Yeats spoke of things falling apart because the centre could not hold. In our case things have been threatening to fall apart but have not because the centre held. That centre for almost two decades has been Indira Gandhi.
In a strange way, this was true even during the Janata period. Different parties came together in 1977 to form the Janata because they did not believe they could defeat her otherwise. Its constituents held together only so long as they remained keen to keep her out of office. They fell out as soon as some of the Janata leaders overcame their fear of her to be willing to come to terms with her.
For these two decades, especially since 1969 when she decided to risk a split in the Congress party, both our politics and political debates have centred on her. We have been either for her or against her. Either way we have been mesmerised by her. She has served as the loadstar with the help of which we have determined our course irrespective of whether we have wanted to move towards the East or the West.
How are we to explain this phenomenon? Indira Gandhi has by any yardstick been a remarkable person – so calm in the midst of adversity, so determined in the face of a challenge either to herself or to her country, so reticent in a private conversation, so concerned with the problems of those close to her, yet so aloof and Olympian in her personal life. And her hold on the Indian imagination has been equally remarkable. Her assassination has stirred the deepest chord in the Indian psyche, shaking the Indian personality as nothing else has at least since the martyrdom of Mahatma Gandhi.
Some explanations have been offered for Indira Gandhi’s personal chemistry. As far as we know, none has been attempted seriously for her hold on the Indian mind. Right now it is obviously not the time to attempt one. One can only attempt a bird’s-eye view of her career. Girilal Jain does that.
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During one of the many difficult periods in her life as Prime Minister, Indira Gandhi once said to me: I have a job of work to do and I shall do it whatever it takes. Finally it took her life.
Only those who could not understand Indira Gandhi would ask whether she knew the stakes when she ordered the army into the Golden Temple. The cost did not matter; it just could not matter once it had become evident that the Akali extremists were threatening the unity and territorial integrity of the country and that there was no other way to cope with the menace.
Not to speak of opposition leaders and innumerable commentators, perhaps her own aides had advised her to reach a patch- up with the Akalis. Perhaps it might have been advisable for her to go in for a patch-up even if it would not have lasted long. But that would have been uncharacteristic of Indira Gandhi. She just could not bring herself to do so in the face of the Anandpur Sahib resolution with its explicitly extremist and secessionist overtones. After Operation Blue star she said as much.
Indira Gandhi’s commitment to India’s unity and security was unqualified. She just could not stand people whose bona fides in that regard she suspected, for good reasons or bad. This was the basis of her quarrel with Sheikh Abdullah and more recently with Farooq Abdullah. She knew the risks inherent in the removal of Farooq from the office of chief minister. But she was willing to run those risks once army commanders in Jammu and Kashmir had told her that their sources of information had dried up because their informants had been terrorised or driven out of the relevant border areas and anti-Indian elements had been encouraged.
This is not to endorse the specific action but to try and explain the psychology behind it. Indeed, it may be in order to disclose that when in a private conversation I pressed my viewpoint regarding Farooq not being anti-national, she told me in so many words: “He is neither national nor anti-national. He is just incompetent. I am not saying he has himself done all this. But he has not been able to prevent mischief by others. Though we drew his attention to the problem, he still did not act.”
She then went into the history of the Sheikh family, narrated her last conversation with Abdullah on the eve of his death and her own earlier reservations about Farooq. It is not particularly relevant to recall the details. Only an additional point may be made that she was keeping the situation in Jammu Kashmir under close supervision and her principal concern was security.
Despite her almost obsessive concern over developments in Jammu and Kashmir and Punjab, not once even in confidential off-the-record conversations did she ever make an observation which could be stretched to imply distrust of any Indian on grounds of religion.
Indira Gandhi’s decisions appoint Muslims as chief ministers at different times – Barkatullah in Rajasthan, Ghafoor in Bihar and Antulay in Maharashtra – have invariably been interpreted as having been motivated by the political consideration of winning over the Muslim vote. She was a politician and it is natural that she should be influenced by political calculations. But these acts were expressions of two other traits in her psychological make-up. She was daring; her great father had not been able to appoint a Muslim as chief minister though he gave them largely ceremonial offices. And she did not discriminate on communal-religious or regional-linguistic grounds.
This was her inheritance and part of her mental-psychological make-up. This aspect of her personality expressed itself most eloquently in her insistence that the Sikh guards must not be shifted from duty at her residence as a matter of precaution even in the face of the continuing attempts by the Akalis and the head priests to whip up emotions. It just could not occur to her that in the final analysis any Indian would lay his hands on her. And it was precisely because she was so genuinely secular in the Indian sense of not discriminating against followers of any faith that she was such an authentic Hindu.
It has been widely known that in her youth Indira Gandhi saw herself as a Joan of Arc. The end vindicated this self-perception. But I recall this point to make another which is that she was a romantic in the 19th century sense of the term. India for her was not a poor and weak country struggling to feed itself. It was a grand vision; a great civilization worthy of the higher respect, if not emulation by others.
This proposition that Indira Gandhi had a life-long love affair with the India of her imagination and dreams is apparently at odds with the popular view that she was a hard-headed pragmatist and a ruthless politician. But this is a superficial view of a very complex person.
Indira Gandhi was deeply emotional though for a variety of reasons she was afraid of showing it; anyone who cried before her could get almost anything out of her. She was very much of a mother; she loved even grownup people leaning on her. She was anything but ruthless by nature. She drifted and drifted and acted only when she had been driven into a corner.
I am aware that this too does not do justice to Indiramma who remained a bit of a bride till the last day. She hated dowdiness; she was determined to remain not just fit but attractive looking. But she did not see any dowdiness or ungainliness in India. The book of pictures entitled Eternal India for which Indira Gandhi provided the brief text brings that out eloquently. Only an incurable romantic can engage in such a romance. She was born with it and I hope she died with it, for there was much to disillusion her even in circles close to her.
Indira Gandhi was a very proud person. She was proud of being Jawaharlal Nehru’s daughter and Motilal Nehru’s grand-daughter. To be a Nehru meant a great deal to her. But she drew on a much deeper and bigger source – India, the India she so proudly put on display in the Festival of India in Britain in 1982 and was to repeat in the United States in 1985.
This pride found its eloquent expression in her dealings with the superpowers. India, as we know, faced a grave crisis in 1971 and urgently needed Soviet military supplies and assurance of political support. And yet when Indira Gandhi visited Moscow in September that year, she refused to open negotiations on the first day because Brezhnev had been unexpectedly held up in Budapest and she would not deal with Kosygin because he was not the top boss. Similarly, on a subsequent visit to Washington in connection with the same Bangladesh problem, she was so icily cold to Nixon that he almost froze. Such instances can be multiplied but that would not be necessary.
This pride, it has often been argued by her critics, cost the country a lot of money when she, for example, decided to host the Asian Games, the non-aligned summit and the Commonwealth conference. Indira Gandhi was genuinely shocked by such criticism. To her this meant that there were Indians who either out of their hatred for her or out of petty-mindedness did not wish to measure themselves up to the glory that India once was and would again be.
In any case, the pride had its obvious advantages too. No power, however great, could trifle with India when she was at the helm of its affairs. Indira Gandhi was worth several divisions. One common remark in Pakistan when Bhutto was rotting in jail with the hangman’s noose tightening round his neck would illustrate the point. Any number of Pakistanis said that if Indira Gandhi had been in power (the Janata was in office in New Delhi then) she would have sent commandos to rescue him! She would, of course, have done nothing of the kind. But the Pakistanis believed that she would have.
A recent incident, though bizarre, underlines the same point. When a US satellite failed to spot two Indian Jaguar squadrons, the first, almost automatic, American reaction was that Indira Gandhi was planning to destroy Pakistani nuclear establishments. So instinctive and great was their fear of her that they did not even pause to pay heed to the fact that the Pakistani uranium enrichment plant is located in a hardened underground site which cannot be bombed out of existence and that too many Indian targets, including nuclear installations and oil rigs, are accessible to F-16s in Pakistan’s possession for New Delhi to risk retaliation by Pakistan. It is difficult to think of a bigger tribute, though an indirect and an unintended one, to a third world leader.
Implicit in her remark that she had a job of work to do and that she would do it whatever it took were three other propositions. That the task – the building of a powerful India which would demand and secure a place worthy of this once great civilization in the comity of nations – was worth the best effort, that the end would justify the means and that she was the instrument of India’s destiny.
This was an unstable mix which could in certain circumstances get out of control as it did in June 1975 when instead of stepping down in obedience to an adverse high court judgment in an election petition against her, Indira Gandhi proclaimed an internal emergency. This was a mild exercise in authoritarianism; in retrospect at least no dispassionate person can dispute that it had a limited purpose and that it was intended to last for only a limited period of time; for Indira Gandhi called for an election when she was under no pressure to do so. But this sorry episode was to pursue her for her remaining years. It vitiated her relations with a substantial section of the country’s intelligentsia forever.
The mix had similarly got out of control first in 1969 and then in 1978 when Indira Gandhi regarded it necessary to split the Congress party in order to establish and retain her ascendancy in what remained of it with her.
In the deepest sense, however, there was a fatal inevitability about it – not about the emergency or the Congress party split, but about the unstable mix. Only individuals possessed by a sense of mission and destiny (the two invariably go together) pursue great objectives like the establishment and consolidation of nation states of the size and complexity of India. The rest get discouraged too soon. And men and women possessed by such missions are as a rule not squeamish about means. Great nations and empires do not rest on the foundations of the Sermon on the Mount, whatever the pretence.
Essentially the problem is one of maintaining the balance between the three constituents. Indira Gandhi could not always do it. I do not personally believe anyone else could have fared better in this period of our history when we are witnessing the dawn of mass politics and the replacement of an essentially agricultural socio-economic order with its inbuilt stability in all respects, including the moral one, by a commercial-industrial order with its inbuilt instabilities. After all, Morarji Desai could not last as Prime Minister for even 30 months. Indeed, one wonders whether he commanded the necessary authority for a single day.
All comparisons are inept but sometimes they are useful. Thus if Gandhiji’s greatest hour came after independence when he struggled to quell the communal frenzy on the sheer strength of his willingness to die by starvation if necessary, Indira Gandhi’s came after Operation Bluestar when she too demonstrated her willingness to die in the service of her goddess – mother India. It is no accident that both the great son and the great daughter of that mother should die at the hands of assassins. It could not be otherwise. The price had to be paid – in blood and the blood of the tallest devotee.
Nathu Ram Godse was determined to frustrate one dream and Satwant Singh and Beant Singh another. In fact, the two are two facets of the same dream – the dream to build and sustain an Indian nation state. Indira Gandhi is as much a martyr to that cause as the Mahatma. Bangladesh was a minor episode in the drama of Indira Gandhi’s life just as the fight against the British was a relatively simple affair in Gandhiji’s life. For both the true test of their greatness was their readiness to confront the disruptive urges of their own people at the risk of their own lives.
Indira Gandhi is dead, long live Indira Gandhi.
The Times of India (Sunday Magazine), 4 November 1984