Indira's legacy: A role model for Modi?

One of the delightful ironies of the right-wing BJP’s state of mind is that while its leaders hate India’s first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru (Union home minister Rajnath Singh is an exception, who is willing to say that despite disagreement with what Nehru thought or did, there is no denying the fact that Nehru was a great leader, something others in the government, including Prime Minister Narendra Modi, don’t want to acknowledge), they admire, even adore, his daughter Indira Gandhi, the country’s third Prime Minister, who was tragically assassinated by her bodyguards 33 years ago (on October 31, 1984). But the BJP leaders of course can’t afford to say they admire her, though they do in their hearts. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) loves the fact that she successfully fought the 1971 India-Pakistan war and helped in the creation of Bangladesh, and that she was at the helm when 93,000 Pakistan soldiers surrendered on the eastern front. They are also proud of the fact, though again they are shy of admitting it, that she carried out the 1974 nuclear tests. They say that they oppose and even hate Indira Gandhi because she imposed the Emergency in 1975 and sent many of the present generation of leaders, many of whom were then student union leaders and agitators and part of Jayaprakash Narayan’s anti-corruption movement, to prison, and they carry a personal animus against her on this count. But they have no quarrel with her over military success and her decision to carry out the Pokhran-I nuclear tests. They are proud of her, but they suppress it in their hearts because it would be impolitic to admit their endorsement of her stance in these matters. 

Their hatred of Nehru is something else altogether. It is visceral, and it springs from an acute sense of inferiority complex based mostly on their lack of a Harrow-Cambridge education. The agnostic sophisticate Nehru poses a threat to the self-respect of the Hindutva leaders. They are much more comfortable with Indira Gandhi as they believe she was more Hindu than her father, which indeed she was. They envy her more than they hate her about her sophistication, but they know that she does not overshadow them intellectually. Indira Gandhi’s streak of anti-intellectualism pleases the BJP’s Hindutva leaders no end. The BJP’s first Prime Minister, Atal Behari Vajpayee, unabashedly admired Jawaharlal Nehru and he did not hesitate to proclaim it in public. There is reason to believe that the BJP’s second PM, Narendra Modi, somewhat models himself on Indira Gandhi, though he would deny this with all the belligerence at his command, and his admirers are sure to howl in protest over such a comparison. Indira Gandhi learnt from her father’s benign shortcomings — idealism, indecision, romantic internationalism. She became decisive, realistic and fiercely Indian. Contrary to the criticism hurled at her that she was a socialist and leftist, she was no leftist, nor even a socialist.

That is why, when she returned to power in 1980 after the Janata Party fiasco, she understood the need to open up the economy, and pushed the Indo-Soviet Friendship Treaty of 1971 into cold storage, and connected with the United States with an open mind, particularly during the North-South Cancun Summit where she dealt deftly with then US President Ronald Reagan. At the same time, she did not give up the Third World rhetoric and the New World Economic Order, even as she negotiated a $5 billion International Monetary Fund loan, and managed to repay it much before time. She was extremely pragmatic. It would not be too far off the mark to conjecture that Mr Modi has unconsciously taken a leaf from Indira Gandhi’s populist streak. He seems to understand the ultimate power of pro-poor rhetoric and the announcement of welfare measures, which is a reminder of Indira Gandhi’s 20-point programme during the infamous Emergency. And then the “loan melas” she unleashed under then minister of state for finance Janardhan Poojari in her second stint as PM. The Jan Dhan Yojana is an echo of the loan melas, in a way of speaking. Indira Gandhi could be sharp and bitingly nasty, though she rarely hurled personal allegations, to her opponents. She had nothing but contempt for her opponents. Mr Modi displays many of the same traits.

It seems one reason why Mr Vajpayee had to look to Nehru as a role model, and Mr Modi and the BJP look secretly to Indira Gandhi, is the fact that the BJP and Jan Sangh have no powerful role models. Syama Prasad Mookerjee, the Jan Sangh’s founder, was just a memory even for the first generation of BJP leaders like Mr Vajpayee, Lal Krishna Advani and Murli Manohar Joshi.  Though Deen Dayal Upadhyay seems to be the inspiration for much of what passes for the BJP’s thinking now, he remains a weak and distant figure. He was not in active politics and did not become a face and a force the way that his friend, contemporary and socialist leader Ram Manohar Lohia became. Or even Jayaprakash Narayan. It is natural then that BJP leaders, when they came into office,  look back to Congress figures like Nehru and Indira. Critics are sure to point out that this is a wild, unsubstantiated inference — that Mr Modi or others in the BJP admire Indira Gandhi and consider her as a role model.

In the run-up to the 2014 Lok Sabha elections, the BJP campaigned that India needs a strong leader in the wake of the weak leadership of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, and the party projected Mr Modi as the strong leader. The BJP had no model of a strong leader of its own. In the eyes of many in the BJP, Mr Vajpayee failed the strong leader test. That leaves only Indira Gandhi in the field. The army of Mr Modi’s admirers can argue that their hero needed no role model, and that he looks back to the Hindu tradition of the able and strong ruler. Before Mr Modi came on the scene, it was Indira Gandhi who fitted the bill as a strong ruler. So the inference that Mr Modi could be imitating — in  the laudatory sense of the term — Indira Gandhi cannot  be simply dismissed out of hand.