In popular perception, Indira Gandhi comes across as a strong, assertive and self-willed woman, to the extent of being autocratic. But in private she was meek and submissive — and it was this side which influenced her public persona
Three decades after her assassination, Indira Gandhi remains an enigma, a unifying as well as a divisive figure, a leader as adored as she is despised. In public perception, she comes across as a strong, assertive and self-willed woman, to the extent of being autocratic. She was the living epitome of Durga, as MF Husain would famously showcase her in one of his paintings, especially in the wake of the Bangladesh war. The imagery of a strong leader with matron-like features — “Amma” as she would be called by millions of poor Indians — was well cultivated. But in private, Indira was meek, insecure and submissive, especially when it came to her wayward son, Sanjay Gandhi, whose mistakes she defended and often tried to cover-up. She both loved and feared him, and was once allegedly slapped by him at the dinner table, with outsiders present; she, we are told, took it quietly with eyes moist and lips quivering.
Indira, thus, could be two different persons at two different places. She could be both ‘ugly’ as well as ‘irresistible’. During her visit to the United States in the late 1960s, President lyndon Johnson was so captivated by Indira that after a private meeting at the home of Indian Ambassador BK Nehru, he stayed on tossing glass after glass of bourbon on the rocks while talking to the Indian Prime Minister. And, against protocol, he readily agreed to stay on for dinner to which he had not been invited and for which Vice-President Hubert Humphrey was supposed to be the guest of honour. Even when Indira refused to dance with him at the White House, on the grounds that it would hurt her image in India, the President wanted to see “no harm comes to the girl”, and sanctioned three million tonnes of wheat and nine million dollars aid to India. It’s another matter that within a few years, Indira followed it up by placing India into the Soviet orbit more firmly than ever before. What’s more intriguing is the fact that the woman who could charm the “most powerful person of Earth” was convinced for a long time about being “ugly and stupid”, as she was called by her aunt Vijayalakshmi Pandit when she was young. Writes Katherine Frank in her biography on Indira, “Tall for her age and thin, with a large nose and skin she felt was too dark, Indira was devastated by her aunt’s ‘annihilating words’. She was already shy and insecure. After Nan Pandit delivered this brutal assessment, Indira became a silent, moody adolescent.” For all her life, the remark “remained fresh in (her) memory”. It had, as Indira would confess much later in her life, “blighted my youth”.
So, who was IndiraIJ Was she strong and audacious as she had been projected, or was she submissive and meek as her relationship with Sanjay and Firoze Gandhi showedIJ The two, when analysed dispassionately, appear to be interlinked. The more Indira became insecure internally, the more aggressive she turned outside. The genesis of it all could be found in her troubled childhood when she lived a life on the margins. Her cousin BK Nehru, who grew up in Allahabad and lived in Anand Bhawan — the palatial abode of the Nehrus — during the 1920s, once asked Indira when she became Prime Minister where she had been during those years; he had no recollection of her. “I was right there,” she answered, “but no one ever noticed me.”
The only person Indira was close to was her mother. Married at a very young age, Kamala Nehru, though elegant and beautiful, possessed none of the qualities admired and sought after by her ‘Anglicised’ and ‘sophisticated’ in-laws — for which she would face taunts and hardships for all her life. Indira wrote to her father about this in 1934: “Do you know anything about what happens to Mummy when you are absentIJ Do you know that when she was in agony, there was no one to help herIJ” Nehru, being busy with India’s freedom struggle, couldn’t do much for Kamala, who died after a prolonged illness in 1936. Nayantara Sahgal writes in her biography, Indira Gandhi: Tryst With Power, on how she went into a shell after the death, saying: “I saw her (Kamala) being hurt and I was determined not to be hurt.”
That’s when Firoze Gandhi entered her life. As Indira said many years later, Feroze “was always there for me”. She, ignored and isolated as she thought she always was, could not have let this support system go away. This explains why she fell in love and even married the man who came from an ordinary background and who, according to Kamala, was unstable and would not enter any profession and be in a position to support Indira. This also explains why Sanjay, despite being a trouble-maker from the very beginning, would get away unpunished. In his book, The Sanjay Story, Vinod Mehta calls him an “outstandingly mediocre” and a “loner”, who had a reputation of being “bit of a kleptomaniac”. Obsessed with cars, he would often whisk away unlocked vehicles for short, fast drives and bring them back before someone could notice it. Thoroughly indifferent towards studies, Mehta recalls how Sanjay was sent away in 1964 to apprentice at the Rolls-Royce plant in England. But he remained a difficult person. Asked to account for one of a series of mistakes, he told his supervisor, “You people mucked up my country for 300 years, so what’s the big deal if I muck up Rolls-RoyceIJ” When Sanjay finally quit the ‘job’ midway, writes Mehta, a Rolls-Royce executive said they were glad to see his back.
When Sanjay came back to India, Indira allowed herself to be used by him to start a car factory. Thus began the Maruti saga, which haunted Indira for years to come before the ghosts of Emergency took over. It was an apt example of crony capitalism at work, wherein Sanjay applied for, and got, a licence to manufacture a cheap car without even a debate in the Union Cabinet — a never-heard-before phenomenon in a command economy where private enterprises with impressive records were made to wait for years to get a licence. In 1970, hundreds of acres of fertile land were secured for the factory and farmers displaced without a murmur. Sanjay promised to produce 50,000 small cars within a year. Five years later, he couldn’t deliver even one! It was only when Sanjay realised that he won’t be able to make cars, he jumped into politics. And the result was Emergency and most of the high-handedness associated with it.
Indira’s internal demons not just provided a long rope to Sanjay, but also allowed the institutionalisation of corruption in the country. She knew perfectly well that some of her ministers were corrupt, yet she took no steps. Brought up with the inferiority complex in the classy environs of Anand Bhawan, Indira had inherent distrust for the educated. This explains the rise of the mediocres around her — Yashpal Kapoor, RK Dhawan, Dhirendra Brahmachari, to name a few. She packed Parliament with her supporters wherein loyalty was more important than ability; she superseded judges and openly sought for committed bureaucracy. So, when one looks at Indira, the person, one realises why she, with all her electoral successes, missed so many opportunities to resolve some of the country’s long-term problems. How she could institutionalise sycophancy and corruption. And why she was transformed from a secular rationalist — someone who took her oath of office as Prime Minister without the customary reference to God — to an extremely religious and superstitious person in her last years.
The writer is Senior Editor, The Pioneer. He can be reached at utpal.kumar1@gmail.com
