National

Mother Fixation

‘India = Indira’. That famous equation helped manufacture a modern deity.

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Mother Fixation
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In parts of rural India, even today, people fast on the death anniversaries of three figures from recent history, points out historian Bipan Chandra—Mahatma Gandhi, Bhagat Singh and, yes, Indira Gandhi. In remote villages among the lush coffee estates of Chikmagalur, says Congress functionary B.K. Hariprasad, Indira Amma finds pride of place among the deities worshipped at home. And Union minister Kamal Nath and senior party leader Ajit Jogi still seek votes in the name of Indira Gandhi in the wilds of Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh.

V.S. Naipaul may have dismissed the Indira era in India: A Wounded Civilisation (1977) as years of drift and aimlessness and written scathingly of “the simplicity of a country ruled by slogans”. And well-known journalist B.G. Verghese, who was her media advisor (1966-69), does say, “Indira Gandhi spoke in the name of the poor, but most of her welfare programmes were just a tactical ploy to outmanoeuvre her rivals.” But he also admits that she had “the vocabulary and capacity to bring out rural women at public meetings, unlike Nehru. She would go to their homes, into their kitchens. She created a political consciousness and democratised politics”. And over the last year, her role in bank nationalisation has come in for fresh recognition. “India would have been ruined,” stresses Bipan Chandra, “after last year’s economic meltdown but for bank nationalisation.”

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Indeed, a quarter century after Indira Gandhi’s assassination in 1984, her life and death, in equal measure, are in some remote way still part of the collective imagination of many of those who live on the margins. “She was the only person after Mahatma Gandhi to have reached out to the masses over the heads of the classes,” says Union minister S. Jaipal Reddy. Indeed, the Congress knows only too well that its claims to representing the poor still rest on the seemingly frail shoulders of the woman who won the general elections in 1971 for them with the evocative slogan, “Woh kehte hain Indira hatao, mein kehti hoon garibi hatao.”

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Indeed, it is this “winning” part of Indira Gandhi’s troubled legacy that the Congress continues to cling to, excising the ugly memories of the Emergency, a grim period in free India’s history. Tucked away in a profile of Indira Gandhi on the Congress website is just one bland line: “The Navnirman movement...and Jayaprakash Narayan’s call for a ‘total revolution’ caused tension all over the north and led to the declaration of internal emergency in 1975.” And the Indira Memorial Museum,  housed in a Lutyens bungalow at 1, Safdarjung Road in Delhi, in which she lived and died as prime minister, and which attracts close to 10,000 visitors every day, typically glorifies her martyrdom. The spot where she fell to her assassins’ bullets is where every visitor’s journey ends, her fateful last walk marked by a rippled frozen river ending in a patch of clear glass through which the bloodstains are still visible.

In sharp contrast, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), assorted socialists and the journalists, academicians, and legal luminaries who bore the brunt of her excesses believe her legacy should be defined only by that dark period. Kamal Nath, a close associate of Sanjay Gandhi, contests this. “The Emergency only resonates with the political class,” he says. “Don’t forget that JP gave a call to the police and army to revolt. Those who were agitating were using extra-constitutional means—and the Emergency, a constitutional measure, was a response to that.”

Intriguingly, distinguished journalist Inder Malhotra, who wrote a definitive biography of Indira Gandhi in 1989, says, “In my book, I said the Emergency was a cardinal sin. I haven’t changed my opinion. But today, the whole perspective on it has changed: two-thirds of India was born after that period; they know nothing about it and care even less. It used to be impossible once to say anything positive about Indira Gandhi in the company of Indian intellectuals. That’s changed. Now, more and more responsible people agree that Indira Gandhi and JP scripted the Emergency together.”

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Indeed, Bipan Chandra’s book In the Name of Democracy: JP Movement and the Emergency (2003) says precisely that. In that context, he points out how prescient Mahatma Gandhi was: “He told Pyarelal in 1943 that the sort of movements being waged against the British cannot be waged in independent India. Nobody, he said, should exceed certain limits in a democracy.”

Of course, the BJP’s reading of the Emergency is different because of the centrality of that period to its politics. The “resistance” offered by RSS and BJP (then the Jan Sangh) members, who formed a crucial part of the JP movement, helps the party project those 18 months as its “freedom struggle”. Especially, as Hindu nationalists played no role in the independence movement.

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But, interestingly, even the Sangh parivar is ambivalent in its approach to her. Atal Behari Vajpayee had famously hailed her as Durga after the Bangladesh war, and after her death, his colleagues in the saffron brotherhood vied with each other to praise her. In 1984 itself, RSS ideologue Nanaji Deshmukh paid her a glowing tribute, saluting her courage. Two decades later, in 2005, RSS sarsanghchalak K. Sudarshan lauded her for dismembering Pakistan in 1971, while the VHP’s Giriraj Kishore called her a “He-Man”.

Indeed, Indira Gandhi’s critics and admirers alike agree that the Bangladesh war marked her finest hour. Hyperbole flowed in Parliament after her victory. Socialist Samar Guha described her as “the flaming sword of the national personality of our country today”. Not to be outdone, the Muslim League’s Ebrahim Sulaiman Sait declared, “Today we have one party, the Indian nation, and one leader, Smt Indira Gandhi.” Even as recently as 2007, Indira Gandhi’s usually mild-mannered grandson Rahul Gandhi thundered at an election rally in Bareilly, Uttar Pradesh, “Members of the Gandhi family have achieved the goals they targeted, like the freedom of the country, dividing Pakistan into two, and taking the nation into the 21st century.” The significance of the Bangladesh war “lies in its conclusive rejection of the two-nation theory”, points out eminent sociologist Yogendra Singh, adding that “it falsified the premise on which India was partitioned.”

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Clearly, Indira Gandhi was too complex a person to be defined by any one act in her two decade-long reign over India. Says Inder Malhotra, “However populist her message, however dubious her methods, her devotion to India can’t be questioned—she did everything to expand its autonomy and power. In her time, India first learnt to feed itself through the Green Revolution and joined the exclusive nuclear club after Pokhran-I. She would have swallowed poison rather than compromise with her country’s honour. There’s her own testimony. ‘How can one be an Indian and not be proud of India?’ she asked. India, in short, was her God.”

Twenty-five years after her death, the deeply paradoxical nature of her legacy continues to fascinate all those who try to assess her. Indira, messiah, martyr or monster? There is no clear answer, certainly not one answer.

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