While in her young days she was dismissed as of very little consequence, she herself was listening to and reading the many people she met in her early life with an uncanny insight. She would later use this ability to formidable effect. When Kamala, her mother, was in jail, she wrote to Jawaharlal that their daughter had promised to look after herself. ‘Indu’ did this all her life and learnt to fight her enemies with her own psychic grievances and paranoia. Her rise to power, first as the Congress President in Pandit Nehru’s own lifetime and the breakdown of her marriage; her election to the prime minister ship by supporters whom she destroyed one by one; her virtual destruction of what was the original Pakistan; her apotheosis as Durga Mata after the worsting of Pakistan on the field of battle, as sweet revenge for Hindu defeats of the past; the imposition of emergency and her downfall; her fight back to power and destruction of what once was a formidable opposition; and in her personal life, her obsessive preferential preoccupation with her younger son; and much more, provide an absorbing tale of high drama and ulterior motives, as well as of personal tragedies. Katherine Frank’s biography gives the reader an account of a public record, useful for those who would like to get acquainted with Indira Gandhi for the first time. But readers in the know will not be able to gauge the person who has described herself as genderless when it came to jockeying for and wielding power. Indira’s extensive travels, her uniqueness as a female Prime Minister, her elegance and charm, all made her one of the most famous and recognizable political figures in the world. Much of the Indian political scene was dependent upon a continued occupation of her position, and no one imagined a day when Indira Gandhi would not be in power. As Ms. Frank points out, ‘from this pinnacle of power, fame and popularity, Indira had nowhere to go but down.’ Despensing with the system of ranking cabinet members, she simply relied on simple alphabetical order in choosing her cabinet, her supporters and allies were given key posts, and ‘cabinet meetings became forums to rubber stamp – rather than formulate – policy.’ Corruption thrived, and under Indira it became endemic to the workings of government at every level. Because she had dismantled the party structure and crippled its hierarchy Indira could no longer draw upon the teams of dedicated regional and local party workers to canvass for her and deliver her votes. But even as Congress politicians and their families displayed the trappings of party corruption, Indira, however, still chose to live frugally. She owned few jewels and her most precious saris were still those made of the cotton thread spun by Nehru in prison. While Katherine Frank has spent a great deal of time analysing the influence of Gandhi and Nehru on Indira, she does not analyze why she cared so obsessively for her younger son alone, and why he had such a hold over her – to the extent of misusing party funds to even beating her. The philandering of her husband is mentioned only in passing. Indira’s love life, about which stories were rife in Delhi, is not discussed even if only to set the record straight. One of the most unsatisfactory aspects of the author’s narrative is the account of Feroze Gandhi’s courtship of Indira. It is common knowledge that he found her adrift and gave her a mooring. He also devoted himself to the ailing Kamala Nehru. Further, while an account of Nehru’s much publicised affair with Sarojini Naidu’s daughter, Padamsee, is included, his most famous liaison with the promiscuous Lady Mountbatten, and its impact on the daughter, is left to be inferred. There are many more dark corners and attics within Indira’s life on which no light is shed. The author also concedes that she had to rely on old notes that Indira had kept. She did not consult archives nor did she widen her research on the subject by consulting a larger group of people from within Indira’s charmed circle, or even with those found at its peripheries. This is a pity. Perhaps insights contributed by some of these impersonal sources may have explained how this sad, petite woman became one of tempered steel, and learned so well how to play power with such abandon. Deprived of parental love in early life by circumstances, suffering for the loss of her mother, disappointed in marriage, she discovered power and gave herself away to it. She served it with pure bhakti and when the time came for the supreme sacrifice, she was found to be ready. In an eerie photograph included in the book, she is seen standing on one of the mountain summits overlooking Kashmir, which had dominated her last term in office. ‘In late October 1984, (at the height of Sikh uprising and her brutal repression), she suddenly decided she wanted to visit Kashmir and see the chinar trees in their autumn blaze.’ The colour of the trees must have given her a foreboding of what was to come. Indira herself felt that ‘her time was over and death was near.’ The speech she gave in Orissa on the night of October 30, 1984 too was a hint at what was to come: ‘I am here today, I may not be here tomorrow … Nobody knows how many attempts have been made to shoot me … I do not care whether I live or die. I have lived a long life and I am proud that I spent the whole of my life in the service of my people.’ On a crisp, golden day on October 31, 1984, she was shot down by her Sikh bodyguards. Thirteen days later, her son Rajiv flew her ashes to Kashmir, and scattered them over the Himalayas. In her end was her beginning, she had come home at last. To truly
know who and what was the real Indira Gandhi, what sort of an impact she
had on the subcontinent, we will unfortunately have to wait for another
day and another author, especially after the official archives are made
open. Najam Rafique |