Indira

Title: Indira – The Life of Indira Nehru Gandhi

Author: Katherine Frank

Publisher: HarperCollins, 2001 (First)

ISBN: 9780002556460

Pages: 567

Indira Gandhi’s tenure as prime minister of India is remarkable for many firsts. It was the first time that a woman could achieve the country’s topmost political spot. It was then that the country had won a major war in more than a millennium of history. It was also the first time that a democratically elected politician imposed an autocratic regime on the people in the form of Emergency, which the people endured with surprisingly little demur. Katherine Frank was born and educated in the US, is the author of three acclaimed biographies and has taught at universities in West Africa and the Middle East as well as Britain. During six years of researching and writing this book, she spent extended periods in India. Frank presents a comprehensive, but slightly adulatory account of Indira Gandhi, first as the daughter of Jawaharlal Nehru and then as the undisputed leader of India for a decade.

Nehru’s family had the stature of a dynasty. Frank notes that the ancestors themselves were very particular in associating with the powers that be. Raj Kaul who migrated from Kashmir to Delhi was a member of the court of Mughal king Farrukhsiyar in 1716. His great grandson Lakshmi Narayan was a lawyer of the English East India Company. Another forefather Gangadhar was a police officer in Delhi when the mutiny broke out in 1857. However, the family’s takeoff to the stratosphere of power took place with Jawaharlal Nehru, based on the wealth generated by Motilal Nehru’s legal practice at Allahabad. The family’s knack of managing finance was lost with Jawaharlal while that of managing politics was missing two generations later in the time of Rajiv Gandhi. Nehru maintained good personal rapport with the British even while opposing them on principles. The Cripps Mission of 1942 which examined constitutional reforms of India was opposed by Congress, but its leader Sir Stafford Cripps was a friend of Nehru. The book mentions a nice anecdote when Cripps visited Nehru’s private residence at Anand Bhawan. He stayed for a few days there and was a strict vegetarian. Not many in Anand Bhawan were vegetarian and very little fruits and vegetables were available in the Allahabad market. Nehru ordered melons from Kabul and grapes from Quetta for the visitor!

Nehru is thought to be a great statesman who moulded India with his ideological principles. Ever since Congress was expelled from power for the first time in 1977, more and more memoirs had started coming out, detailing the political acumen of him. Needless to say, most of the tales are disappointing for patriotic Indians. Some shocking observations can be seen in the book, One Life is not Enough by K Natwar Singh, reviewed earlier in this blog. This book presents a few episodes where the great leader’s true colours can be discerned. And no, I don’t mean to point out anything personal. We may grant him some reprieve on that front on account of the dictum that no man is perfect. But his fumbling on the Kashmir policy has caused great loss of lives and material for the country. Nehru’s Kashmir policy was solely founded on the person of Sheikh Abdulla. When he started showing overbearing and partisan tendencies, Nehru was at a loss to what to do. In the end, he was arrested and put behind bars for nearly a decade that tarnished the country’s credibility in the eyes of the world. In another instance, Frank narrates Nehru’s impulsive reaction to an international incident. When he heard that Chou En Lai’s plane had crashed at Hong Kong, he immediately wanted to send a telegram to the British prime minister, suspecting the incident to be orchestrated by British Intelligence. This message was very rashly worded and it required all the persuasive powers of Indira to detain him from dispatching the message. How much equanimity can we expect from such a person who handled the foreign affairs portfolio till his death? When the pro-American Sri Lankan Prime Minister Sir John L Kotalawala moved a resolution in the 1955 Non-Aligned Summit at Bandung condemning the neo-imperialism of the Communist Bloc, Nehru was so incensed that he wanted to walk out. So much for non-alignment!

Readers are more interested in reading about the events after Indira came to power, but a very large portion of the book is devoted to cover life before her ascent as the prime minister. But it then scrutinizes her unsure progress to the peak of glory in 1971, when Bangladesh was carved out after vivisecting Pakistan. Her early years as prime minister were beset with political and economic problems. To score a point over her rivals in the party, she adopted a socialist façade – without any sincere ideological commitment. She nationalized commercial banks, insurance companies, installed a license-quota-permit raj to rein in private enterprise and forfeited the Privy Purse granted to former sovereigns at the time of accession of their states to India. This endeared her to the masses, but caused catastrophic damage to the economy. The author reiterates the ideological bankruptcy of Indira by comparing the earlier and latter parts of her term from 1966 to 1977. After her son Sanjay’s rise to prominence – who was a proponent of free market competition and autocratic ways in dealing with the public – she backtracked on leftist populism. After reaching the summit of popularity in 1971, the author wryly comments that she had nowhere to go but down.

And down she went! Indira’s rule marked India’s unfortunate decline to corruption and muscle power of the rich. Sanjay openly made or marred deals. The book presents some details of corruption at Sanjay’s Maruti factory, which was set up to manufacture small cars. P N Haksar, the principal private secretary of Indira, was a man of integrity but was jettisoned from the post when he opposed some of Sanjay’s intrigues. Not content with that, Sanjay’s cronies in the government raided the business enterprises run by two elderly relatives of Haksar and arrested them. People who argue that Indira was ignorant of the mischief created by Sanjay will be hard-pressed to find a response as to what happened to Haksar. Indira’s politics was more a show than dedication was clear in her response to a question on literacy in India posed by an American journalist in 1978. Her outburst was ‘I don’t know how important literacy is. What has it done for the West? Are people happier or more alive to problems? On the contrary, I think they have become more superficial” (p.433). It has been the bane of India to have politicians like Indira Gandhi who wanted the people to be kept in darkness and feared that they’d be swept out of power when the populace became enlightened.

Indira Gandhi opened an era of terror in the form of Emergency (1975-77) when individual rights were suspended, opposition leaders put in jail and all political activity stopped. She was thrown out of power, but was rehabilitated three years later when the people who ousted her fought bitterly among themselves. If Indira is still remembered with a touch of fondness, the reason for that is her martyrdom, supposedly while trying to safeguard the integrity of the nation. But Katherine Frank describes many events which reveal that Indira dug her own grave. She encouraged and provided support to Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale, a dreaded Sikh militant, in order to engineer a split in Akali Dal, a party that stood up to and threatened the political supremacy of Congress in Punjab. She provoked unrest in other parts of the country by dismissing the state governments at her will, for protecting the petty political interests of her own party. The basis of all these undemocratic and underhanded deals was her desire to cling on to power at any cost.

The book is written with a good amount of research on Indira. However, the author’s grasp of the political landscape of India and other political parties than Congress appears to be amateurish and derived unchanged from other works. A noted feature of the book is its propensity to be a fountainhead of gossip. The suggestion on the parentage of Feroze Gandhi is shocking, as also that on his personal life and rumours in Allahabad. Allusions to M O Mathai’s (Nehru’s private secretary) relations with Indira are simply outrageous. It is suggested that a chapter titled ‘She’ was removed from Mathai’s biography at the behest of Indira because it contained nasty personal references to her. The book contains a few monochrome plates, a commendable section of Notes and a good Index. A chronology would’ve helped it much better.

The book is highly recommended.

Rating: 3 Star