Indira Gandhi Read online

  Later she recalled her role as her father’s hostess:

  When I went to live with my father at Teen Murti House, the residence of the Prime Minister, it wasn’t really a choice. My father asked me to come and to set up the house for him. There was nobody else to do it. So I set up the house, but I resisted every inch of the way about becoming a hostess. I was simply terrified of the so-called social duties. Although I met a large number of people, I wasn’t good at ‘socializing’ and small talk and that sort of thing … .2

  She did not have the recognizable ingredients of public appeal or charisma. She was expected to play a greater role in national affairs, and her political involvement had grown to the gradual exclusion of her personal and private life, but front-rank leadership was not an idea easily connected with her. The imposing will and determination she later displayed in public life had as yet left their mark only on the family circle. At her father’s death, grieved and undecided about her immediate future, she made no move to enter the leadership fray. Nor did the party’s high command dwell on it as a possibility.

  In order to avoid a contest for leadership that would present a picture of discord at Nehru’s death, senior leaders headed by Kamaraj, Congress president, worked to bring about a unanimous choice. The principle of consensus, not new to Congress politics, was used this way and defined as such for the first time, and Lal Bahadur Shastri was chosen prime minister as the neutral and most generally acceptable candidate.

  Morarji Desai, cut out by this procedure, saw the situation differently. His standing in the party hierarchy was high and his ability proven during his chief ministership of Bombay state and his experience in Nehru’s cabinet as commerce and later finance minister. With a right based on his record to lead the country, he wanted an open contest that would set a healthy precedent for the post-Nehru Congress, enabling the party to throw up its own choice rather than one arranged behind the scenes by those who controlled votes and patronage. A man of definite views and stern character, he did not have the pliability the bosses considered an important qualification for the job. He accepted their verdict as a matter of party discipline, and Shastri became the leader. The consensus was welcomed in India and abroad as an impressive exercise in mature political functioning, along with the fact that the parliamentary system had been upheld during this critical transition period and thus strengthened. It had, however, acted as a brake on the ‘natural’ process of political selection.

  Mrs Gandhi, who had declared no personal stake in the succession, was a potent, if passive, presence on the scene. Even after the consensus, she remained, as daughter of the charismatic Nehru, a figure whom his party could not comfortably ignore in the emotional aftermath of his death. Shastri gave her the portfolio of information and broadcasting in his cabinet, but her relations with him were cool and distant, and she made no secret of her disdain for a man she considered a minor character whom chance had made a leader. Interviewed on November 11, 1965,3 she said India had ‘swerved from the right path’ after Nehru’s death, and that socialism and non-alignment were being forgotten. She became a determined contestant for the succession when Shastri died suddenly at Tashkent in the Soviet Union on January 12, 1966, though she had described herself as ‘wholly without political ambition’ and continued to see herself this way.

  When Mr. Shastri passed away, I really didn’t think of myself at all. When he had come to ask me to become a Minister, I had thought it was just a huge joke and I had told him that, firstly, I was not in the mood for jokes immediately after the death of my father, and secondly, that this was a ridiculous proposition… . I must say I was worried at the thought of Mr. Morarji Desai becoming Prime Minister, because his policies were so diametrically opposed to what we stood for and I feared that India would immediately change direction.4

  Nehru’s daughter would be an important asset in the coming election of 1967, but her eligibility was linked chiefly to her party’s insistence on uncontroversial leadership, in the void so soon again left by Shastri’s death. Shastri’s nineteen-month tenure had been dominated by two wars with Pakistan. There had scarcely been time to survey the post-Nehru scene and assess its priorities. And the party needed a period of reconstruction to rebuild its declining reputation. Indira Gandhi had what mattered greatly to the group of leaders who masterminded her rise—a reticence that made her apparently content to stay in the background of events. She had never been embroiled in controversy or ambition, and her subdued public manner ensured respect for the principle of collective leadership. As between her and Morarji Desai, the other contestant, she looked colourless and manageable, the safer choice for a party whose political fortunes had suffered a severe setback with the Chinese attack in 1962 and needed to pull together. On her part Mrs Gandhi knew she needed the party bosses, who did not favour her so much as oppose Desai. She tactfully refrained from canvassing for votes or formally declaring her candidacy and said she would abide by Congress President Kamaraj’s wishes. Her reticence was noted and approved. After hearing from Kamaraj, she made her own moves to enlist support.

  There was less visible hurry and strain in New Delhi than there had been on Nehru’s death. The Congress ruling clique felt that with its main crisis, the succession to Nehru, safely over, no other succession would present a critical problem. Desai’s insistence this time on a vote was conceded, but the ‘open contest’ proved, in effect, to be a trial of strength between him and the party bosses. There was little doubt that with the party machine behind Mrs Gandhi, with the general election just a year away, and most MPs anxious for tickets and support, they would follow their chief ministers’ orders to vote for her. The Congress Parliamentary Party elected its leader by a secret ballot on January 19, 1966. Mrs Gandhi, with the bosses and a coalition of chief ministers solidly behind her, won 355 votes to Desai’s 169 and became prime minister on January 24. There were other reasons for her election. Desai belonged to the old guard. Mrs Gandhi was young. Desai represented the Congress’s past, Mrs Gandhi its future. A man of ascetic habits and implacable opinions, Desai had a ‘grey eminence’ aura that could be forbidding. Mrs Gandhi would be modern and flexible. Through her, Congress radicals believed, the party would be regenerated.

  The selection of a parliamentary constituency for Mrs Gandhi could no longer be postponed. She declined her aunt’s offer to vacate Phulpur and refused an invitation from Shastri’s constituency, Jumnapar, also near Allahabad, to represent it. She said she had offers from all over the country and would decide later. On August 28, 1966 Mrs Pandit (my mother) wrote to me from Allahabad:

  I have filed my application for the Phulpur constituency after a talk with Indi† and her written consent … [she] is still hesitating. Two safe but inconspicuous seats are being prepared, but it is the general desire which I share that she should stand from Allahabad City and face any challenge that is offered.

  The Phulpur question remained open, though Mrs Pandit’s application had by now been approved and filed. She wrote to me from New Delhi on September 18:

  You must have seen from the papers that I offered Phulpur to the P.M. and she refused … I did this because I knew she has wanted it and because inspired rumours were being circulated that ‘the people’ want her there … . Before the meeting I spoke to Indi. She seemed pleased but said she would not permit me to make ‘this sacrifice.’ Or did I want something else? I said the offer was unconditional—there was no sacrifice… . When I announced my decision at the meeting, the very same people who had been turning around in circles carrying on a whispering campaign against me were a bit stunned and started saying I mustn’t make such a ‘sacrifice.’ … In her speech Indi said I should keep Phulpur but added that ‘these things’ were to be decided finally by Kamaraj. So we are held up until the end of October when the decision will be made.

  Mrs Gandhi was reluctant to stand from Allahabad or its environs. The Samyukta Socialist Party concentrated its full fire on this Congress stronghold, Nehru’s birthplace an
d political base. ‘Dumb doll’, Ram Manohar Lohia’s mildly derisive description of Mrs Gandhi, signified an irreverence that refused to concede special status to the Nehrus or to treat Allahabad as their fief. Lohia, who could rub shoulders in camaraderie with the crowd, also had an intellectual’s appeal for the rebellious young. His language was incisive and brilliant, and Mrs Gandhi, unsure and apt to seek refuge in her family’s sacrifices for the national movement, was no match for it. She chose eventually to stand from Raebareli, the constituency of her late husband, Feroze Gandhi, and Mrs Pandit kept the rural Phulpur seat. Congress credit was low, and each known and respected party member who could win an election was needed. Mrs Pandit’s political base was Uttar Pradesh, where she had twice been minister for health and local government (1937 and 1946) and twice been elected to the Lok Sabha after Independence (1952 and 1964).

  Following the country’s fourth general election in 1967, a little over a year after Mrs Gandhi became prime minister, the question of leadership became a live issue again. Mrs Gandhi’s year in power had jolted the high command. She had devalued the rupee in June 1966 on the advice of her inner circle or ‘kitchen cabinet’. Without the advance measures needed to cushion the economy against a drastic reduction of 57.5 per cent in the value of the rupee, prices had risen, with consequent hardship to the consumer. Angry criticism assailed devaluation from all sections of opinion in Parliament. To the men who had put her in power, this showed a reckless disregard for the homework hard economic decisions require. It had also been an abrupt departure from the concept of joint cabinet responsibility for decision-making and an indication that either she did not understand parliamentary method or had deliberately ignored it. Three days after devaluation, the party registered its disapproval of the action, though accepting it as a fait accompli. It marked a divide in Mrs Gandhi’s relations with Kamaraj. She now made it a point to distinguish between the party, as represented by its bosses, and the people, whom she identified with herself. Asked about her differences with Kamaraj in an interview with Kuldip Nayar before the 1967 election, she replied, ‘You see, here is a question of whom the party wants and whom the people want. My position among the people is uncontested.’ The publicly stated assumption of a privileged position distinct from, and even opposed to, her party made little impression on a party racked by election fever.

  The election was a debacle for the Congress which lost power in five states, and in three others had a slender majority that did not last. In the Lok Sabha it was reduced to a small majority of about twenty-two, while in the states a new pattern emerged. Kerala and West Bengal formed Marxist (CPI-M)‡ led governments, while the Jan Sangh became the dominant party in the Hindi belt in the north. Some powerful Congressmen, including Kamaraj, lost their seats. Since 1963 there had been hard thinking and at least one concrete programme (the Kamaraj Plan) to revitalize and strengthen the party at the grass roots. The election revealed how inadequate these had been. The last lustre of the national movement had worn off the Congress. In these circumstances the party clung closer to ‘consensus’ to avoid the friction of a new leadership contest, proposing Mrs Gandhi remain prime minister and take Morarji Desai into her cabinet as deputy prime minister. There had been no deputy (number two in the cabinet) since Sardar Patel’s death in 1950. Mrs Gandhi, in a stronger bargaining position since Kamaraj had been defeated at the polls, agreed to Desai’s inclusion as finance minister, with the label of deputy, but not to ‘any duality of authority’. Her authority, she said, would be ‘unfettered’. In Nehru’s time a rank had been assigned to each minister. She dispensed with this practice, instituting alphabetical order, so that cabinet positions provided no opening for conjecture about future power line-ups.

  *A reference to Nehru.

  †Indi, like Indu, is an abbreviation of Indira.

  ‡The Communist Party of India-Marxist, known as the CPI-M, broke away from the Communist Party of India (CPI) in July 1964 as a consequence of the worldwide split in the party. Contemptuous of the CPI, which is accused of being lured by power and office, the CPI-M rejected ‘the hoax of parliamentarianism’ and believed it must ‘accomplish the people’s democratic revolution through revolutionary people’s war by uniting the fighting masses … on the basis of a worker-peasant alliance’.

  TWO

  The Person

  Mrs Gandhi remained for the country at large a muted figure. A poor speaker and instinctively swift to prevent any encroachments on her position or prestige, she gave an impression of inhibition and wariness. Her first year in office, with the general consternation over devaluation, had made a weak start. Yet her remarks revealed her belief in herself as special to the Indian scene, in background, judgement, and above all in her Nehru birth. Her childhood or other personal references frequently figured in her speeches.

  Having lived in the midst of crisis from my earliest childhood, I am not overawed by present difficulties.1

  I have no doubt our difficulties will mount, almost 100% each day. But I go to difficulties head on. Since I was a child I have been able to proceed only in this way.2

  … I have not eaten any cereals for a year except when I eat out. I just cannot when I know others are not getting enough.3

  You are all experts in your fields and I am not… . but I am an expert at dealing with people. This is something, I think, I was either born with or I learnt from my very childhood … I developed what may be called a ‘feel’ of the people, and I find that this intuition helps me with the ordinary people… .4

  Politics rarely, if ever, produces modest, hesitant figures doubtful of their own capacities, and it is not surprising that Mrs Gandhi had a high opinion of herself. It was notable only because she sought at every opportunity to convey it to her audiences, and it contrasted with the lighter, more confident tread of speech and manner her father had had. The Indian public was not familiar with her as it had been with her father when he became prime minister. Nehru’s life, his intellectual development and even his private anguish were part and parcel of the events and literature of the national movement. Introspection and outburst were part of his public speaking. His ideas were on record in his writings. And those who could not read knew him, through personal encounter and public presence on the scene over many years, more intimately than most national figures are known among their people. He was in all his strength and weakness a thoroughly familiar quantity. Mrs Gandhi was not. The brooding self-portrait she now revealed by stages seemed curiously at odds with what was generally known about the atmosphere of her home and the spirit inspiring it.

  The extended family headed by Motilal Nehru included the children of his elder brothers and sisters, some of whom he had helped to educate and set on their feet in careers. Motilal was inordinately proud of his clan and made much of it. To him it was the most intelligent, attractive brood imaginable, and it, in turn, both admired him and revolved around him. A natural leader of men, his personal magnetism and the prestige he enjoyed in politics and the legal profession made his home the meeting place of some of the most brilliant, vital and dedicated society of his time. His resounding laughter and flaring temper were both legendary, as was his generosity. His zest for life carried the family with elan through a revolutionary change in lifestyle, when he and his son joined Mahatma Gandhi. Incontestably a man of ‘family’, in the great tradition of shelter and nurture, with the personality and instincts of a patriarch, Motilal lavished extravagant affection and indulgence on the elder of his two daughters, his favourite Nanni or Nan, as she was known. But his most inviolable love was reserved for his only son. Jawaharlal, with his wife and daughter, were thus the focus of an entire clan’s attention and concern in a way that princes and heirs apparent are.

  Father and son entered with passion and humour into the freedom crusade. Jawaharlal’s writings reflect the magic of the time, binding the household together in an incomparable adventure over and above the hardships involved. To some extent every member of Anand Bhawan, even visi
tors to it, were touched by the aspiration, the glow and romance of the national movement. In Mrs Gandhi’s recollections a more sombre picture emerges. Her games, she told interviewers, had consisted of making fiery political speeches to her dolls and servants and triumphant encounters with the police. Whatever speeches she had made recently, she once said, she had been making since she was ‘twelve years old’.5 Home and childhood were associated for her with dark events and crisis: ‘So from September 1929 a part of the house was turned into a hospital. In the beginning doctors came only at dead of night and the women of the house, including myself, aged twelve, were the nurses.’6 She told the Rajya Sabha, ‘As a small schoolgirl, at a time when Gandhiji undertook his historic fast in the Yeravda prison, I went to a Harijan colony to work there. This was one of my first activities in social work.’7 On the fiftieth anniversary of Jallianwala Bagh, she said in a broadcast, ‘I was hardly more than a baby, but the impact of this tragedy on my elders could not but leave its mark on me.’8

  A more natural and charming glimpse of her emerges in this extract from her father’s letter to his sister, Mrs Pandit, written on November 23, 1926, from Montana, Switzerland, where his wife, Kamala Nehru, was being treated for tuberculosis. Indira was then nine years old:

  Indu came here for her birthday and spent three days with us.† Her English is becoming infected with her French and she talks of going jusqu’ a the post office and it being presque ten o’clock! As for Hindustani, she tries to avoid talking in it. I insisted on talking to her in Hindi and I always write to her in Hindi.