Indira Gandhi – woman of courage and caprice
The logical explanation is that passage of time provides a better perspective that is free from prejudices that immediacy normally breeds. From a human angle, one also grows kind to a departed soul. The reverse is also true. History makers who enjoyed admiration and reverence while alive have become subjects of scathing and savage attack after their deaths.
The best examples of the two instances, at least in India, are Indira Gandhi and Mahatma Gandhi. There are any number of writings that call to question whatever the Father of the Nation did.
Perhaps no other Indian leader was reviled and despised, not just by political rivals but also by the common people, as much as Indira Gandhi was during her lifetime. But there is a qualitative difference in the way people, especially the media, look at her 25 years after her assassination on that mellow wintry morning of October 31, 1984.
Talk of politics and its practitioners in India invariably turns to Indira Gandhi. You could like her or hate her but surely not ignore her. Such was her personality. If she was courageous, Indira was equally capricious as events in her life show.
Indira caught the imagination of the world as no other developing nation's leader had then, or since. As a world leader, her moment of glory came in December 1971.
War clouds were gathering over the Indian horizon in the aftermath of Islamabad's military crackdown on East Pakistan after the Awami League had won the national elections and its leader, Sheikh Mujibur Rehman, was poised to take over as Prime Minister. But the Punjabi-dominated, Urdu-speaking military would not countenance a Bengali-speaking Prime Minister. Troops landed in thousands in Dhaka and all over East Pakistan and let loose a reign of terror. Panic-stricken East Pakistanis crossed the border into India in their millions. Already battling poverty of its teeming millions, India was faced with the humanitarian responsibility of feeding the starving refugees. It discharged it with its own resources and foreign aid for months. As aid was thinning out, India realized that the only permanent solution was to send the reluctant refuges home under a government of their own choice that assured them safety and security.
Indira Gandhi went on a world tour, apprising leaders of the problems India faced in the wake of the massive influx of refugees. She gave President Nixon, who still tended to side with Pakistan, an earful. The West was dithering and was reluctant to ask a recalcitrant Pakistan to behave and respect the democratic verdict. Her patience finally worn out, Indira took things in her own hand and surprised the rest of the world.
What happened within few months is history. Indira Gandhi defeated Pakistan in a war forced on India and helped the Bengalis of East Pakistan win independence to form Bangladesh. Even her political opponents hailed her as `Ma Durga', Hindu goddess of courage whose mission is to annihilate evil.
Indira displayed courage in crucial moments of her political career. It was her courage that helped her challenge the Old Guard in the Congress party and emerge as the undisputed leader in 1969; it was her courage that helped her take on Nixon at the height of the Cold War during the early 1970s; it was her courage that helped her win a decisive victory with Pakistan in the 1971 war that saw the birth of Bangladesh.
Perhaps none paid for the folly of underestimating her courage more dearly than the then Pakistani military ruler general Yahya Khan who boasted to a group of western journalists," If that woman thinks she is going to cow me down ... I refuse to take it. If she wants a war I will fight it." This was on November 27, 1971. Within two weeks the general lost the war and Pakistan lost its eastern wing that became independent Bangladesh.
Just sample this Sunday Times correspondent’s (London) description of Yahya Khan as he spoke to the journalists over dinner a few days before the full scale war broke out in December 1971: " Rage and sweet reasonableness alternated in Yahya's rambling confidence, ever returning to that woman! To a tough man like Yahya, being caught in a relentless trap and waiting helpless for the next turn of the screw is bad enough; to a Muslim general the idea that the screw is being turned by a Hindu in sari is clearly agonising."
Indira displayed caprice too. If she displayed statesmanship during the Bangladesh war, a few years later she showed her sense of insecurity over losing power. She clamped emergency on the advice of her son Sanjay Gandhi and a closed coterie around him. She did not resign after the Allahabad high court unseated her from Parliament. She did not want to hand over the baton to a senior leader like Jagjivan Ram because of her distrust of her colleagues.
To the media Indira remained somewhat of an enigma. During her lifetime, the media loved, admired and hated Indira with equal intensity at different times. It praised her to the skies and also downed her to the dumps. It employed only the superlatives to describe her actions.
Journalists who were witness to the ‘liberal’, security-free era can only long for the good old days, but cannot hope to get them back in today’s terror environment.
As a special correspondent for PTI, I had seen Indira Gandhi go in out of Parliament House, accompanied only by her private staff. In that act, journalists often came face to face with her. And if she knew someone personally, she spent a few moments with him/her. This is something unimaginable today unless one encounters the PM in the Central Hall.
She was easily accessible to the common man till she breathed her last. Ironically she was smilingly returning the greetings of her own security guards who felled her in a hail of bullets after their “friendly” act. Her assassination gave birth to the elaborate security rigmarole – the SPG, Black Cats ET all - that goes with the PM today. Security became more stringent after Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination seven years later in 1991. Today, even journalists on duty, cannot go near the PM as they are pushed back by personal security personnel if they try to do so.
As a special correspondent for PTI, I had seen Indira Gandhi go in out of Parliament House, accompanied only by her private staff. In that act, journalists often came face to face with her. And if she knew someone personally, she spent a few moments with him/her. This is something unimaginable today unless one encounters the PM in the Central Hall.
During her lifetime, the media loved, admired and hated Indira with equal intensity at different times. It praised her to the skies and also downed her to the dumps. It employed only the superlatives to describe her actions. While politically Indira often displayed her steely guts and appeared somewhat Machiavellian, she was a loving mother and doting grandmother to Rahul, Priyanka and Varun. She missed Varun, son of Sanjay and Maneka, when the latter left the Indira home after a spat some time after Sanjay's death in June 1980. Sanjay’s death broke her heart but she bore the cross silently and with dignity.
As an active politician and as the Prime Minister of the country, the joy of private life often eluded her. Ironically, her brief period of peace and private life came when she was out of power from March 1977 to January 1980.
Those were the days when she enjoyed cordial relations with her younger daughter-in-law Maneka. This writer remembers well a March afternoon in 1979 when he found Indira Gandhi in the company of Sanjay and Maneka at Archna Cinema in New Delhi, enjoying a Peter Seller’s comedy — The Return of Pink Panther.
Seated several rows behind me, Indira Gandhi obviously enjoyed the film as any other commoner did. At the intermission and at the end of the show, she exchanged pleasantries with total strangers. There was not even a hint of security.
After the show, as the family waited outside the cinema, a humble Ambassador pulled up before them and carried them home with no fuss whatsoever.
As a professional journalist since early 1970s, I shared with my peers the privilege of interacting with Indira Gandhi, covering her in and outside Parliament. But to this day, I am not tired of boasting to them: “I watched a film with Indira Gandhi”, though it was occasioned by fortuitous circumstances!
One is curious to know what Ms Sonia Gandhi was doing those days. By all accounts, she was leading a private life with husband Rajiv and children Rahul and Priyanka. She hated politics and, according to her own admission, "fought like a tigress" to stop Rajiv from entering it. But, then, you cannot escape politics if you are a Nehru-Gandhi. When in Rome, do as Romans do. This has proved very true for the Italy-born Sonia.
- Asian Tribune -