Indira Gandhi

“My grandfather once told me that there were two kinds of people: those who do the work and those who take the credit. He told me to try to be in the first group; there was much less competition.”

 

Tomorrow marks 54 years since Indira Priyadarshini Gandhi, née Nehru, (1917 – 1984) became the first (and only) female prime minister of India, serving for three consecutive terms (1966–77) and a fourth term from 1980 until she was assassinated in 1984. As India is my main field of study, I thought I’d do post looking at this controversial and complex figure.

Indira was born on 19 November 1917 in Allahabad, to a Kashmiri Brahmin family. Her father, Jawaharlal Nehru, was a leading figure in the movement for independence from British rule, and became the first Prime Minister of the newly independent India. Her paternal grandfather Motilal Nehru was one of the pioneers of the independence movement and was a close associate of Mohandas (“Mahatma”) Gandhi. After the early death of her young brother, Indira was an only child and had a lonely and isolated childhood. Her father was often away – either working or imprisoned – and her mother was often bedridden with illnesses before her untimely death of tuberculosis in the 1930s.

Indira was mostly homeschooled until 1934. She was named Priyadarshini, literally "looking at everything with kindness" in Sanskrit, by the famous Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore.  After a year at university, she was forced to abandon her studies to attend on her sickly mother who was living in Europe. She enrolled at the University of Oxford where she excelled in history, political science and economics, but her grades in Latin—a compulsory subject—remained poor and she was unable to graduate on account of this.  

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“Opportunities are not offered. They must be wrested and worked for. And this calls for perseverance... and courage.”

Indira was plagued with illness throughout her youth. She repeatedly sought recuperation in Switzerland which disrupted her studies. She was being treated there in 1940, when Germany rapidly conquered Europe. Indira tried to return to England via Portugal but was stranded for nearly two months. She managed to enter England in early 1941, and from there returned to India without completing her studies at Oxford (although she was later awarded an honorary degree). In 1938, she officially joined the Congress Party of India.

While in Britain, Indira frequently met her future husband Feroze Gandhi (no relation to Mahatma Gandhi), whom she had known in Allahabad, and who was studying at the London School of Economics. In 1942, the pair married in India – it was a Hindu ceremony, although her husband came from a Zoroastrian Parsi family. They went on to have two sons, Rajiv Gandhi (born 1944) and Sanjay Gandhi (born 1946). She and her husband were estranged for much of their marriage, owing toe Indira’s new position as her father’s hostess for events which required her to accompany him around the world.

When India became independent from British rule in 1947, the Congress Party came to power headed by Indira’s father, Nehru.  Gandhi became a member of Congress’ working committee in 1955. In 1959, she was elected to the largely honorary post of party president. 5 years later, she was made a member of the Rajya Sabha (upper chamber of the Indian parliament) and was named minister of information and broadcasting. 

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“To be liberated, woman must feel free to be herself, not in rivalry to man but in the context of her own capacity and her personality.”

In January 1966, Gandhi was named leader of the Congress Party—and thus also became prime minister— following the sudden death of her predecessor. She represented a middle way between the left and ring wing politicians. However, her leadership was constantly challenged from the right wing of the party, led by Morarji Desai. She won a seat in the 1967 elections to the Lok Sabha (lower chamber of the Indian parliament), but the Congress Party managed to win only a slim majority of seats, and Gandhi had to accept her opponent Desai as deputy prime minister.

During her first year in office, she visited Washington, D.C., where she won substantial support for India’s weakened economy. Her and her successive visit to Moscow reflected the continuation of her father’s policy of nonalignment. In an attempt to calm Sikh agitation and as a reward for Sikh military service in the Kashmir war, she granted the long-standing Sikh demand of a Punjabi state, which required partition of the existing state of Punjab but left its newly designed capital of Chandigarh as shared administrative headquarters of the new states of Punjab, with a Sikh majority, and Haryana, with a slight Hindu majority.

Internal party tensions continued to grow, however, and in 1969 she was expelled from the Congress Party by Desai. Undeterred, Gandhi, along with the majority of the party, formed a new faction called the “New” Congress Party. In the 1971 elections the New Congress won a sweeping electoral victory over a coalition of conservative parties. 

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“People with clenched fists can not shake hands,”

In December 1970 Pakistan held general elections, its first since independence. The Awami League, headed by East Pakistan’s popular Bengali leader Mujibur Rahman, won a clear majority but West Pakistan’s president, General Agha Mohammad Yahya Khan, refused to honour the democratic choice of his country’s majority. Following failed negotiations during which Mujib demanded independence for East Pakistan, Khan ordered a military massacre across East Pakistan in March 1971. Though Mujib was arrested and flown to prison in West Pakistan, he called on his followers in the east to rise up and proclaim their independence as Bangladesh (“Land of the Bengalis”). Some 10 million refugees fled across the border from East Pakistan to India in the ensuing eight months of violent unrest. India sent troops to support Bangladesh against Pakistan. Mujib, released by President Zulfikar Ali Bhutto—who had taken over from the disgraced Yahya Khan—flew home to a hero’s welcome, and in January 1972 he became the first prime minister of the People’s Republic of Bangladesh.

In a last-minute but fruitless attempt to support Pakisan, the USA sent nuclear weapons to the Bay of Bengal, allegedly to evacuate civilians from Dhaka. However, the war ended before any such assistance could intervene. Many Indians viewed the aircraft carrier’s presence so close to their own shores as provocative. In response, by 1972 India had launched a nuclear program of its own, detonating its first plutonium-armed device in May 1974. The atomic explosion was felt in Pakistan, who swiftly resolved to produce a bomb of its own. Pakistan cosequently forged stronger ties with China and with Muslim countries to the west but found itself further weakened as a potential threat to Indian hegemony over South Asia.

Gandhi strongly supported East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) in its conflict with Pakistan and became the first government leader to recognize the new country. 

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“Whenever you take a step forward you are bound to disturb something”

The Bangladesh war elevated PM Gandhi to virtual “mother goddess” status in India. She was hailed as a sharp military strategist and diplomat, and her popularity was never greater than in the years immediately after her victory over Pakistan.

By late 1974, however, Gandhi’s halo was slipping. Despite her campaign promise to “eradicate poverty”, the opposite had been achieved. Skyrocketing international oil prices and domestic inflation, India’s unemployed and landless as well as its large fixed-income labouring population found themselves sinking deeper into starvation and debt. Student strikes and mass protest marches erupted and Gandhi’s political opponents Narayan and Desai joined forces in leading a new Janata Morcha (“People’s Front”) movement against government corruption and Gandhi’s supposedly inept leadership. The mass movement gathered momentum throughout the first half of 1975 and reached its climax that June, when the Congress Party lost a crucial by-election in Gujarat. Gandhi herself was found guilty by the High Court of several counts of election malpractice during her last campaign. In June 1975 the High Court of Allahabad ruled against her, losing her her seat and exiling her from politics for 6 years. 

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“People tend to forget their duties but remember their rights.”

Opposition leaders threatened a civil disobedience campaign to force the prime minister to resign, and many of her oldest cabinet colleagues and Congress Party advisers urged her to step down pending an appeal to India’s Supreme Court. Instead, she took the advice of her younger son, Sanjay, and on  26^th June 1975, Gandhi persuaded the president to declare a national emergency, which empowered her to do whatever she considered best for the country for at least six months.

The elite Central Reserve Police force, the prime minister’s palace guard, was ordered to arrest Desai and the ailing and aged Narayan. She then blacked out the entire region of Delhi in which the press was published and appointed Sanjay as her personal censor of all future news leaders and editorials. Her minister of information and broadcasting immediately resigned rather than obey Sanjay, who held no elective office at the time but who was fast becoming one of the most powerful figures in India. “India is Indira, and Indira is India,” was the call of Congress Party sycophants. Almost every leader of Indira’s political opposition was jailed or kept under house arrest for almost two years, and some of India’s most prominent journalists, lawyers, educators, and political activists were silenced or imprisoned. 

“Women sometimes go too far, it’s true. But it’s only when you go too far that others listen.”

Gandhi announced her Twenty-Point Program soon after the emergency was proclaimed, largely aiming to reduce inflation and revitalise the economy by punishing tax evaders, black marketers, smugglers, and other real criminals. Prices did come down, production indexes rose dramatically, and even the monsoon seemed cooperative by bringing resplendent rains for two successive years.

However, the public vehemently opposed many of the other policies implemented at this time, including a freeze on wage increases, pressure for increased worker discipline, and a birth-control program (introduced by Sanjay) that mandated sterilization for families with more than two children. Really not good, Indira, really not good.

It was perhaps because of the economic gains that Gandhi decided to call general elections in early 1977, but she may also have believed what she read about herself in her heavily censored press - or feared a military coup had she simply refused to seek a civil mandate for her policies. Most political prisoners were released, and Narayan immediately joined Desai in quickly rejoining the Janata movement, whose campaign warned Indians that the elections might be their last chance to choose between “democracy and dictatorship.” In the elections, held in February, Indira lost her Lok Sabha seat, and Sanjay lost his bid for one. Opposing candidates together represented more than two-thirds of the Lok Sabha membership. The Janata Party (precursor to the Bharatiya Janata Party who are currently in power) took over, led by her old adversary Desai as prime minister, aged 80. 

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“Forgiveness is a virtue of the brave.”

In 1977 (and later in 1978) she was briefly imprisoned for corruption. Her imprisonment brought a strong backlash of sympathy for her from millions of Indians, many of whom a year earlier had feared her as a tyrant. Boosted by renewed public support, in early 1978 Gandhi and her supporters officially completed the split from the Congress Party by forming the Congress (I) Party—the “I” signifying Indira. Despite her incarceration, she won a new seat in the Lok Sabha in November 1978, and her Congress (I) Party began to grow in influence. Dissension within the ruling Janata Party led to the collapse of its government in August 1979. In January the following year, Gandhi and Congress (I) were swept back into power in a landslide victory. Her son Sanjay, who had become her chief political adviser, also won a seat in the Lok Sabha. All legal cases against Indira, as well as against Sanjay, were withdrawn. S

She adhered to the quasi-socialist policies of industrial development initiated by her father. She established closer relations with the Soviet Union, on whom she relied for support in India’s never-ending conflict with Pakistan.

In June 1980, however, Sanjay Gandhi – who was being groomed as his mother’s successor - was killed in the crash of a new stunt plane he was flying. Indira Gandhi, who seemed never fully to recover from the loss of Sanjay, immediately recruited her elder son, Rajiv – a pilot - into political life. 

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“Mankind will endure when the world appreciates the logic of diversity.”

Throughout Gandhi’s reign, India continued to grapple with poverty, pluralism, inequality of wealth and education, and continuing provincial and communal violence. The worst violence erupted in Punjab.

The majority of the Sikh population in Punjab had gained prosperity in the wake of India’s Green Revolution of the late 1960s. However, bumper crops and higher per capita incomes attracted many younger Sikhs away from ingrained tradition and religious values that others held sacred. This opened large gaps within Sikh society. Though Mrs. Gandhi had agreed in 1970 to transfer Chandigarh to the recently divided Punjab as its sole capital, that simple act had never been carried out, for Haryana’s mainly Hindu populace vigorously demanded adequate compensation. The prime minister tried to appease Sikh frustrations by appointing a Sikh, Zail Singh, as her home minister, in charge of police nationwide, yet most of the Punjabi leaders distrusted Singh and soon came to distrust Gandhi even more. Though in 1982 she nominated Zail Singh to be the first Sikh president of India, even that symbolic elevation of a member of the small Sikh minority to the highest office in India’s secular republic failed to quell the rising storm over Punjab. 

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“I am proud that I spent the whole of my life in the service of my people ... I shall continue to serve until my last breath and when I die, I can say, that every drop of my blood will invigorate India and strengthen it.”

By the early 1980s some Sikhs were calling for more than mere separate provincial statehood, instead demanding nothing less than a nation-state of their own, an autonomous Sikh Khalistan, or “Land of the Pure” similar to that granted to Muslims with the creation of Pakistan.  More moderate Sikh leaders  unsuccessfully attempted to prevent civil war. Extremists like Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale won the support of many younger devout Sikhs around Amritsar, who were armed with automatic weapons and launched a violent movement for Khalistan that took control of the Sikhs’ holiest shrine, the Harmandir Sahib (Golden Temple) in Amritsar.

Gandhi and her government appeared completely unable to prevent the increasing politically-motivated killings and acts of terror in Punjab, Haryana, and Delhi. She knew that nationwide elections would have to be called by January 1985, and the overwhelming Hindu majority of India’s electorate would likely judge her government too weak to be re-elected. In 1984, therefore, Gandhi authorised “Operation Bluestar” against the Golden Temple. Early in June, after a night of artillery fire, the army moved tanks and troops into the temple precincts. The battled raged 24/7 for 4 days and hundreds of innocent people were caught in the crossfire – in addition to the deaths of 100 soldiers. Khalistan had its first martyrs in the 450 Sikhs who died (some estimates suggest a much higher death toll). In retaliation, on October 31, 1984, Gandhi was shot dead by two of her Sikh bodyguards inside her garden in New Delhi.

Immediately, mobs of bloodthirsty thugs descended on Sikh neighbourhoods in and around Delhi, where they set fire to cars, homes, and businesses and launched a massacre of Sikhs that left thousands dead and many more thousands wounded and homeless in the worst religious riot since partition. The 1984 anti-Sikh riots remain one of the darkest periods of India’s history. 

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“The purpose of life is to believe, to hope, to strive.”

Following Indira’s assassination, her 40-year-old son, Rajiv Gandhi, took over as prime minister – despite having not even been a member of his mother’s cabinet. It took him several days to appeal for an end to the violence and to deploy the army to stop the “orgy of murder and terror in Delhi”. Several well-known leaders of the Congress (I) Party in Delhi were accused by human-rights activists of having incited the Hindu mobs to violence, but none was ever accused in any court of law or sentenced to any jail term. Thus, Indira’s reign ended in violence and unrest.

It has been said that “Indira Gandhi’s ‘soft-spoken, attractive personality masked her iron will and autocratic ambition, and most of her Congress contemporaries underestimated her drive and tenacity.” While it is not unusual for men to underestimate the political acumen of women, Indira proved one of the most influential Indian leaders – for better or for worse.

My boyfriend’s dad described Indira as “India’s Iron Lady” and as I wrote these posts I couldn’t help but notice the parallels between Indira Gandhi and Maggie Thatcher. Both undoubtedly made history by becoming the first women leaders of their democratic nations, both did serve to defeat (seemingly) more conservative branches of their governments, improved the economy (albeit at a high cost to public well-being) and lead their nation to decisive victories in (somewhat controversial but nonetheless widely celebrated) wars abroad. However, like Thatcher, Gandhi’s initial promise as a pioneering feminist icon was dampened by policies which increasingly punished the most vulnerable in society and abused their power at the expense of the lives of their own citizens. Gandhi’s troubling policies of forced sterelization – while perhaps more explicit – are reminiscient of Thatcher’s paradoxical degradation of her fellow women despite her own feminist achievements. I almost did my PhD on the Indian state’s treatment of Sikhs – and having researched the 1984 anti-Sikh riots in some detail – I am left with an especially poor view of Gandhi and her domestic policies.

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“Let us not forget that in India the symbol of strength is a woman; the goddess Shakti.”

However, I am also wary of drawing a direct comparison between Gandhi and Thatcher – or indeed between Gandhi and her male contemporaries. India is (at least according to recent statistics on women’s education, employment, and domestic violence) the most patriarchal society in the world in terms of its shocking women’s rights records, and even today the ideal Indian woman is one who stays at home caring for her husband and sons and who defers to man’s authority in the public and private sphere. My masters thesis focussed on toxic masculinity in India and its Hindu justification, so in a sense I had always admired Gandhi for rising above the gender norms of her society and achieving a feat which at the time even women in supposedly more progressive Western countries had not achieved. As the above quote reminds us, goddess worship is a huge part of the Hindu religion and Indian society as a whole – and the female power is often respected and feared more than its masculine counterpart. The conflict between empowerment and patriarchy in Indian society has fascinated me throughout my academic career, and I feel that no one better embodies this paradox than Indira Gandhi.

Thus, Gandhi remains a controversial and complex figure in Indian history. Personally, I think it is important that she is remembered not only because she permanently changed the landscape of South Asia, but so that little girls (especially in societies which undervalue, under educate and under protect their women) know that nonetheless they can reach the top. However, we must hope that when they do, they are less corrupt, ruthless, and divisive than their predecessor.