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| From a 'dumb doll' to a towering democrat |
| Ak Bhattacharya / New Delhi Nov 27, 2009, 00:44 IST |
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Indira Gandhi, like all charismatic leaders, had many faces. To begin with, she was the gungi gudiya (dumb doll) for all those veteran Congress leaders who decided to project her as an alternative candidate to checkmate Morarji Desai’s claim to succeed Lal Bahadur Shastri as India’s next prime minister in 1966. It is, of course, a different matter that Indira Gandhi proved those wily but ageing politicians hopelessly wrong and soon took charge of the government and later the Congress party, well, quite unlike a gungi gudiya.
Pranay Gupte’s biography of Indira Gandhi attempts to capture several such aspects of her multi-faceted personality, though not always answering all the questions her moves and actions raised during her two stints as India’s prime minister. Gupte is a competent story-teller, but his narrative fails to go beyond the immediate incidents and stops short of offering the possible explanations of why certain developments took place the way they did.
For instance, he beautifully narrates how US President Lyndon B. Johnson found Indira Gandhi to be a charming woman, for whom he could set aside all protocol and walk her down Pennsylvania Avenue to Blair House, where she was staying, taking unawares the White House security staff and throwing the traffic into confusion. Johnson also attended the Indian ambassador’s dinner, uninvited, just to be with India’s first, and indeed the world’s second, woman prime minister. The two leaders struck an instant rapport that promised stronger ties between the world’s two largest democracies.
Something went wrong after her return, though what actually soured the relationship is still a mystery. Gupte has no answer either. Was it her short stop-over at Moscow on her way back to India or the shrill adverse reaction she received at home over the US-India co-operation agreement in the fields of education and research? Indeed, there was no thawing of the relationship between Indira Gandhi and the US, until her assassination by her own bodyguards on October 31, 1984. Gupte’s silence on this is frustrating because that development brought about a decisive change in post-Independent India’s economic history.
At home, many of Indira Gandhi’s contemporaries saw her as a politician who cared little for institutions and their autonomy. Her policies and ideology were relevant only to the extent that they were a tool to help her retain power. That was largely responsible for her special brand of “socialism” — a mix of licensing controls on private enterprise, nationalisation of various industries (banking, insurance, oil and coal, to name a few) and enforcement of draconian economic laws like levying high income-tax rates and controlling big industries in the name of preventing concentration of wealth in the hands of a few.
Later in her second stint as prime minister, she did not hesitate to turn towards the other direction, since that helped her seek a loan from the International Monetary Fund and bail the economy out of its financial mess. Once again, Gupte is less than candid while bringing out the subtle changes in Indira Gandhi’s policy directions. Even a political biography ought to have provided relevant perspectives on such economic policy shifts as indeed these were not entirely divorced from political pulls and pressures of that era.
Gupte, however, correctly presents Indira Gandhi as a staunch nationalist at heart. She came on the centre stage of national governance at a time when the very idea of India as a country had begun to be questioned. Displaying firm control and political pragmatism, she not only kept the country together, but also dealt a crucial blow to India’s neighbour, Pakistan, by discreetly expediting the secession of East Pakistan and facilitating the birth of a new nation on India’s eastern borders, Bangladesh. Of course, she messed it up all by not using her decisive victory over Pakistan in that battle to finish the Kashmir issue. That, however, is a different story and Gupte is silent on that, too.
In the domestic arena, the same spirit of nationalism pervaded her style of governance, though many would disagree with the methods she used to achieve her goals. Gupte traces the problem of terrorism in Punjab, of which she was a tragic victim, to one of her first decisions after taking over as prime minister in 1966. She presided over the trifurcation of Punjab to meet a long-standing demand of the Punjabi-speaking Sikh population to have a state of their own. In the process, the Sikhs got Punjab where they were a majority, but two new states came into being — Himachal Pradesh and Haryana.
Gupte’s biography is delightful in the sections that describe Indira Gandhi’s days as Jawaharlal Nehru’s daughter —a lonely child looking for company and later getting drawn to Feroze Gandhi to whom she eventually gets married in spite of her family opposing it initially. Equally interesting is the narrative that describes how Rajiv and Sonia step in after Indira Gandhi’s death to preserve the pre-eminence of the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty in Indian politics. Indeed, Gupte’s prediction is that the legacy of Nehru and Indira Gandhi will endure for many more years to come.
MOTHER INDIA
A POLITICAL BIOGRAPHY OF INDIRA GANDHI
Pranay Gupte; Penguin Viking
598 +XII pages; Rs 599
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