The story of Indira & India
VIDYA SUBRAHMANIAM
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The author hopes that Indira's vision of a secular India will withstand the vicissitudes of today's corrosive politics
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MOTHER
INDIA - A
Political
Biography of
Indira Gandhi:
Pranay Gupte;
Penguin/
Viking, 11,
Community
Centre,
Panchsheel
Park, New
Delhi-110017.
Rs. 599.
A quarter century after her assassination, pollsters continue to be baffled by Indira Gandhi's undiminished popularity, and the name recall she commands in the remotest corners.
A google search throws up more than a 100 books on India's most controversial Prime Minister. Indira was a riveting subject, more than even Jawaharlal Nehru, whose own life story was no less than a cinematic magnum opus. Nehru's sterling qualities were acknowledged by critics and admirers alike, and most saw him as straightforward, if naïve at times. However, Indira appeared to the beholder as a multi-layered, complex, and beguilingly contradictory person.
It must have been a huge advantage to Indira's biographers that members of the Nehru clan were breathless letter writers. Aside from Jawaharlal's letters to Indira covering a wide range of subjects from the intimately personal to complex affairs of the world, which have been been immortalised in the form of books, there was huge correspondence between Jawaharlal, on one side, and his sisters, father Motilal, and Mahatrma Gandhi, on the other. World leaders wrote to and wrote of Indira. Family members penned elegant personal memoirs, and there was also a wealth of material available in The Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira's own published speeches.
Documentation
The exhaustive documentation ought to explain why there is so much in common among the biographies of Indira Gandhi. Whether it was Inder Malhotra , Pupul Jaykar, Katherine Frank, or Pranay Gupte, the biographers relied heavily on family correspondence and memoirs for gaining insights into her early life.
Naturally, the narratives are similar and, indeed, one story relating to Indira's birth seems to be a favourite of all her biographers: Disappointed at the birth of a girl, Indira's grandmother Swaroop Rani refused to announce the gender, resorting instead to a gender-neutral hua (it has happened). The source of the story: Vijayalakshmi Pandit's A Scope of Happiness: A Personal Memoir. Of course, Jaykar, being a close friend, could drawfrom her own conversations with Gandhi and other family members. Malhotra too met Gandhi frequently over a period of 30 years.
Pranay Gupte, on the other hand, had no access to her, and confesses as much: “…a lot of what I say on Indira Gandhi and on India is based on the research of others.” He also makes it clear that his book is intended for general readers (euphemism for foreign audiences, surely) who want to “learn something of the contemporary history of the Indian subcontinent.” From this perspective, there is no doubt that the author has succeeded in his effort.
Gupte's book is an engaging page-turner that treads the middle ground between Malhotra's “facts are sacred” approach and Katherine Frank's saucily written “inside story” style treatment. In addition, it has covered Rajiv Gandhi's years as Prime Minister, his assassination, the Congress party, and India's emergence in recent years as a country of substance. The author describes Indira's assassination and its violent aftermath in painstaking detail, using his own primary sources (interviews, visits to Punjab, and so on) to reconstruct the pain and horror that visited on the Sikh community.
In the cavernous body of the book unfolds the poignant story of Indira — the loneliness of her early years; her fierce attachment to a mother who suffered humiliation and neglect at Anand Bhavan; her slow but dramatic transformation from a painfully shy teenager through tentative politician, war hero, and finally to the authoritarian, monarch-like figure of the Emergency phase. The narrative takes in its sweep the oversized story of India, its chequered political journey, its many foreign policy challenges, its battles with disease, poverty and terrorism.
In one of his letters to sister Nan (Vijaylakshmi), Nehru worries that 14-year old Indira has become “self-centred” and “grown remarkably selfish.” Some of the traits would assume more virulent forms in later years: As the Congress President in 1959, Indira engineered the dismissal of India's first elected Communist government in Kerala. In the twin roles of Prime Minister and party chief, she chopped and changed Congress Chief Ministers, treated institutions as personal fief, and brazenly courted danger, as she did when she propped up Sant Bhindranwale against the moderate Akali factions — she would pay for this misadventure with her own life. Did Nehru plan for Indira to inherit his place?
Seeds sown
The author argues that the seeds of the Nehru dynasty were sown as early as in 1928 when Motilal indicated to the Mahatma that Jawaharlal would make an “excellent” president of the Congress.
A noticeable omission in the book is Indira's own fight with crippling tuberculosis — she spent close to a year in a sanatorium in Switzerland, agonisingly lonely, the ghost of Kamala hovering over her and with a none-too-good medical prognosis. The author is of the view that “a contemporary political assessment of Indira Gandhi cannot but be harsh.” Yet he concludes on an optimistic note, hoping that Indira's “vision of a united and secular India” will withstand “the vicissitudes of today's corrosive politics.” It is an assessment even her critics will agree with.
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