Sad, Lonely, but Never Afraid

By Otto Friedrich

Indira Gandhi: 1917-1984

An interviewer once asked Indira Gandhi if it was true, as he had heard from one of her aunts, that she had been the family pet. "Would you say," he pressed on, "you were a spoiled child?"

Gandhi's crisp answer: "No." There was a long pause, and then she added, "On the contrary, I felt rather deprived of everything." After another pause, Gandhi began talking about when she was three and all her English dolls and dresses had to be destroyed because Indian nationalists were boycotting foreign goods. "My first memory was of burning foreign cloth and imported articles in the courtyard of the house. The whole family did it."

The next year, hardly aware of what was happening, she perched on her grandfather's knee as he and her father were sentenced to prison for opposing British rule in India. Her father, Jawaharlal Nehru, was to spend years in prison while his only child grew into a shy, frail adolescent. He wrote her a long series of laboriously educational prison letters, now widely read in Indian schools, that covered the whole history of the world. "They were the only companionship I had with my father," she later recalled.

It is difficult to assess the enigmatic and contradictory personality of the woman who ruled India for most of two decades, but the roots must lie somewhere in those years of loneliness. Daughter of a champion of democracy, she made herself at one point a virtual dictator. She could be warm and charming but also arrogant and ruthless. She always had a look of sadness. "I like being Prime Minister, yes, but... I am not ambitious," she once said. And on another occasion: "I could have become an interior decorator. I could even have become a dancer."

When Indira Priyadarshini (the second name means Dear to Behold) was born on Nov. 19, 1917, in Allahabad in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh, the Nehru family servants gathered around to pay homage to the master's elaborately swaddled infant, and one of them misguidedly congratulated Nehru on the birth of a son. Perhaps he did wish for a political heir; if so, it had to be Indira, for there were to be no other children.

As a little girl, Indira liked to climb on a table and, as she recalled, "deliver thunderous speeches to the servants." Once the foreign-made toys had been destroyed, she arranged her Indian-made dolls in Indian circumstances, some as demonstrators marching for independence, some as British police clubbing them on the heads.

Her mother Kamala was a demure and subservient woman who had been found for Nehru by his father; it was an arranged marriage, and the acquired bride was greatly scorned by Nehru's Westernized female relatives. While the men were in prison, Kamala developed tuberculosis, so she was sent to Switzerland to convalesce. Indira went with her, to two bleak years at a school near Geneva; then, after Kamala's death, she went on to Somerville, a women's college at Oxford. One relief from her loneliness was a penniless but galvanizing Indian student in London, Feroze Gandhi.

Feroze had been studying in Allahabad some years earlier when the sickly Kamala collapsed while marching in an anti-British demonstration outside his college. He took her home, became slightly infatuated with her and lingered around the house as a friend of the family's. He hardly noticed Indira, who was five years younger than he. But after the two had returned home to India from blitzed and threatened London, Indira announced in 1941 that they wanted to get married. Nehru was dismayed; he needed Indira to run his household. Feroze had no money, no job. "Nobody wanted that marriage, nobody," Indira said later, but she was adamant. Nehru himself wove a pink cotton sari for her to wear as her wedding dress. In 1944, Rajiv was born, and two years after that, Sanjay.

Nehru never ceased to make demands on Indira, and his daughter never stopped acceding to them. She repeatedly left Feroze's home to preside over social functions for her father. When Nehru became independent India's first Prime Minister in 1947, Indira moved back into his house with her two sons and became his official host. That was in effect the end of her five-year marriage, though she never divorced Feroze. He won a seat in Parliament in 1952, occasionally made bitter sarcasms about Nehru and died of a heart attack in 1960.

As "the nation's daughter," Indira accompanied Nehru everywhere, to Washington three times, to Peking and Moscow. Usually she walked a few steps behind her illustrious father, always deferential, ready to be of use. Nehru trusted her and confided in her, but even as she neared 40 she had no political status, made few speeches, offered little advice. She knew everyone, but no one took her very seriously.

In 1955 the Congress Party asked her to serve on the 21-member administrative working committee. She did well, organizing charities, making speeches for social-welfare causes and traveling widely on party business. But those efforts would hardly have made her president of the party within four years. Her elevation was partly an honor to Nehru, then at the height of his power, and partly the result of a complex intrigue. Younger officials in the party hoped to use Gandhi as a well-liked figurehead with which to challenge the old-line bosses who traditionally dominated Indian politics.

Gandhi proved a surprisingly forceful administrator of the party bureaucracy. She weeded out a number of time servers, promoted younger officials, negotiated agreements among rival factions; she also played a key part in ousting a Communist state government in Kerala. But after a year she quit, saying that she had to devote all her energies to her father.

Now past 70, and more than a decade in office, Nehru was becoming increasingly disillusioned and crotchety. Sometimes he snapped at Indira, too, saying "Don't talk nonsense" or telling her to keep quiet. She unfailingly did as he ordered. One night in January 1964, Nehru finished a speech, then suffered a stroke and collapsed in Indira's arms. For more than four months, she not only nursed him but aided him in running the country from his sickbed. When Nehru died of another stroke that May, a dry-eyed Indira supervised every detail of the tumultuous funeral and flew in the plane that scattered his ashes across the countryside.

Then she collapsed in tears. Almost every time someone spoke to her, she would start crying. Nehru's successor, Lai Bahadur Shastri, wanted her to serve as Foreign Minister, but she wanted no public office at all. Only after ten days of Shastri's pleading did she agree to serve as Minister of Information and Broadcasting, a minor post. After less than two years in office, Shastri suddenly died, and the Congress Party bosses could not agree on a successor. They turned to Mrs. Gandhi as someone who could serve while the struggle for power went on.

And so, at the age of nearly 50, and with very little official experience, Indira Gandhi almost accidentally became the leader of India's millions. She seemed to have no clear idea of what to do. The economy lurched into a major recession, bad weather brought threats of famine, and a general election the following year sharply reduced the Congress Party's majority. "The Prime Minister has no program, no world view, no grand design," one of her aides later commented. Mrs. Gandhi corroborated that analysis, in a way, when she said, "I have a housewife's mentality when I go about my job. If I see something dirty or untidy, I have to clean it up."

Yet to the astonishment of her original supporters, Mrs. Gandhi turned out to be a fighter. In 1967 she proposed a controversial ten-point program that included nationalizing the commercial banks and cutting off the government's $6 million annual subsidies to a variety of maharajahs and princelings. When conservative opponents rallied around her chief rival, Deputy Prime Minister Morarji Desai, she dismissed him from her Cabinet. When the party chiefs, angered by her leftward turn, expelled her for "grave acts of undiscipline," she went to the Parliament and won a vote of confidence. When she called a surprise election in 1971, she triumphantly captured more than two-thirds of the seats. And when civil war broke out between the two regions of neighboring Pakistan, she sent in troops to help transform East Pakistan into the new nation of Bangladesh.

Mrs. Gandhi was at the peak of her power, but she was still unable to deal with the huge problems of governing India. The costs of the 1971 war, which had brought millions of refugees pouring into India, helped send the economy into another spin. The badly divided Congress Party was widely accused of graft and incompetence. Mrs. Gandhi's main interest was in claiming the role of a great power. She detonated India's first atom bomb in 1974 and reached out for Soviet aid and weaponry to re-equip India's armed forces.

Then came the great crisis and the great fall. In 1975 a court in Allahabad convicted Mrs. Gandhi of having violated the electoral law by misusing government property in her last campaign. The court not only canceled her election to Parliament but barred her from holding office for six years. Her opponents in Parliament immediately claimed that the ruling meant she must resign as Prime Minister, but Mrs. Gandhi instead declared a state of emergency. The police rounded up and jailed opposition politicians, union leaders, student demonstrators--some 50,000 people in all. Civil liberties were suspended, the press censored. Even her old rival Desai, by then 79, who had claimed that "Mrs. Gandhi is worse than Hitler or Stalin," was hauled off to prison. Some believed she acted under the malign influence of her younger son Sanjay, but she defied all critics. "In India, democracy has given too much license to people," she said. "Sometimes bitter medicine has to be administered to a patient to cure him."

Mrs. Gandhi surprised everyone by calling elections early in 1977. She apparently believed that the people would once again rally behind her. To her consternation, the vote went overwhelmingly against her. Desai emerged from prison to become the new Prime Minister. Mrs. Gandhi was arrested on a charge of corruption, then released, then rearrested the following year and released again. Mrs. Gandhi's opponents soon fell to quarreling with one another, and when the nation once again voted, in January 1980, it swept her right back into power.

Having freely given up her office before being reelected, Mrs. Gandhi to a certain extent had healed the injuries that she had inflicted on Indian politics and on her own reputation. By now she had become a national heroine. "Indira zindabad [Long live Indira]!" the crowds would shout wherever she went. Millions knew her simply as Madam, or Madamji, or Amma (Mother), or even just She.

Inevitably, perhaps, Mrs. Gandhi attracted more violent emotions. "Once a man poked a gun at me," she said not long before her death. "Another time, in Delhi, someone threw a knife at me. And then, of course, there are always the stones, the bricks, the bottles" When she was speaking to a crowd in Orissa in 1967, a stone smashed her in the face, breaking her nose and cutting her lip. She pulled her sari over her face to cover the blood, but refused to leave the podium. "I am frequently attacked," she said. "But I'm not afraid." That was the kind of woman who died last week: not afraid, only surprised at the men who shot her as she was greeting them in her garden.

--By Otto Friedrich