FORAY | Sunday, November 1, 2009 | Email | Print | 
Bittersweet legacy
Chandan Mitra
Twenty-five years is too short a time in history to make a dispassionate assessment of a personality as overpowering and complex as Indira Gandhi. It is only when the predictable overdose of nostalgia on the one hand and bitterness on the other peter out that historians might succeed in reaching a near-objective conclusion about her legacy. Only one thing will be as true then as it is today: There will be no unanimity about the appraisal. Indira Gandhi divided India in death as much as she divided polity in her lifetime. Resolute, combative, ruthless are some of the adjectives often used about her and not just by her political opponents. But the other side of her persona, fiercely nationalist on the one hand and caring, sensitive, nature-loving on the other rarely find the same prominence in her report card.
Writing on the legacy of World War II, historian Arnold Toynbee remarked, if one needed to locate a memorial to Adolf Hitler one had only to look at the post-War map of Europe. This is not remotely to suggest that Indira possessed Hitlerian traits, the draconian Emergency (1975-77) notwithstanding. But I quote Toynbee to similarly suggest that India as we find it today is very largely what Indira Gandhi left behind for us. Why just India, she altered the geo-politics of South Asia itself: Bangladesh today may not give her due credit, but I make bold to suggest that its founding father Sheikh Mujibur Rahman would probably have mounted the gallows and East Pakistan would have stayed the way Islamabad wanted it to be, namely, a subjugated colony, but for the sheer courage of Indira's conviction.
Sikkim too may not have risen in revolt against its erstwhile ruler and merged with India but for her success in fashioning India into the region's predominant power with sufficient self-confidence to defy even the mighty United States. Pokhran II, which propelled India into the enviable status of a world power, might not have happened had she not had the guts to "implode" a nuclear device for "peaceful purposes" way back in 1974. Whichever way you look at it, demonise her or deify her, Indira Gandhi moulded India's fledgling nationhood, crafted a self-assured nation and ensured that the country she loved with consummate passion could never again be treated lightly as a poor, developing former British colony.
An inveterate egoist, her father Jawaharlal, once wrote an obituary of himself in Ramananda Chatterjee's celebrated nationalist journal Modern Review. In it he said that if asked to pay a tribute to himself in one sentence, he would write: "Here was a man who loved India from the very core of his heart and in turn the people of India returned this in full measure". Nehru's legacy is now coming into increasing dispute after decades of hagiographical sycophancy by Congress-Left historians. But Indira's legacy was bittersweet in her lifetime and continues to be so thereafter. Yet, those lines appear more appropriate for her rather than her Anglophile, Fabian Socialist father whose grandiose notions of himself often restricted clarity of vision pushing him into a series of costly mistakes including the ceasefire in Jammu & Kashmir, 1962 war with China and above all the erection of an inefficient economic system in the name of pursuing egalitarian goals.
Undoubtedly, Nehru was loved by the people for his candour and transparency but then those were innocent times for the country and its politics. Faced with the first serious crisis on the China border, his unreal dreams of Hindi-Chini Bhai Bhai having been shattered, Nehru was a broken man realising he had failed to stand up to the challenge. Indira, on the other hand, had nerves of steel: No wonder she was the first politician about whom it was said she was the only one who wore pants in her Cabinet — a comment later used widely about Margaret Thatcher.
It was perhaps the overflowing popular support she commanded in the aftermath of the liberation of Bangladesh, preceded by bank nationalisation, abolition of privy purses and enactment of land ceiling laws that lulled her into complacency. I don't believe she was a dictator at heart, even if she was impatient with the political opposition. But egged on by her younger son she was pushed into a misadventure in 1975 particularly when she realised half her party was conspiring against her in the wake of the Allahabad High Court judgement unseating her from Parliament.
With her, the Nehru-Gandhi trait of assuming the family's divine right to rule moved from being a private conviction to public assertion. That is what motivated her epic fight-back against tormentors in the Janata Party Government who, in turn, facilitated her struggle by harassing her with the Shah Commission and later expelling her from Parliament after she won the Chikmagalur by-election. She could play with people's emotions with a dexterity never seen since: Women swooned and fainted at her mere glimpse, in the South Indiramma is still the Congress's principal vote-catcher even if most of its voters today weren't born when she was felled by assassins' bullets. Just observe the number plates of tourist buses that line the parking lot outside 1 Safdarjang Road; the overwhelming majority are from Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh.
Amid all these astonishing qualities, she had one fatal flaw: A tearing sense of insecurity bordering on paranoia. She could destroy institutional structures at will, actually proceeded to bring the judiciary under political control and believed that the bureaucracy existed only to help fulfill her political goals. She even sought to legitimise this pursuit by coining the phrase "committed judiciary and bureaucracy" that were to be employed to usher in social and economic "justice", a euphemism for institutionalised Congress supremacy.
Perhaps her mounting insecurity and inability to accept defeat on any front drove her into the fast lane seeking to short-circuit the goal of legitimisation through the Emergency. Had she been more patient and obtained electoral endorsement, it is possible that she would have destroyed constitutionally ordained institutions even further for even the Constitution was hardly a sacred document for her. By inserting "Secular, Socialist" in its preamble — words none has dared to change despite India long abandoning socialism — she sought to establish nothing, not even her father’s genuine commitment to democracy, was sacrosanct if it came in the way of her objectives.
India has learnt a lot from her failures; dealing with local insurgencies being one of them. In retrospect, Punjab need not have happened at all. But her temptation to use it to electoral advantage persuaded her to first foment religious fundamentalism and then allow it to fester to a point where she thought she would be feted for effecting a smooth surgical operation. It didn’t happen quite that way and she paid with her life.
Pending a more dispassionate appraisal of her humungous legacy, we need to exorcise the bad and focus on the good to create an India that would make her proud. India owes her that much.
Email | Print | Rate:
|