Autumn of the Matriarch

Title: Autumn of the Matriarch – Indira Gandhi’s Final Term in Office
Author: Diego Maiorano
Publisher: HarperCollins India, 2015 (First)
ISBN: 9789351774709
Pages: 261

Just as Margaret Thatcher is called the ‘Iron Lady of UK’, Indira Gandhi more than deserve the epithet ‘the Iron Lady of India’. In fact, the five major policy changes she had initiated – termination of privy purses, bank nationalization, Bangladesh war, the Emergency and Operation Blue Star – ended up with far more consequences for India than what Thatcher had made in her tenure for her nation. Most books and articles on Indira Gandhi concentrate on the Emergency and how she stifled free speech and put democracy on ventilator for eighteen gruelling months. This book concentrates on the final five years in her office which she won by sweeping the polls in 1980 which, in a sense, was an indication that the populace had forgiven her for the excesses of the Emergency. The research for the book is part of a PhD scholarship of the University of Torino, Italy, granted to the author. Diego Maiorano is a research fellow at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies, University of London. He has written several articles on Indian politics and society. He was associated with very prestigious academic institutions where his main topic of interest was contemporary Indian history and politics.

It feels like Maiorano have no exposure to India other than academic or personal interactions with the prominent personalities who had a role to play during the period under discussion. This brings in a refreshingly neutral feel to the narrative while exhibiting a few glimpses here and there of the ‘white man’s disdain’ of India and its society. A primer on Indian politics after 1947 is condensed into a brief section which covers Indira Gandhi’s ascent to power. This was different from that of her father and first prime minister of India, Jawaharlal Nehru. A combination of genuine popularity with the party’s remarkable ability to extract votes in exchange of patronage distribution ensured the Congress’ dominance over India’s political system in the first two decades after independence. However, after Indira became prime minister, corruption was institutionalized in the early-1970s. Industrialists factored in the cost of ‘donations’ to Congress party as any other cost involved in an investment. Indira was riddled with a sense of insecurity right from her childhood, which made her look at her rivals – whether in politics or party – with unease and hostility. She destroyed her own powerful party leaders who could eventually turn into enemies. State chief ministers were handpicked and nominated by her. With the suspension of internal party elections in 1972, she controlled the key positions in the party apparatus. Loyalty to the Gandhi family was an essential pre-requisite to guarantee a plum position in the party as well as the state.

The early-1970s was a restive period both in terms and national and global politics. The oil shock had set in motion a huge inflation. In Nehru era, higher education had received a disproportionate amount of resources as compared to primary and secondary education. This led to high enrolment of students in colleges. Employment for these became a problem and large scale student protests erupted everywhere. The quality of Indian democracy had steadily deteriorated since Indira came to power and the Emergency was only just another nail in the process. Indira destroyed her own party as an instrument for information gathering at the local level and was not aware of the resentment brewing in the countryside in 1977. She lost the election and was even jailed for misuse of power. However, the internal dissensions in the Janata party was unmanageable. Everyone wished to have a slice of power and had no compunction to backstab anyone who obstructed their way. Within two years, the Janata experiment failed and the party exploded into several fragments. Hence in the 1980 election, Indira and her party was the only alternative to chaos. She offered stability in the face of the disastrous economic and social situation brought on by the mismanagement of her adversaries. The electors bought her argument and she swept the polls. Her modus operandi remained the same as before. Most of her colleagues in the Cabinet were long on loyalty and short on original thinking and administrative ability.

Then comes the first half of the 1980s which is the area of focus of this book. The pyramidal system of corruption that had come into being in the early-1970s scaled newer heights. Many chief ministers were removed because their incompetence and corruption had become too much even by the prevailing permissive standards. The party high command continuously intervened in provincial affairs and direct involvement of central ministers in the administration of a state became quite common. They were haughty towards local leaders as exemplified in Andhra where Rajiv Gandhi’s chiding of state chief minister T. Anjaiah provoked N T Rama Rao to float a regional party to restore ‘Telugu pride’. Law and order situation severely deteriorated in the early-1980s. Punjab and Assam erupted into violence. The irony was that the rebel sponsored by Congress as a counterweight to Akali Dal in Punjab, Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale, turned a Frankenstein that ultimately led to the assassination of Indira herself. High-handed tactics employed in removing Farooq Abdullah in Kashmir might have had a role in fomenting militancy. The personalist conception of the Congress party became clear when following Sanjay Gandhi’s death, his brother Rajiv was inducted into politics. From that moment on, dynastic succession became the universally accepted rule, not only in Congress, but in most other parties too. A whiff of fresh air was also felt on the economic side. Indira took a radical departure from the past as she gave up efforts to bring about social changes through land reforms, progressive direct taxation, measures to restrict conspicuous consumption and control over monopoly. Seeds of liberalization were thus sown in this term.

Maiorano presents a closer picture of the socio-economic transformation Indira Gandhi was attempting to bring about. She tried desperately to woo the middle class. The party proclaimed her as a strong leader the country invariably needed. It also tried to substantiate the modernisation dream of the middle class and to stimulate its sense of national pride. Then she promoted the interests of the upper castes (p.121). The book alleges that the RSS actively supported Indira in her final years. Its workers campaigned for Congress and refused to support BJP (p.134). The author claims that her political message on the country’s unity was in many ways identical to that of the Hindu right-wing. The support of big businesses and kickbacks on foreign contracts ensured a huge availability of funds for the prime minister’s party (p.136). The author observes that the Punjab problem was completely avoidable and easily manageable if Indira had negotiated with those parties who did not share her own political objectives. To break Akali unity, Zail Singh and Sanjay Gandhi financed and promoted a hard-line preacher Bhindranwale who in fact campaigned for Congress in three constituencies in the 1980 elections. He was arrested for the murder of Lala Jagat Narayan but ignominiously released soon after, because the Delhi Gurdwara management committee threatened to withdraw support of the Congress in Delhi.

The book focusses on the somewhat irrevocable damage Indira Gandhi had inflicted on democratic institutions of India. The judiciary strenuously fought for its independence and eventually resisted to a large extent the attacks of the executive. Indira superseded the seniority of three judges and appointed A N Ray as the Chief Justice of India in 1973. All the three judges promptly resigned in protest. However, the parliament and the president surrendered without fighting. The author remarks humorously that the bureaucracy split into three groups – ‘the wives’ (those officers who are attached to only one party), ‘the nuns’ (officers who remain unattached to any party) and ‘the prostitutes’ (who attach themselves to whichever party is in power and switch when there is a change of government), the share of the last being quite high (p.167). Indira left behind three destructive legacies – she institutionalized corruption as a key feature of India’s polity; entry of criminals into politics which was started and legitimized by Sanjay Gandhi (p.211); and state institutions became a vehicle for pursuing personal and partisan ends coupled with the institutionalization of dynastic politics. The book concludes that Indira left behind a divided nation, though not in the physical sense of disintegration. India’s social fabric was badly cracked in the mid-1980s.

The author’s unfamiliarity to India is almost tangible in the narrative as he relies solely on newspaper reports and personal interviews. This is accentuated by lack of comparison to modern Indian politics which he seems not to have followed in detail. At some points, the coverage is totally dependent on interviews with some of the prominent figures held a quarter century after the incident. It feels like the opinions they expressed are taken at face value. Indira’s attempts to subjugate India’s institutions for personal domination is a self-professed recurring theme in the book. Maiorano focusses only on politics and leaves out the economic aspects of her rule. This is a great drawback as her U-turn from the socialist path is not sufficiently elaborated. It is true that the author has provided some coverage on this topic and remarks that the government’s focus shifted from the rural poor to the urban middle class in the 1980s. Indira’s encounter with the judiciary is also only glimpsed at. This may be because the most dramatic period of the tussle happened before the Emergency. The lack of coverage on the personal aspects of the prime minister such as her itinerary in the final weeks and the repercussions in the country after Operation Blue Star are glaring. Written from a typical European perspective, the author trivializes the aftereffects of illegal immigration from Bangladesh into India’s northeast, specifically Assam. For the Assamese middle class, he says, what was at stake was control over the state institutions which in turn were the key to the allocation of most middle class jobs (p.114). The grave Assamese concerns over the takeover of their state by illegal Bangladeshi Muslims goes above the author’s head probably because he was not aware of the deeply religious nature of India’s partition and how the district of Sylhet was taken away from Assam to merge with Pakistan because the Muslims had by then become a numerical majority in the district as a result of unchecked immigration.

The book is recommended.

Rating: 3 Star