:: Inder Malhotra

Gudiya to Durga

By Inder Malhotra

Oct 31 : NEXT only to her illustrious father, Jawaharlal Nehru, Indira Gandhi was the longest-lasting Prime Minister of India but with a crucial difference. He was at the helm for 17 long, formative and unbroken years after Independence during which he won three successive elections hands down. All through he was the nation’s cherished icon; only after the debacle in the border war with China in 1962 was his image smudged. Her 15 years in power, by contrast, were broken into not just two separate innings but also several different phases with sharp ups and downs, high drama, including a roller-coaster ride, and searing tragedy.

This inevitably made her controversial first and then the focus of constant contention until the country was overwhelmed by inflamed polarisation of both the polity and society for or against her. From the late 1960s to well beyond her assassination in 1984, she was either adored or abused. Significantly, reverence came from the masses and vehement reviling from the chattering classes. Her rationalisation of this was that her father’s position was a "saint strayed into politics" and since his position was absolutely secure, he never had to struggle. Unlike him, she had to claw every inch of the way to the room at the top. Only the last part of this statement is true.

Complex and controversial Indira’s personality surely was, but it was also compelling, which should explain her many splendid achievements — despite an equal number of failings and faults — and the lasting imprint she has left behind.

Since her life’s story is all too well known — more books have been written on her than on any other Indian with the sole exception of the Mahatma — let me skip the phase during which took place the historic transformation of goongi gudiya into invincible goddess Durga, resulting from her tremendous triumph in the 1971 general election, two years after the Congress split, and from India’s victory in the war for the liberation of Bangladesh.

Even today there is inadequate appreciation of her strategic virtuosity. She realised that international alignments were necessary to meet grim security challenges. After Henry Kissinger’s secret flight to China, she signed the Indo-Soviet treaty. More importantly, after the war, during which America sent nuclear-armed Enterprise into the Bay of Bengal, she authorised Raja Ramanna, a nuclear scientist and then the director of Bhabha Atomic Research Centre, to start working on an underground nuclear test that was conducted in 1974. This was undoubtedly her finest hour. But the trouble with reaching Olympian heights is that you have nowhere else to go but down. No one could have foreseen, however, that Indira’s decline would be so swift and stunning.

The afterglow of Bangladesh faded fast. In less than two years much else also happened to change the Indian scene so radically as to erode Indira’s magic. Rains failed at a time when the government’s granaries had been emptied to feed 10 million Bangladeshi refugees. Soaring prices led to mass discontent. The 1973 "oil shock" delivered a shattering blow to the already precarious Indian economy. Clearly, Indira had no control over this. But, unfortunately, she did nothing about equally disastrous developments that she could have and should have controlled. The most corrosive of these was massive corruption among her cohorts and henchmen aggravated by their links with hoarders, smugglers and profiteers.

Since, under political compulsions, Indira had moved from pragmatic to populist policies — and had incurred much opposition by such measures as bank nationalisation, abolition of privy purses, rigorous controls on industry and avoidable confrontation with judiciary — she made the cardinal mistake of nationalising the wholesale trade in wheat in conditions of egregious scarcity, and had to rescind it in something of a hurry.  

No wonder the dam of pent-up popular anger burst first in Gujarat as "Nav Nirman" and was soon overtaken by the formidable "JP Movement", so called because it was led by the highly respected Gandhian leader, Jayaprakash Narayan.

Over time, Indira could have perhaps coped with the tidal wave of protests. After all, she had successfully crushed a railway strike. But the Allahabad high court’s judgment, invalidating her election to Parliament and disqualifying her from holding public office for six years, made this impossible.

Since she decided not to step down even temporarily, her answer to the countrywide outcry for her immediate removal was the hammer-blow of the Emergency, her Himalayan Blunder and a 19-month nightmare for everyone else. In clamping it she had erred greviously, and greviously did she pay for it. In the 1977 general election she and her party were defeated humiliatingly. The hurriedly cobbled Janata that had overthrown the Empress believed that she had been "consigned to the dustbin of history". How wrong it was. In just three years she was back in power spectacularly.

Within six months of this triumph took place the tragedy of the death of her favourite son and duly designated successor, Sanjay. From this shock Indira never recovered fully. But she lost no time to draft her surviving, apolitical son, Rajiv, to take up his brother’s role. Dynasty, in her scheme of things, was above all, and this part of her multi-dimensional legacy has flourished in all parties during the last 25 years.

Although, after her second coming, Indira Gandhi was besieged by grim challenges from Assam to Punjab to Sri Lanka, Operation Blue Star — the storming by the Army of the holiest of the Sikh shrines because it had been converted into a citadel of secessionism and terrorism by a Frankenstein monster created by her own party — led to her assassination by her own security guards.

This is the logical end of the narrative. Let me, therefore, very briefly sum up Indira’s unique qualities that made her dominate the Indian scene for 20 years like a colossus, irrespective of whether she was in power or our of it. These also account for the nation’s continuing high respect and affection for her.

She is and will remain memorable because of her total devotion to India and its supreme interests, and her unflinching determination to defend its sovereignty and unity in all spheres at all costs. In this respect De Gaulle of France is the only other world leader that comes anywhere near her.