Opinion Imagining Indira

To give a cross-section of views by prominent journalists on India’s controversial iron lady:

Vir Sanghvi praises Indira for her strength and leadership. He says her critics attack her mainly for her dynastic ambitions and her Left-wing economic policies. The Emergency she imposed,he believes,has been forgotten. Sanghvi credits Indira for keeping India together and gives her high marks for strengthening the electoral process and for her foreign policy.

MJ Akbar believes that India welcomed the realism of Indira Gandhi after the travails of Nehru’s idealism. He applauds her for calling elections in 1977 rather than following the example of so many post-colonial dictatorships in Africa and Asia.

Karan Thapar opines that Indira Gandhi’s imprint is not just resilient,but perhaps indelible. “She is not only the best remembered of our politicians,but also,I suspect,the most misunderstood,” he says. He recalls his personal interaction with the Gandhi family and recounts an incident when as Prime Minister,Gandhi wanted to make sure that she was not later than the President in arriving for a screening of the film “The Pink Panther”. Thapar’s sister remarked in amazement,”She is virtually a dictator,yet she’s so particular about protocol and politeness.”

Shekhar Gupta,with a more balanced view,feels that Indira was a different Prime Minister in each of her three spells in office. “She changed and evolved,often for the better,sometimes not quite so. She was “insecure about losing power. The extreme leftward swing in her politics came not from any genuine commitment to socialism,but as an ideological camouflage for a series of dictatorial and subversive blunders which she was to regret later.”

Pratap Bhanu Mehta argues that during her tenure,Indira willfully assaulted every single institution: the judiciary,federalism,the police. She tolerated and created a style of politics that was lumpen at its core; an odd combination of corruption,violence and the use of arbitrary power. Her economic policies were largely a disaster. He adds,however,that she was the last leader who truly belonged to the whole of India. The reverence and nostalgia for her has survived,in part because her personal qualities seem to transcend her politics.

Tavleen Singh notes that Indira Gandhi was a charismatic politician with an amazing ability to convince ordinary Indians that she was their one and only benefactress. But “when I try to remember anything good she did for India from an economic or political point of view,I come up with a very short list. By 1984,when she had ruled India for over 16 years,she succeeded in turning India into a country in which everything was in short supply and everything second-rate.”

My own assessment of India’s iron lady comes closest to those of Tavleen and Mehta.

Many now tend to forgive Indira for her Emergency excesses,and claim that at heart she was a true democrat. After all,she called elections in 1977 when she need not have done so,her apologists argue.

Whether she did so because of her democratic convictions or because she was led to believe that she would win the next general elections and was sensitive to world opinion and her place in history,is something we can never know for sure. But in any case,the imposition of Emergency was not a one-off aberration. Throughout her political career,and not just in the Emergency years,Indira demonstrated her authoritarian and ruthless streak.

She had no compunctions about subverting the Constitution,co-opting the judiciary,emasculating her own party,victimising her opponents through the use of government machinery,unseating lawfully elected state governments and denigrating top Constitutional positions by cynically making appointments on a sole criteria — whether the person was pliable and loyal to her. She intimidated and bullied the press,ran Doordarshan as her personal propaganda machine,furthered her son’s business interests and made no bones about her dynastic intentions.

In recollecting Indira’s legacy,many commentators have confused her huge personal popularity and political shrewdness with performance. She may have been a strong leader– particularly when compared to the fractious,undisciplined leaders who succeeded her — but the country’s economy stagnated during her tenure.

The advantage of a decisive victory over Pakistan,was frittered away with no real gain. Even her enemies would not question Indira’s deep commitment to India,but like many of her blind followers she had unfortunately begun to believe then Congress president Dev Kant Baruah’s famously sycophantic words,”Indira is India and India is Indira”.