Indira gandhi: tryst with powerNayantara Sahgal
Penguin
2012, pp 412
399
Deified and disliked in equal measure, ruthless and charismatic, Indira Gandhi evokes strong emotions. Her sterling role in the creation of Bangladesh, highly personalised style of functioning, encouragement to personality cult, tolerance of corruption, contempt for democratic norms that led to the dark days of Emergency to preserve her hold on power have left a lasting imprint on Indian polity.
Dynastic politics that she ardently promoted is well entrenched now. But the person who presided over the destiny of the nation for so long still remains an enigma. Twenty-eight years after her death, it is time to assess dispassionately her troubled legacy.
Indira Gandhi: Tryst with Power authored by well-known novelist and political commentator Nayantara Sahgal throws light on the real Indira helping to unravel to some extent the mystique surrounding her. Being Jawaharlal Nehru's niece and Vijayalakshmi Pandit's daughter gives her unique access to information on her cousin's personal life and rise to power. When published 30 years ago, the book had created a sensation as it was a no-holds-barred attack on the Emergency.
Sahgal finds that a sense of insecurity haunted Gandhi throughout her life. She had a troubled childhood marked by prolonged absence of parents. The loneliness and early death of her mother shaped her personality as too private "a person whom nobody knew intimately." The marriage with Feroze Gandhi against Nehru's wishes was an uneasy one.
She never tried to encourage family ties. Nehru's death was an opportunity to end relationships. All along Gandhi nursed a grudge against her father's kin as her mother had not got her due recognition from the more sophisticated Nehru clan, a fact that Sahgal refers only in passing. This has drawn her more to her mother's family.
She measures her cousin's democratic credentials with Nehru's legacy. She faults Gandhi for straying from Nehru's path of consensus and compromise.
Though she was elected prime minister through consensus, her ascendency in the congress marked decision-making as her sole prerogative. While Nehru believed in the freedom of the press, any dissent was anathema to the daughter. Nehru's cabinet had many stalwarts who were on equal terms with him.
But Gandhi went all out to cut senior colleagues to size. She felt safe only in the company of mediocre people and tried to remove any sign of emerging leadership. What mattered was only personal loyalty. Sahgal compares Gandhi surrounded by sycophants to a ''reigning medieval monarch surrounded by a panoply of a court, its flattery, its intrigue…''
Bulk of the book is devoted to developments leading to the imposition of Emergency. She argues that the transition to dictatorship was not a sudden development but the culmination of a steady erosion of democratic values since the days she locked horns with Congress old guard.
Bank nationalisation and the presidential poll ushered in an era of populist politics and leadership cult. Her demand for committed civil service, attempt to gag the press, the centralisation of power and meddling in states and detention of thousands of opposition activists get adequate attention. Sahgal terms Gandhi's record on the economic front dismal and terms it a lost decade.
She frittered away the goodwill and optimism generated by the 1971 elections. The hopes on radical economic reforms soon evaporated. The author is scathing in her attack on Gandhi for her crackdown of the immensely popular JP's movement.
Her refusal to acknowledge facts about Sanjay Gandhi's misdeeds including the Maruti affair had been an "emotional blind spot." She pushed systematically the idea of dynastic rule. To Sahgal, Sanjay's death was a "providential removal of the most sinister presence modern Indian politics had known."
The new edition has a chapter — Completing the picture. She calls her cousin a "fascinating paradox." While claiming that she was following her father's footsteps, she was making a total break with his policies. Though she had no hesitation to suppress democratic rights and personal liberties at home, she doggedly pursued a foreign policy to ensure the creation of a democratic Bangladesh. She argues that Gandhi was not a democrat in practice, though she yearned for a democratic image.
It was this yearning that forced her to call elections during the Emergency much against the advice of Sanjay. The new chapter is lighter as it provides more personal touch and anecdotes involving Gandhi. She recalls the time when they wept together at Teen Murti Bhavan after Nehru's death. The chapter also refers to her wide-ranging interests in arts, crafts, classical music, theatre and literature and how she disliked fuss and clutter around her.
Tryst with Destiny is a seminal work, a bold evaluation of Gandhi era and a caution on the need for eternal vigil to preserve the civil liberties that we have taken for granted. It is a study of her political style by a person who had watched her at close quarters giving an insight into certain unknown facets of the inscrutable persona.