The Iron Lady and the novelist

And, yet, such was the prestige of Prime Minister Nehru that any gesture by him could not be opposed. Lal Bahadur Shastri, whom Jawaharlal Nehru had nominated as his successor, made Indira Gandhi the minister of Information and Broadcasting in his Cabinet.

She soon appointed an inquiry committee under G.P. Parthasarthi to review the working of AIR and television and I was nominated as one of its seven members.

During the functioning of the Parthasarthi Committee, I was seeing Indira Gandhi almost every week. On one occasion she told me, over a hurried cup of tea, that we must bring young people into every department of government.

Once she became the Prime Minister, she seemed to take this proposal even more seriously. Everyone knew, of course, that she had all along been encouraging her younger son, Sanjay Gandhi and some other young men in his age-group, like Kamal Nath, to take an active part in various “nation building” activities.

For instance, Sanjay Gandhi had conceived the idea that if we could not build new, planned cities like Chandigarh and New Delhi, we must clean up existing towns, ensure sanitation and health, pull down ramshackled structures and build new houses or repair those which could be renovated.

Soon Sanjay Gandhi began to pull down what he perceived as decrepit buildings in Delhi. Inevitably there was much hue and cry about this operation clean up, because Sanjay Gandhi did not accommodate the people thus displaced in other shelters when he bulldozed their homes.

Prime Minister Indira Gandhi did not criticise either Sanjay Gandhi or Jagmohan, the then lieutenant governor of Delhi on these demolitions.

I was not allergic to Sanjay Gandhi’s pioneering initiatives, but felt that he was sometimes taking undue advantages of his favoured position. For instance, he appeared with the President of India, Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed, on a big battleship of the Indian Navy in Bombay’s harbour. When the President took the salute, Sanjay stood by him. At that juncture, I was constrained to write a protest letter to the newspapers at this effrontery.

After that incident, I did not call on the Prime Minister or go to her house as I had been used to doing during my previous visits to Delhi.

Her initiatives to arrest Bhindranwale by sending the Indian army into the Golden Temple was, I believe, a serious error of judgment, that brought about the alienation of the Sikh community from the Central government.

At that juncture, I had written to her advising her that the army should not be sent into the Golden Temple. But under the advice of the members of her Kitchen Cabinet, she had done what even the then President of India, Gaini Zail Singh had severe reservations about.

For some time after the Golden Temple affair, I did not go to see her. A few months later, however, she sent a message to me through T.N. Kaul, asking me to come and see her. In an indirect manner, while Sanjay Gandhi was in the room having tea, she remarked that gracious uncles might forgive and forget the deeds of the impetuous young. I felt that it was her way of saying that she was sorry about Sanjay’s activities.

After a while, Sanjay came to her and reminded her that they were to go to the funeral of Jayaprakash Narayan. Apparently Sanjay had at long last put aside his narcissistic ways and had decided to pay homage to an elder statesman.

I felt that after all the political quarrels and her alienation from friends, she had come to realise that she had allowed her affection for her son interfere in important matters of State.

Excerpted from the noted author’s account of the Indira era