Understanding Indira: PM in turbulent times

What do historians have to say about Indira Gandhi on her birth centenary? (It falls on Sunday, November 19.) It will be said that it’s much too early to assess her role, her achievements and failures, that all the source material, including government files and personal correspondence of the period, is not yet available to researchers. Whatever historians in the future may have to say about her, it is curious as to why contemporary historians are shying away from making their tentative judgments. One of the reasons that present-day scholars are hesitant to talk about Indira Gandhi in an objective way is because many of them are caught up in the like-dislike, love-hate attitude towards her. She remains a polarising figure for those who have watched her through her years as Prime Minister, from 1966 to 1977, and again from 1980 till the day she was assassinated on October 31, 1984. The anti-Sikh riots that followed her assassination also clouds the view of many scholars.

Thirty-three years after her death, we still don’t have a decent political biography of Indira Gandhi. The books that have been written about her over the years are quite flimsy from the historical point of view. The exception is Zareer Masani’s book on her that came out in the late 1970s. It is based on documents more than on pseudo-psychological and overtly political perceptions and judgments. It will be many years before we can get a biography of the kind that Sarvepalli Gopal had written about Jawaharlal Nehru in three volumes in the 1970s. And we need something substantial about her for the sake of understanding a crucial phase in post-Independence history. Even the bare facts of her political career are bowdlerised by those who write about her. She was the president of the Congress Party in 1959 and all everyone can refer to is the bringing down of the first democratically-elected Communist government of E.M.S. Namboodiripad in Kerala as though she has done the deed single-handed. Even a cursory reading of the facts as recalled by Judith Brown in her 2003 biography of Nehru shows how the vested interests in Kerala, specially the Christian establishment with its control of educational institutions and lands, was fiercely opposed to Namboodiripad’s land reform measures, and how the state unit of the Congress was pressuring the high command of the party to act. It should be recalled President’s Rule was imposed in Kerala at the time. Therefore, Indira Gandhi’s critics are a little too hasty in nailing her misdeeds. They have no patience even to put all the facts together.

Whatever our view of Indira Gandhi, the debaters, the assessors and the wranglers forget the fact that her first tenure as Prime Minister from 1966 to 1977 was the most difficult period in terms of the economy and politics, notwithstanding the military victory over Pakistan in 1971 and the 1974 nuclear tests. The economy was in a bad shape, there was near-famine conditions in Bihar in the year that she took over as Prime Minister. And she was forced to concede the demand of the Punjabi Suba, which resulted in the formation of present-day Punjab, Haryana and Himachal Pradesh. In the 1967 general election, the Congress got a bloody nose — Indira Gandhi was hit on her nose at an election rally in Bhubane-swar — and it lost power in many states, including what was then Madras, and its majority in the Lok Sabha was reduced. The “spring thunder” from Naxalbari in West Bengal broke out in the same year. She faced internal rebellion in the party, which led to the split in 1969. The heady electoral victory of 1971 was the only positive point on the domestic front. But her landslide victory was not much of a solace because the economic and political situation deteriorated drastically from 1972 to 1975, when she imposed the Emergency. Though critics can see her as an ogress of the Emergency, the historian does not have the luxury of hating her for it. His or her business is to lay out all the facts surrounding the Emer-gency, which would require looking at the situation before, during, and after the 19-month period when the fundamental rights enshrined in the Constitution were suspended.

When she returned to power in 1980, she was forced to take a $5 billion loan from the International Monetary Fund, and had to contend with communal politics in Punjab and in Assam. Her critics and political analysts blame her for mishandling Punjab and for allowing monsters like Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale to emerge, which finally resulted in Operation Bluestar in June 1984 and her assassination in October that year. Such was the blind hatred of Indira Gandhi that her critics, including this writer, chose to overlook the communal politics of the All Assam Students Union (AASU) movement, which led to the shameful and heart-wrenching Nellie massacre. The then leaders of the just-born BJP contributed their dirty mite to the communal cauldron. It was clear that Indira Gandhi was less confident, less strident in her second term as Prime Minister, and she did not control the party which she seemed to do in the years between 1969 and 1975. But a closer look at her first term would reveal that she was tentative, pragmatic in her approach, and it was just a myth created by the detractors that she was the “only man in her Cabinet” or that she was an Iron Lady. It is irrelevant for the assessment of her politics whether she was charming, elegant or sophisticated in her social deportment. She is considered a leader with unerring political instincts, but it turns out to be an error-riddled assessment of overweening political analysts. She was never on firm ground. She was not anchored in political ideology. She was trying out various stratagems to deal with various problems. Some of these succeeded, and others boomeranged. It is time to understand her, rather than vilify or praise her.