Indira Gandhi inspired more engrossing fiction than arguably any other prime minister, including her father. The “protean Mother India” of Rushdie’s imagination and the dictatorial prime ministerial figure in Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance existed in an opaque swirl of infinite, unaccounted power exercised over the faceless millions. But there are other interesting narrators of this interregnum who, while perhaps lacking the felicity of literary expression of Booker awardees, have had by virtue of their professional duties first-hand acquaintance with how the system worked under the country’s first and only woman prime minister. We are referring of course to spooks, both at home and abroad, whose memoirs continue to provide intriguing glimpses of the Indira years — the latest on the shelf being former RAW chief K. Sankaran Nair’s Inside IB and RAW, which this newspaper has just excerpted. From Nair’s rather raw account, it appears that suspicion was the hallmark of inter-personal relations in those shadowy days. Indira Gandhi, fresh from her encounters with the Syndicate to whom she had lost half the party, wore her paranoia not lightly and even senior cabinet colleagues felt its embrace. Nair tells us how she stealthily divested her home minister of the department of personnel so that she, as prime minister, could control the bureaucracy. This was followed by a swoop on the CBI so that she could have the state’s putative apparatus under her control. These moves were early intimations of the prime minister’s partiality for authoritarian power. The fear Indira Gandhi had of subterranean opposition grew with time, until it needed a national Emergency to keep in check the ubiquitous “hidden hand” she so feared. The irony was that spooks, and not just home-grown ones, had a fairly free run of the place. The late Vasily Mitrokhin, a former KGB agent, had a great deal to say about how his organisation tried to “Sovietise” New Delhi with means ranging from honey traps to cleverly planted CIA conspiracies, and succeeded for the most part.These tales of intrigue may today be only of academic interest, but they serve an important function. They are reminders that it needs absolute transparency to check absolute power.
