Indira Gandhi at 100: Why is she still relevant

By Zareer Masani

It may seem surprising that, more than three decades after her passing, Indira Gandhi is back in fashion with two new biographies and a stream of articles and reminiscences. She’s still best remembered for the Emergency, when Indian democracy almost met its end. But her memory also seems to chime with the current mood of Indian chauvinism, especially in relation to Pakistan. After all, it was Indira, portrayed as an avatar of Durga, who gave India its first and only decisive military victory.

Bookended by Emergency
My own memories of the lady are inextricably tied to the Emergency, when she danced like a present-day Kali on the corpse of Indian democracy. As a naïve twenty-something, I had succumbed to the charms of Indira’s 1970 offensive against the tired old men of the Congress Syndicate. My father Minoo Masani, then president of the Swatantra Party, had been forced, against his own better judgement, to join the Indira Hatao campaign of the Grand Alliance of opposition parties. He consequently lost his parliamentary seat in the election landslide of 1971, while my mother, Shakuntala, and I, somewhat disloyally, campaigned for Indira’s winning side.

Inspired by Indira’s Garibi Hatao slogans, I set out to write her biography for the British publisher Hamish Hamilton. What a stroke of luck for their publicity people when the publication of the book in June 1975 coincided with the declaration of Emergency. I spent that week churning out front-page articles for the British press and whizzing from one TV studio to another. But my publishers were less pleased by the book’s reception in India. When a consignment arrived for publication by Oxford University Press in Bombay, it was impounded by Customs at the behest of the PM’s press supremo, HY Sharada Prasad. What followed was the kind of subtle arm-twisting common in less overtly totalitarian dictatorships.

My disillusionment with my subject had grown steadily during my three years of research and writing. My final chapter had described growing allegations of corruption and nepotism against Mrs Gandhi and her son Sanjay, her increasingly autocratic response to Opposition campaigns against her and the likelihood of her imposing some form of dictatorship. My publishers now received messages from Sharada Prasad that the book would be released for publication on one easily met condition — that we delete the final chapter predicting the Emergency. My first instinct was to decline, but my publishers wanted to accept. Eventually, I agreed to delete the offending chapter, provided the book carried a notice clearly stating that it had been removed by government censors. As I had hoped and expected, that condition proved unacceptable to the Prime Minister’s Office, and there the matter rested till the lifting of the Emergency made publication possible in 1977.

I was at Oxford during those Emergency years, writing my doctoral thesis on the Congress Left in the 1930s. I had been advised by a mutual family friend of ours and the Nehru-Gandhis, Muhammed Yunus, not to visit India, because I was on Sanjay’s hit list and would be arrested. So it was with a little trepidation that I returned in March 1977 to report for The Guardian and The Economist on the very unexpected general election Indira had called out of the blue. Was this a hollow attempt to legitimise what had become a dynastic dictatorship, or was it the dawn of a return to real democracy? The columns of the international and more wary Indian press filled with speculation about Indira’s true motives.

With the benefit of hindsight, I think it was an act of dictatorial hubris that went drastically wrong for the would-be dictator. Mrs Gandhi was never content to be just a dictator; she needed to be seen as a democrat too, especially by her father’s friends and admirers abroad. Among the supporters of her Emergency were respected British Labour politicians like Michael Foot and Peggy Lee, widow of Aneurin Bevan, convinced that Indira had been forced to defend democracy from an evil, right wing conspiracy to seize power. Two years on, she needed to demonstrate some democratic credentials of her own.

Convinced by both their flatterers and official intelligence that she would win another landslide victory, Indira and Sanjay plunged into an election campaign that badly backfired. It took place under a continuing state of Emergency, which made us doubt whether the election would be free or fair. But thanks to the regime’s unpopularity and the courage of angry Indian voters, the campaigning spun out of government control. I remember attending one of Indira’s rallies in rural UP, where attendance was poor and large sections of the crowd heckled and booed her, then turned their backs and walked out. Her tone grew noticeably shrill, as her speech was drowned by the chanting of hecklers.

The next time I saw her was at a packed hearing of the Shah Commission, set up by the Janata Government to enquire into her misdeeds. I remember her attitude of defiance, amid much jeering and booing, and her refusal to apologise for anything more than “some excesses”. She may have had in mind Sanjay’s forced sterilisation drive and his demolition of Muslim homes at Turkman Gate in Delhi.

To my astonishment, in 1980 the Indian electorate voted an unrepentant Indira back in as decisively as they had voted her out only three years before. Her towering political nemesis, Jayaprakash Narayan, had died, and none of her other opponents inspired much public confidence. Her second term was less ideological and more pragmatic in easing controls on India’s private sector. But it was overshadowed by the personal tragedy of Sanjay’s death and by the political tragedy of Indira’s battle with Sikh separatism, culminating in her own assassination.

Had her life not been cut short at the age of 64, who can doubt that Indira might have gone on and on, bolstered by the dynasticism and corruption that has become so endemic in Indian public life? A sad reflection on Indian democracy today is the continuing cult of strong, charismatic, authoritarian leadership that surrounds Narendra Modi, and that may also explain our continuing fascination with Indira Gandhi

Zareer Masani is a historian and author of biographies of Indira Gandhi and Lord Macaulay.