Indira: The Life of Indira Nehru Gandhi
Katherine Frank
545pp, HarperCollins £19.99
Buy it at a discount at BOL
I shall never forget boarding an Air India plane at Heathrow 17 years ago to find the entire cabin crew in tears. They had just heard that Indira Gandhi was dead, and were inconsolable throughout the flight. When we landed at New Delhi, the plane was immediately surrounded by police. In the distance columns of smoke were climbing into the sky over the old city, where Hindu mobs were massacring Sikhs in reprisal for Indira's assassination. Next day I sat with friends, watching the lying-in-state on television, with fans blowing cold air from great blocks of ice onto the body so that it wouldn't decompose. Later there was Rajiv Gandhi, shimmering in the heat haze as he walked seven times around his mother's pyre. I can remember every detail of that week with absolute clarity: like so much else about India, it was utterly indelible.
As Katherine Frank suggests in this excellent biography, the carnage that broke out after the assassination - more than 2,000 Sikhs were slaughtered in Delhi alone - was a depressing indication that Indira Gandhi's great mission in life, which she had inherited from her father, had failed. For the Nehrus were dedicated to the notion of a secular state in which no creed or caste would dominate anyone else; where the religious card that had beggared and bloodied the country's history since the year dot could no longer be played.
After many centuries of alien rule, first by the Mughals and then by the British, this was to be a democracy of unique and great distinction. Jawaharlal Nehru spent himself endlessly in this cause, and his daughter gave her life for it. The story of Indira Gandhi is a chronicle of what, between them, they did achieve; and although it is now spat upon by their infinitely less worthy successors, that was no small thing.
The book is dominated by three tremendous figures: Mahatma Gandhi, part saint, part humbug, and unrelated to Indira; Jawaharlal, the highly westernised (Harrow and Cambridge) Kashmiri agnostic who steered his country into and through independence and put India on the world map in its own right; and Indira, the most tragic figure of the three because her life was cut off some distance short of her goal. The Mahatma had achieved the seemingly impossible by shaming the British (which took some doing) into leaving his country alone, and Jawaharlal had given India a sense of moral purpose and a truly democratic structure, which shone like a beacon across the corruption and oppression that passed for government throughout the rest of the old colonial world.
Indira wanted to carry this on, and to do more: she wanted to put an end to her people's everlasting poverty, the more obscene because it was too often endured in the shadow of high walls protecting unimaginable wealth and privilege. She had a strangely sympathetic relationship with Margaret Thatcher, and it's easy to see why: both were strong-minded women with a clear sense of purpose who had made it to the top in a profession dominated by men, and both cherished deeply unattractive sons. There, however, the resemblance ended. Can anyone imagine the Grantham Grasper doing voluntary relief work in pestilential refugee camps, as Indira Gandhi did during the horrors of Partition?
Two lesser characters helped to shape Indira's destiny. One was her Parsee husband Feroze Gandhi; they became estranged, yet she still felt a responsibility for him. The other was her younger boy Sanjay, a nasty piece of work who never did anything that was not fuelled by self-interest and who increasingly influenced his adoring mother into actions that strayed from the Nehru tradition. But the major figure in her life by a very long way was her father, who not only doted on her (as she did on him) but used her as a substitute confidante for her mother Kamala, who died when Indira was 19. She became his consort, and found herself slowly being lowered into the snakepit of Indian politics, as well as accompanying him on all his official journeys abroad. And although she never admitted it, the relationship eventually became a burden to her: until Nehru died, when she was 47, she could not feel that she was her own woman.
Even after she had become prime minister herself - and an immensely popular one, at that - she was never completely free from men until the last four years of her life, by which time she was worn out and had lost her old balance. As long as Feroze was around, she was incapable of breaking free of him completely; and until Sanjay killed himself doing aerobatics, she was something of a tool in his hands. Though she herself was incorruptible, she too often turned a blind eye to his shabby little deals. This increased the enmity that had long come her way, notably from unpleasant rivals such as Morarji Desai, as well as from old men inside her own Congress party, all pursuing vendettas founded on jealousy.
As Frank makes plain, Indira Gandhi was an imperfect woman, quite apart from her disturbing indulgence of Sanjay. She bore grudges, and had a notoriously acid tongue and a "legendary genius for silence", which she had learned from the Mahatma as a child and which, like him, she used as an intimidating weapon. She could be quite ruthless, as when she imposed the Emergency on a nation rapidly descending into chaos (it worked, despite all the hand-wringing by ignorant liberals in the west). She was once caught out in a case of electoral malpractice and paid for it under examination by the Shah Commission, which was itself later discredited for its political motivation.
On the other hand, she went to the country in due time, knowing that she would be defeated in the wake of the Emergency; everyone had predicted that this was the end of democracy in India, but she was a Nehru and there was never any chance of that. After two years of Desai and a reversion to chaos, the country was very glad to vote her back in. She also masterminded the Green Revolution, which, for the first time in its history, made India self-sufficient in food.
She died as she had lived, dedicated to her ideal. After the secessionist thug Bhindranwale had fortified the Golden Temple in Amritsar so that it was desecrated when the Indian Army stormed it, the chances of her being murdered were very high; she knew this so well that she started planning her own funeral. The intelligence service advised her to get rid of the Sikhs in her security detail, but she refused: India, she insisted, was a secular nation. Beant Singh and Satwant Singh therefore remained on duty at her residence, where they shot her in the garden one morning. And so she perished, bravely and with her dignity intact. India is now in very different hands, and all who care about that country must tremble for the future of its secular democracy.
