May You Be the Mother of a Hundred Sons (29 page)

When Shastri died of a sudden heart attack in 1966, the leading Congress party bosses, a group dubbed “the syndicate,” turned to Mrs. Gandhi as their choice. In their eyes, her main advantage was that she could be easily managed and manipulated; many women had held political positions in India, but always at the behest of men, and no one thought a woman capable of independent leadership. Mrs. Gandhi was also a Nehru, a name that still stirred the nation. After her election in Parliament as prime minister, the dramatic expectations inherent in that name were made evident by the excited crowds who greeted her as she emerged from the building after her victory. They shouted not only “Long live Indira” but also “Long live Jawaharlal”—causing one of Mrs. Gandhi’s biographers, Dom Moraes, to observe that it was as if her father had been reincarnated in his daughter’s body.

The India that Mrs. Gandhi encountered upon taking office was a vastly different country from the one her father had led. By 1966, the post-independence euphoria had been replaced by a severe economic
crisis; drought and the costs of the 1965 war with Pakistan had caused rampant inflation and the threat of famine. Mrs. Gandhi had a tentative first year, but the syndicate soon learned that the malleable “dumb doll,” as one opposition leader had called her, had no intention of doing their bidding. Less than six months after becoming prime minister, under pressure from the World Bank and the United States, Mrs. Gandhi infuriated party elders with her surprise decision to devalue the rupee, which theoretically would have made Indian exported products cheaper and thus more competitive on the world market. Party leaders had been consulted only at the last minute, and she had ignored their objections that the devaluation would make India a pawn of the United States. The bosses of the old guard, who as contemporaries of Nehru felt that they were the true heirs to power, increasingly came to think that they had created a monster. They broke away from Mrs. Gandhi, and in 1969, following a battle over the choice of a Congress candidate for the figurehead post of Indian president, the party split. It was widely believed that Mrs. Gandhi had cleverly set the stage for the battle for her own political gain, and her critics were appalled. Nayantara Sahgal, whose mother, Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit, was Mrs. Gandhi’s aunt and a bitter political rival, wrote that “her strategy to gain control of her party had displayed a militancy foreign to Congress tradition. She represented something ruthless and new. She had astonished people with her flair for cold assessment, shrewd timing, and the telling theatrical gesture; above all, with her capacity for a fight to the finish, even to bringing the eighty-four-year-old party of liberation to rupture.” As Mrs. Gandhi later said: “My father was a saint who strayed into politics. I am a tough politician.” Her power was complete in 1971, when she was reelected in a landslide. That same year, civil war broke out in Pakistan. India invaded East Pakistan to help the region defend itself against West Pakistan, and East Pakistan consequently emerged victorious as the independent nation of Bangladesh. India became the supreme power on the subcontinent, and Mrs. Gandhi the paramount leader.

But power in India is volatile, and two years later, as Mrs. Gandhi’s government struggled to contain an economic crisis brought on by inflation, two severe droughts and increases in the price of oil, her popularity had sunk to an all-time low. An uprising against her leadership was gaining force in the state of Bihar, led by Jayaprakash Narayan, a populist Gandhian-inspired reformer. Mrs. Gandhi’s critics charged her with mismanagement and corruption and closely followed
the court case filed against her by a socialist member of Parliament, alleging irregularities in her 1971 election. In June 1975, the High Court ruled against the prime minister, convicting her of two counts of electoral corruption and declaring her election to Parliament invalid. The opposition immediately cried for her resignation, but Mrs. Gandhi responded two days later by arranging power failures at Delhi’s newspapers and then sending the police to arrest opposition leaders in predawn raids at their homes. When the capital awoke later that morning, on June 26, 1975, the government-controlled radio was announcing that a state of “Emergency” had been declared. Mrs. Gandhi, invoking a law left over from colonial days, said a period of authoritarian rule was necessary because of “a threat to internal stability” and a fear of insurrection. Over the course of the next two years, some fifty thousand people were reportedly jailed, many without knowing the specific charges against them. The press was censored, constitutional guarantees of civil rights were suspended and the democracy that India had so long fought for seemed destroyed. Mrs. Gandhi continued to insist that “if we have these curbs today, it is because democracy was in danger. A handful of people were trying to stop the functioning of the will of the majority.” The West watched aghast as the leader of the world’s largest democracy moved increasingly closer to the role of despot. She installed her brash younger son, Sanjay, to run an aggressive slum-clearance and population-control program, and rumors of forced sterilizations led to sometimes violent protests.

Early in 1977, Mrs. Gandhi surprised everyone by calling for elections at a time when she was apparently convinced that the Congress party would win easily. But the voters turned her out of office, and Morarji Desai, an opposition leader whom she had imprisoned two years earlier, became prime minister. The
Indian Express
, one of the leading opposition newspapers, editorialized that no government such as Mrs. Gandhi’s could assume that it could “drive a coach and four through the Constitution and the laws, make inroads on the liberties of the people and hope to escape nemesis from an outraged people.” Over the next three years, Mrs. Gandhi spent a brief time in prison, formed the breakaway Congress-I (for Indira) party and exhaustively toured India in an attempt to return to power. The failures of Desai’s government and her own popularity with the masses of Indians, despite her obvious flaws, paved the way for victory. In the 1980 elections, the Congress party won two thirds of the seats in Parliament; afterward,
Indira Gandhi said that the triumph had been achieved “entirely on my name.”

Her last years in office were a time of improved relations with the United States, and also of personal tragedy. When Sanjay, her favorite and heir apparent, died in a plane crash in June 1980, she kept tight control of her emotions in public, but in private, friends recalled, she was a devastated mother, deeply depressed and adrift. A year later, Indira Gandhi wrote to her friend Pupul Jayakar that sorrow “can be neither forgotten, nor overcome. One has to learn to live with it, to absorb it into one’s being, as a part of life.” It surprised no one in Delhi, however, when Mrs. Gandhi quarreled with Sanjay’s widow, Maneka, and eventually threw her out of the house because, she said, she had discovered that Maneka was attempting to form an opposition party under her own roof. In fact, she had never liked the shrewd Maneka at all, and she seemed to be reacting less like a politician than like a typical Indian version of the aggrieved mother-in-law. “They both really behaved like rustic village women,” Khushwant Singh recalled.

Throughout her private travails she remained preoccupied with what she saw as constant threats to Indian unity, and she worked to bring down a number of state governments—Kashmir, in particular—with which she disagreed. Fatally, she clashed with radical secessionists among the Sikhs, who wanted to create an independent Sikh nation in the strategically and economically vital border state of Punjab. In June 1984, in a move that would set in motion her assassination, Mrs. Gandhi sent in Indian troops to flush out Sikh terrorists holed up in the Golden Temple in Punjab, the holiest shrine of the Sikh religion. After a thirty-six-hour battle, as many as twelve hundred were reported dead, including Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale, the most militant of the secessionist leaders. The Sikhs never forgave her. Four months later, as Mrs. Gandhi was walking from her residence to her office on the grounds of the compound, two of her Sikh bodyguards turned their submachine guns on her, riddling her body with bullets. She was declared dead the same day at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, and her only surviving son, Rajiv, was immediately sworn in as prime minister. The Nehru legacy had passed from father to daughter to son, and the family had become independent India’s first political dynasty.

During my years in India, I often went to Mrs. Gandhi’s Safdarjung Road home, which had become a museum after her death. It was close to our own house in Delhi, and as I walked with the crowds of Indian
tourists past Mrs. Gandhi’s old study and dining room, I tried to imagine what she might have been like. Even by Indian standards, it was a modest house for a prime minister, no larger than the bungalows the government provided for important cabinet members and judges. But unlike so many of those houses, whose drab, bureaucratic furnishings gave one the feeling that their occupants were just passing through, Mrs. Gandhi’s residence, even as a museum, reflected the personality of a woman who cared about the small things—the flowers, the carefully selected art, the combination of subtle colors—that turned a house into a home. In back of the house there was a large well-tended garden of lush grass and rose beds, with a curving cement path that led toward the building she had used as an office. She had walked that route on the morning when her bodyguards turned their guns on her, and I always had an eerie feeling as I followed it. At the end of the path, in what I thought was one of the more macabre memorials to the fallen prime minister, were several brownish spots of what was said to be Mrs. Gandhi’s blood. The stains were preserved on the path under a plastic covering and were watched over by guards with submachine guns. It was the last stop on the tour, and all of the Indian visitors soberly took pictures. To me, the brutal memorial of blood was a final counterpoint to the gracious woman of the well-kept household, revealing the defiant, warlike part of her psyche that Indians knew as Durga. Every time I left the house, I regretted that I had not had a chance to meet the world’s most famous Indian woman—and, indeed, one of the most remarkable women of the twentieth century—but I also realized that one of the most explosive eras in modern Indian history had come to an end.

IN THE MONTHS AFTER MRS. GANDHI’S DEATH, A NEW AGE FOR WOMEN
dawned in Indian politics. Pollsters determined that women in particular supported Rajiv Gandhi in the December 1984 Congress party elections, in part out of sympathy for his mother, but also because they seemed willing to put their faith in a young man who was a symbol of both continuity and change. Rajiv, eager to prove that he would be a progressive prime minister as well as Indira’s son, responded by creating a new Ministry for Women and Social Welfare and selecting a woman to run it. While his mother was prime minister, people seemed to have been blinded by her power and position to the absence of women in government. Rajiv named Mohsina Kidwai, a veteran
of Congress politics, to his cabinet, as the union minister for health and social welfare. Under Mrs. Gandhi, not a single woman had been a member of the cabinet. Rajiv appointed another woman as deputy chair of the upper house of Parliament, named two others to top positions within the party, selected a third as a minister of state and said that 20 percent of the seats in the legislative assemblies should be reserved for women. None of these were radical steps; like most politicians, Rajiv Gandhi was an incrementalist rather than a revolutionary, and later he would enrage feminists with his slow response to the sati in Rajasthan and his handling of legislation relating to a controversial Muslim divorce case. But there was no question that the climate had changed. In October 1985, in response to criticism that the new women’s ministry might become a ghetto where women’s problems would be shunted off from the larger concerns of government, Rajiv Gandhi reorganized it as a separate department within the Ministry of Human Resource Development and put one of the women stars of the Congress party, Margaret Alva, in charge. Alva was forty-three, straightforward, a lawyer who had successfully argued before the Supreme Court of India that Indian Airlines stewardesses should be subject to the same employment conditions as stewards; earlier, a stewardess had had to quit when she married or became pregnant. More than anyone else, Margaret Alva represented the new kind of woman who had come into power at the invitation of Rajiv, but who had risen in politics both because of and despite Indira Gandhi.

I first met Margaret Alva one hot summer day in her office at the Parliament building in Delhi, the majestic, circular red sandstone monument designed by an assistant to the English architect Edwin Lutyens and built on a scale that clearly indicated that the British intended to remain in India forever. Margaret Alva was a woman who bustled competence, but she was harried that day, having sandwiched me in between other appointments, and I remember watching as she gulped a cup of coffee in fifteen seconds flat. She was dressed in a simple cotton sari, and had a scrubbed, attractive face. She told me that she had been active in student politics in college, but after her marriage she began raising a family of four and settled in comfortably at home. “I refused to budge,” she said. Her husband’s parents, however, had been the first couple to serve together in the Indian Parliament, and Violet Alva would have no slouch for a daughter-in-law. “She kept telling me,” Alva said, “ ‘You’re wasting your time sitting at home. You have so much talent. Why don’t you do something?’ ” She became active in
local politics in the southern city of Bangalore, and in 1974 Indira Gandhi appointed her to the upper house of Parliament. Margaret Alva left Congress amid party infighting with Mrs. Gandhi in 1979, but Rajiv brought her back in 1982. By the summer of 1988, the last time I spoke with her, Alva had become one of the most powerful women in Rajiv’s government. The official biography put out by her office concluded with this: “She combines many roles but is proud to be a wife and mother—devoting a good part of her time to domestic duties.” It was standard boilerplate for a woman member of Parliament—the unwritten assumption was that Margaret Alva was perfectly welcome in Parliament as long as she did not neglect her responsibilities at home—but it also happened to be true. “You’re doing two full-time careers, unlike the men,” Alva said with an air of resignation. “And yet we women are always told we’re the weaker sex.”