The Dynasty

Title: The Dynasty – A Political Biography of the Premier Ruling Family of Modern India

Author: S S Gill

Publisher: HarperCollins, 1997 (First published 1996)

ISBN: 9788172232658

Pages: 569

The first four decades of the Indian Republic saw the unchallenged rule of the Nehru dynasty – 38 out of the 42 years, to be exact. Jawaharlal Nehru gave the mantle to his daughter Indira Gandhi, and she in turn, to her son Rajiv Gandhi. While it can’t be denied that the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty is well known for their role in Indian politics, the people look to them as they did to a royal house in India’s ancient past. A lot of writers have contributed to the biography of the family as well as individuals all these years. So, what is the need of another book on the same theme? Coming to think of this, this book is a little different from the pack of this genre. While others follow a biographical approach, this work employs political biography in which the personal lives of the protagonists are by and large ignored. It analyses various sectors of the society and economy and summarizes how the rule of the dynasty brought about a change – not always positive – and how they shaped modern India. The tome is all the more relevant even though it came out 22 years ago, as the widow and son of Rajiv Gandhi are in the race to the prime minister’s chair in the elections to be held in 2019. S S Gill was a career civil servant and retired as Secretary in the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting in 1985. Having been decorated with Padma Bhushan, he contributed to leading English dailies and magazines after retirement.

The book is noted for its stark and unprecedented expose of many of Nehru’s follies. This is in spite of the naive reluctance on the part of Indian society which equates any criticism of Nehru and Gandhi to an attack on the founding principles of the modern Indian nation. However, Gill establishes with a quote from ‘The Discovery of India’ that Nehru approached India as an alien critic, full of dislike for the present as well as for its past. His ascent to power was not to be fully attributed to the merit of his work in the party or government. Nehru became Congress president in 1929 only with Gandhiji’s prodding of the delegates at the behest of his father Motilal. This is evidenced by the fact that only three out of the eighteen provincial committees had supported his candidature. When he became the prime minister at independence, he wanted to consolidate his power in the party too, in order to elevate his daughter Indira. Vallabhhai Patel was his bete noire in the party, but enjoyed popular support. Purushottam Das Tandon defeated J B Kripalani to become Congress president with Patel’s backing. Tandon and Nehru had a series of clashes on one pretext or the other. When Patel suddenly died, Nehru was emboldened to take on Tandon with no holds barred. Nehru threatened to resign from the party if his own men were not inducted into crucial party councils. An exasperated Tandon resigned in protest and Nehru shamelessly stepped into his shoes as party president. After a brief time, a pliant politician was found in the person of U N Dhebar to become the president and to carry out Nehru’s diktats. In 1959, Dhebar obediently vacated the chair for Indira Gandhi to become Congress president. The perpetuation of the Nehru dynasty in the Congress party began from that point.

Though Gill points out that the unbroken single-party rule for three decades provided the necessary continuity for democracy to take root in Indian soil, he relates a number of issues in which Nehru bungled miserably. His government neglected primary education altogether and encouraged specialized and university education instead. This skewed priority symbolizes the elitist mindset Nehru possessed, which endeared him to the rich, urban and educated upper castes. Allocation for education in the first three five-year plans hovered at a measly seven per cent. No emphasis was placed on increasing literacy. Female literacy was abysmally low and even in the twenty-first century half of the world’s total illiterates reside in the country. Readers can clearly discern from the description of Nehru that he thought himself taller in stature than his party or even the country itself! His beefed up ego and the urge to project himself as a great statesman forced him to spend four hours each day personally dictating replies to letters which came in the hundreds. This silly practice left him with little time for general reading or fresh thinking and was the reason why he often complained of being stale. The moment the country missed Patel the most was after the reorganization of states on linguistic basis which was made a messy and long-drawn out exercise caused by Nehru’s frequent fumbling. In foreign relations too, he made a favourable first impression, but piteously failed to follow through. Having no contact with ground realities, Nehru flew across the world attending inconsequential international conferences and summit meetings while China was readying for attack in 1962. Having an incompetent V K Krishnamenon as defence minister didn’t help matters. China scored an easy victory in the war. The bitterest part of the episode was that none of the non-aligned countries came in India’s support when China attacked her.

The tenures of Indira and Rajiv are followed in a chronological way rather than the thematic pattern used for examining the Nehru period. As such, the narrative does not differ much from the myriad books written on the period. The information available with an insider like the author would’ve added weight to an in-depth analysis. However, he remarks sharply that idealism and greatness walked out of Indian politics with the exit of Nehru. The socialist pattern of Indian economy was of course designed by Nehru, but its enforcement was overseen by Indira, as is evident in the nationalization of banking, general insurance and the coal industry. She took over three foreign-owned petroleum companies, more than 100 sick private textile mills and various other loss-making companies all in the name of public sector commanding the heights of economy. A separate chapter is also included in the book which laments at the disastrous consequences of the excessive reliance on public sector. The dynasty’s progress card is, however, an unmitigated disaster. In 1950, India ranked as the tenth industrialized nation in the world, which slipped to the twenty-seventh position by 1980. India’s share of world trade dwindled from 2 per cent in 1950 to 0.42 per cent in 1980. Rajiv brought in liberalization measures and a partial opening up of the economy at first, but after he was embroiled in ugly corruption scandals like Bofors gun and HDW submarine deal, he lost the initiative. However, Gill brings out one important aspect. Indira’s intellectual outlook lacked the splendor of Nehru’s global concepts and his deep concern for peace, but she operated on a more down-to-earth plane and gave much greater economic content to India’s foreign policy. Rajiv was just an amateur by comparison.

The book’s scope is confined only to the years of power of the scions of the dynasty. No personal details other than deaths and assassinations are included so that it is essentially a political biography. Gill displays a marked leftist perspective in his observations which is unusual for a career bureaucrat. He compares China’s flawed ‘Great Leap Forward’ years to Nehru’s socialist planning and chastises him for not using the party organization of the Congress to impart change to the masses rather than utilizing bureaucracy for the job. Statements such as ‘only in a revolutionary struggle can a leader uphold his ideals untarnished’ (p.491) are jarring because of its empty rhetoric, but help to identify the author’s true political colours. But what is truly outrageous is his assertion that ‘India’s political stability rested on the prop of the elaborate network of relations with the USSR’ (p.526) as if democracy would’ve wilted in India had the USSR not extended its protective shield! This is outright falsehood. The Russian communists had no more affinity to Indian democracy than enlisting a useful partner in India for its cold war strategy. If at all, the USSR in fact supported Indira’s Emergency regime which is a permanent blot on Indian democracy’s balance sheet. Gill argues for the right of self-determination to the Kashmiris, but stops just short of arguing for secession. He riles against research labs set up by Nehru for its elitism and laments that scientists in these institutions were out of touch with the masses. It looks like the author was contemplating a drastic reform like China’s ‘Cultural Revolution’ in which party dissidents and intellectuals were forced to go to remote village communities to do manual labour. At the same time, he finds fault with opting for modern medicine rather than strengthening indigenous medical heritage.

The bureaucrat in Gill exposes his real self in the sharp criticism he reserves for Rajiv Gandhi’s reformed administrative paradigm which liberally borrowed from corporate management such concepts as evaluations and deadlines. These are degraded as worthless in the administration of a huge and diverse country as India. It is really tough to get a civil servant accountable to something! Gill’s most vehement denunciation is directed at General Krishnaswamy Sundarji for his supposed role in Operation Blue Star, though he tactfully does not focus on the General’s name in the military operation on Sikhism’s holiest shrine. Sundarji is accused of adventurism in getting the unsuspecting political leadership mired in a near war with Pakistan following the Brasstacks military exercise. His condemnation of the General is mean as he says without proof to uphold the argument: “Sundarji hankered after a war, not because he was convinced of its inevitability, but as it offered him the only path to personal glory and a niche in history” (p.478). Harsh words in deed, against a soldier who did his duty he was asked to perform by a civilian authority. He even claims that Sundarji had planned a military coup in India. Is this open hostility spawn out of the turf war between a bureaucrat and a military official? Or, is he venting his impotent anguish at the desecration of the holy Harmandir Sahib caused by the disastrous military operation? It is difficult to settle this issue with available material. Gill is also peeved at the undeclared taboo to criticize the armed even forces even on ‘vital matters of national interest’. A shocking claim of the army’s mass murder of innocent pilgrims during the temple operation is described in the book, which is not recounted in any other book I have seen on the subject. In an incident reminiscent of the Black Hole of Calcutta in 1756, the army locked sixty pilgrims in a small room and closed all ventilation passages. By the time the door was opened again the next morning, fifty had died of suffocation (p.327). The veracity of this claim is to be verified.

The book is highly recommended.

Rating: 3 Star