The daughter of India's founding statesman Jawaharlal Nehru, Indira Gandhi was prime minister of India for 15 years, beginning in 1966. Apart from one break of three years, she ruled continuously from then until she was assassinated by two of her bodyguards in 1984. Indira: The Life of Indira Nehru Gandhi is the story of this powerful woman's colorful life.
She was no relation to Mahatma Gandhi, India's other founding figure. Her family name derived from her husband, Feroze Gandhi, a Congress party activist and by religion a Parsee, whom she had married at the age of 25 in a love-match opposed by her family and almost all the Indian media. The husband nevertheless gave his name to what has become known as the "Gandhi dynasty."
The Nehru family were originally Kashmiris, though they no longer spoke Kashmiri. Indira loved Kashmir. It was, and is, the most spectacularly beautiful part of India, and its capital Srinagar was the traditional site for honeymoons of the wealthy. Today the town is the center of a sullen quasi-war zone, and its celebrated Dal Lake congealed with pollutants, fishless, and periodically giving off a foul methane gas.
Indira, the first of Nehru's children, was never an outstanding student, but was determined to the point of stubbornness. She was embarrassed by her small stature and her large nose. She never planned to go into politics, but instead was an indefatigable social worker, washing and bandaging the wounded for sixteen hours a day in Delhi refugee camps at the time of Partition in 1947, and flying missions to Assam with Red Cross supplies in the brief war with China in 1962.
Feroze was a glamorous but frequently unfaithful husband. There were even rumors that he had once had an affair with Indira's own mother. He died aged 47 in 1960 and was cremated in Hindu style as he had previously expressed a desire not to be left to the elements in the traditional Parsee "towers of silence" where his body would have been devoured by vultures.
Irdira almost died giving birth to their maverick second son, Sanjay, who was himself to die while trying to perform aerial acrobatics over Delhi in his two-seater private plane early one morning in 1980.
In 1963, with her father old, weak and humiliated -- though still, at 74, working 17 hours a day -- the world thought Indira Gandhi was only waiting to inherit the family mantle of power. In reality, she was trying to work out a way to leave India and political life altogether, go to live in a small house in London, and write a book.
Three years later, with Nehru and his successor Lal Bahadur Shastri both dead, Indira Gandhi was sworn in as India's third prime minister.
India in 1966 was in a bad shape. Droughts had led to famine conditions in several states, the economy was flagging, the US had recently supplied arms to Pakistan, and there was agitation in the Punjab for independence.
Indira's controversial response was to devalue the rupee, re-orientate India away from Washington and toward Moscow, concentrate power at the top, and postpone any decisive action on the Punjab problem.
This book leads you through the convolutions of Indian political life with a modesty that is eminently user-friendly. Complex subjects, such as the 1975 Emergency (authoritarian rule introduced by Indira Gandhi following a confrontation with the judiciary), the secession of what is now Bangladesh from Pakistan in 1971 following India's military intervention and the country's difficult relationship during this period with the US are all explained with great lucidity.
Indira Gandhi is shown as having been by turns decisive, calculating, emotional and strong. She charmed Lyndon Johnson, fascinated Margaret Thatcher, and was detested by Pakistan's Zulfikar Ali Bhutto (though she appealed vehemently, albeit unsuccessfully, for clemency for him when he was condemned to death).
Her own end was also brutal. A Sikh fundamentalist Jarnail Singh Bhindarwale, who had come to represent the calls for an independent Punjab in their most uncompromising form, had occupied the most holy of all Sikh religious sites, the Golden Temple in Amritsar. Following increasingly violent terrorist attacks by his followers, Indira Gandhi decided that Bhindarwale had to be evicted from the Golden Temple by force. This was achieved in June 1984, but at the cost of far more death and destruction than she had anticipated. It was in revenge for this attack that two Sikhs of her personal guard shot and killed her as she was leaving her house for work five months later.
One of the assailants was himself shot almost immediately afterward in a nearby police guardhouse. The other, after a protracted judicial process, was hanged four years later.
Indira was succeeded by her technocrat son Rajiv (who had failed his university examinations and never got a degree), and was himself killed in 1991 by a Tamil girl who, as she bent down to kiss his feet, detonated the explosives she was carrying under her dress.
One curious aspect of the earlier part of the Nehru family story is the love relationship that developed between Jawaharlal Nehru and Edwina, wife of the UK's Viscount Mountbatten, when he was Viceroy of India immediately prior to independence. Their correspondence is currently closed to researchers, though two British historians have seen it. Apparently the Mountbatten family would be happy to have the letters published, but Sonia Gandhi, Rajiv's widow, won't agree, and it's she who holds the originals of Nehru's half of the correspondence.
There is nothing psychoanalytic about this straightforward and readable biography. The story of Indira Gandhi's life is narrated, conscientiously and in detail, but without excessive authorial speculation or analysis. In essence, it is told as a qualified success story, presented without partisanship. It in fact reads like a good, if sometimes lurid, novel.
When an American professor who was preparing the article on Indira Gandhi for the Encyclopaedia Britannica, asked her what she most wanted to be remembered for, Indira paused, and then said "I do not want to be remembered for anything." Almost certainly, history will see the matter rather differently.
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