"A Woman and the Power" by Lucas Turks
Indira Priyadarshini Gandhi, née Nehru, knew how to raise the Indian
subcontinent to the role of great power, governing the most populous democracy
of the world in the most difficult period of its history: that of the development.
Infancy and prepolitical life
Born on November 19 1917 in Allahabad, Indira was the only daughter of Kamla
and Jawaharlal Nehru. The latter was the first president of independent India
and that was only the apogee of a life completely pervaded by the politics. Since
the tender age, Indira was involved in the struggle for the independence of India
to which each member of her family actively participated. Her grandparents, uncles
(among which Vija Lakshmi Pandit, first woman called to preside the UN) and parents,
were cyclically halted for crimes against the British Empire, forcing her since
that time to assume several responsibilities as housewife.
It happened straight that in some occasions all the components of the family
were arrested and she was the only one to be free. This already happened at the
age of 4 and in the decade that followed, it was a rather frequent eventuality
. The hard treatment which her parents had received during the long periods of
imprisonment, weakened notably the health of her mother that was forced to spend
a long convalescence in Switzerland, accompanied by little Indira that she had
just celebrated her eighth birthday.
The distance from the native country and the studies in a Swiss college modified
her vision of the world forever. In fact, originating from a very rich family
and culturally at the vanguard, she would have been able to abandon herself in
the traditional reserve of the Indian women waiting for a good marriage that guaranteed
her a prosperous future. Contrarily, spending the first years of the adolescence
in a foreign nation allowed her to see the reality of her nation with the eyes
of a detached observer, able to also see the defects and the problems, maintaining
unchanged the homeland love transferred to her by her father.
Reentered in India, she became active in the guerrilla against English already
at the age of 11. She founded the Monkey Brigade, a formation constituted entirely
by kids that was inspired to the Monkey army of the Monkey epic Indian poem Ramayana.
Composed by more than 6.000 members, the movement had active role in the struggle
for the independence furnishing an accurate and sure service of transmission of
the communications among the delegates of the movements for freedom and attaching
with impunity some English barracks. As she remembered, in this first part of
her life it was of enormous importance the proximity of her father and the Mahatma
Gandhi who didn't ever exclude her either from the political discussions either
from the active participation in the actions of protest and struggle. About this,
she said: “… my choices had been influenced by them, from the spirit
of equality that they infused in me; my obsession for justice comes from my father
that had received it from the Mahatma Gandhi. However, it is not correct to say
that my father influenced me more than the others… they were all to do it,
it was everything to do it…”
The strong relationship with her father, already deeply clear from the letters
that he wrote from the jail during the time of the Monkey Brigade, then collected
in two books become famous, it had been increased from the premature death of
her mother (1934) due to a cancer. The sudden lack of the maternal figure upset
for a long time Indira that until the beginning of World War 2 was disinterested
in the political life, entirely devoting herself to the superior studies, graduating
first to the Visva-Bharati University, in the state of the Bengal, for then continuing
abroad her own studies at the Sommersville College in Oxford, Great Britain.
The approach to the public life
The permanence on the English ground was particularly fruitful for that that
it concerns the political activity of the future leader. It was enrolled in the
labor party and she started an intense activity of support to the movement of
the Indian Congress in which she had entered in 1938. The intensive work consented
her also to enter in contact with other Indian exponents of the Movement in Great
Britain for motives of study and job. Among them, there was a unknown lawyer of
Bombay, Ferozi Gandhi, homonym but not relative, of the Mahatma that succeeded
in making breach in the heart of the youth Indira that until eighteen years old
had professed herself deeply convinced to be able to live without men. That love
that then would have culminated in the marriage in 1942 was strongly opposed from
the whole India. Motives were simple: Indira belonged to a family of Brahmins,
of Hindu religion, while Ferozi was being a Parsee, descending from a cultural
group run away centuries before from Persia to avoid the Muslim persecutions.
The difference of religion, one of the dark evil who torments still today India,
constituted an insurmountable problem for whatever person was born down there,
except for Indira. Her father Nehru was contrary at the beginning to a marriage
that provoked dissension even between the supporters of his party and that let
receive to the bride hundreds of threatening letters a day, but he was forced
to surrender not postponing the wedding of only a day from the obstinate refusal
of her daughter. The ceremony took place in February 1942.
If Nehru had believed that the conjugal life would have been able to change
at least partially the too restless character of her daughter, he would have had
to see well soon that it was not so. Ferozi was also politically involved as much
as her wife. From a union of that kind it could not wait anything else rather
than a hard struggle of opposition to the British occupation. Already six months
after the wedding, the authorities of His Majesty had arrested them with the accusation
of subversive activity. Indira was condemned to 7 years of imprisonment that were
then converted in thirteen months of which only nine indeed passed in the Indian
jails. Her involvement in the struggle for the independence of India was more
and more important and when the country finally got it in 1947, the nomination
of her father as first president of the Indian republic seemed to prelude to her
active participation in the government. Instead where neither the religious fanatics
nor the British police had succeeded, the birth in rapid succession of her two
children does the miracle. The new role of mother convinced her/ to put aside
momentarily her political expectations to devote herself to the family life. In
her memoirs those years are painted as the happiest of her life and there is no
motive to doubt of it, seeing what love tied both sons to their mother.
The separation from the public life lasted until 1955, when the office of first
collaborator of his/her father was entrusted her. How secretary and personal adviser
of the illustrious parent she had the opportunity to get used with the power without
suffering the negative aspects of the pressure caused by the direct use of it.
Already in 1957 in Chamba she officially spoke for the first time in an electoral
rally in place of her father, picking up large consents. Success was really behind
the angle. As it often happens, professional fortunes don't coincide with those
of the family. The larger involvement of Indira in the business of state caused
a progressive leaving from her husband who, accustomed to a calm and measured
ménage, had badly digested the continuous shifts of her wife. The separation
was inevitable, but nobody ever wanted to divorce. There is who says that they
remained married for convenience, but Indira affirmed that the love was not ended
and that the distance was caused only by the job with her father. However it is,
such behavior lasted for little time, because Ferozi Gandhi died in 1960.
The precious year, Indira had gotten the Office as President of the Party of the
Congress, first step toward places of great responsibility. In the 1964 Nehru
died suddenly, leaving his daughter, just chosen to the Indian Parliament, deprived
of his protecting wing. For the succession to the great statesman Indira was not
taken in consideration because she didn't have enough charisma to pretend it yet.
Lal Bahadur Shastri was named Prime Minister. However he didn't forget the faction
of the party that was faithful to the family of Nehru, granting to Indira to become
Minister of the Information.
The conquest of the power
Perhaps, the ability and the determination of Indira would have passed unnoticed
if Shastri had maintained the position for a longer time. The equilibrium of power
would have consolidated excluding the heir of Nehru from the power, also because
of the fact to be a woman in a nation deeply traditionalist. Instead in 1966,
the Prime Minister died for an attack of heart, leaving vacant the most important
charge in India. However, the party of the Congress that firmly possessed the
majority inside the Parliament had inside divisions between a wing of socialist
tendencies to which owned the followers of the stream of Nehru and one of moderate
right driven by Moraji Desai. Both had support among the population, but nobody
had enough votes to elect its own representative. Not to risk that the opposition
took advantage of these inside discussions, it was consented to designate Prime
Minister a figure of compromise that mirrored continuity with the past. Which
better choice than Indira Gandhi, daughter of Nehru?
In addition to such motivations clearly of opportunity there were others more
difficult to confess. Desai was convinced that Indira was easily controllable
and influenceable, therefore the ideal to practice power staying in the shade.
Rarely in the modern history a personal judgment was so wrong. Once conquered
the place, Indira had nearly one year to get ready for the 1967 elections. During
that period she put in practice an aggressive politics against all the evil that
gripped her country, first among all the diffused poverty. She started a nationalization
of the mining and financial resources, finally making independent the Indian economy
from the foreign markets. The nationalization were done only to do them, but were
organized for a vaster project of redistribution of the wealth that let her earn
the appellative of “Communist” that irritated her because she felt herself
socialist, where for socialism it is intended a politics of justice more than
an ideology. In a period in which in the world you could be been or with the Soviets
or with the U.S.A, India looked for a third street, that of the not-alignment.
1966 was also the year when one of the most serious famines that India has
ever struck happened. Well, though hardly tried from the hunger and from the suffering,
the government of Indira refused help from abroad. The bright overcome of those
difficulties was followed by an accurate planning of the births through a revolutionary
demographic politics. Aware of the impossibility to sustain a rate of growth of
a fifth of the population every fifteen years, Indira adopted extremely drastic
provisions that would never have been approved in European countries, but that
were the right action for the gravity of the Indian situation. She even tried
the masculine sterilization decreed by law in limit cases. Though it was an hard
work, she started to teach to her own people that children are a wealth not because
they can already get a new salary at the age of 6 or 7, but rather for the better
future that they can guarantee to India. To whom blamed her that the sterilization
was a barbaric practice contrary to the human rights, she responded that she didn't
find nothing of wrong in sterilizing a man that already had nine or ten children,
especially if this could serve to make better the life of the same children.
Those people that had elected her as figure of transition were shocked in front
of such activity. She was attacked from the most conservative wing of her party
that could not bear that politics of planning in the style of the Soviet quinquennial
plans were applied in the Indian Democracy. More times Indira risked losing confidence
at the Parliament, she knew how to sustain the government until the 1967 elections.
The work developed in so little time was so appreciated by the people that an
overwhelming victory came unexpected. The party of the Congress got 355 seats
in the Parliament. Unfortunately, the equilibrium of power inside the Party was
slightly modified in favor of Indira and so she has to accept contingent necessity,
naming Deputy Prime Minister Moraji Desai. The four years until 1971 served for
consolidating her own position. The banking reform started in 1966 was continued,
transporting in public hand the whole capital that circulated for the private
financing. However, instead that to go toward a useless and harmful statalism
she planned a program of industrial improvement that enormously availed itself
of the facility of access to the credit, previously limited from the friendships
and from the corruption. The great Indian nation seemed to have begun the long
way to become a true modern state.
The 1971 Indo-Pakistan war
Unfortunately, the dream risked breaking down in 1971 for the becoming acute
of the crisis with Pakistan. The two countries had been united until 1947 under
the British domination and subsequently separated in base to purely arbitrary
criterions used to separate the populations that professed the two principal Indian
religions: the Islam and the Hinduism. Large migrations forced million of persons
to abandon their own native lands to reach the coreligionists, but the high concentration
of Muslims in the East Bengal, at more than three thousand kilometers from the
rest of the territory destined to the Islamic people, it didn't allow the move
toward Western Pakistan of the population resident there. At the moment of the
independence, it was taken the odd decision to give birth to Pakistan as it was,
separated in two parts, of which the second, that is the East Bengal, entirely
dependent from India for that that it concerned the economy and the communications.
The Kashmir affair and the conflict that had followed it in 1947 had not done
anything else other than making worse the feeling of encirclement that conditioned
enormously the foreign politics of India, threatened also from the other uncomfortable
neighbor, China.
The already precarious relationships between Pakistan and India quickly degenerated
for the inside instability of the state of Islamabad, deeply divided by political
and personal rivalry that could be identified with two persons: Mujib Rahman and
Zulfikar Alì Bhutto. In the 1970 elections, the former had gotten the absolute
majority in Oriental Pakistan, while the latter in Western Pakistan. The Pakistan
constitution had made arbiter of the situation the president of the republic,
Yahya Khan who for the whole 1971 winter consented full liberty to the two contenders.
Mujib, aware of the power that he has gained, exposed himself in stronger and
stronger manner complaining the independence of Oriental Pakistan until directly
communicating this desire to Bhutto in a personal meeting that happened on January
27 1971. The fact that neither Bhutto nor the president Yahya had anything to
object to that project let believe to Mujib to have free hand in the business
of Eastern Pakistan. For two months he built an ample net of contacts and supporters
in preparation of the secession, holding also public speeches about this argument.
You can imagine what his surprise was when on March 25, President Yahya declared
the martial law in the whole Oriental Pakistan without any warning. The military
command of the operations against the secessionist was entrusted to the general
Tikka Khan that in the night between March 25 and 26 unleashed his troops in the
city of Dacca, capital of the oriental province. Certainly, the conspirators against
the unity of Pakistan were all halted, but the soldiers were not limited to this.
There were mass shooting and hanging of whoever was suspected to have collaborated
with them. The regular troops gave themselves to the looting and they raged against
the local population with cruel premeditation. The official figures of the massacres
speak of 50.000 corpses from the sunset until the dawn. The horror caused by the
army pushed a tide of civilians to look for salvation in India. The union of race
between the inhabitants of the West and Oriental Bengal politically divided only
by little more than 20 years, it let believe to the fugitive that the only way
out it was really in that direction. Between 2 and 5 million of oriental Pakistan
citizens crossed the border towards India, held not back by the authorities of
Pakistan, too busy in the restoration of the order in the high spheres of the
power to be able to also be dealt with the humanitarian aspects of the exodus.
It is still not clear the reason that is at the base of the actions of Indira
Gandhi that followed those sad dark moments. India would also have been able to
sustain all the fugitives that after all before 1947 were considered Indian citizens
and that had relatives in the whole West Bengal. Instead, on November 26 1971
was definite a military intervention in Eastern Pakistan. Officially, the push
toward a new war was for stopping the flow of fugitives, but it can be more probably
affirmed that Indira had seen in that action a good occasion to break that encirclement
that she believed that India was suffering.
The effort of the Indian army was enormous. The Pakistan troops displaced in
the oriental part, also fighting for the survival of their own state, were immediately
in difficulty. For a long week the Pakistan units that from the Kashmir up to
the Indian Ocean they garrisoned the western border, stayed inactive. Only on
December 2, when it was thought that Islamabad had accepted the loss of the region
of Dacca, the Pakistan army started an ample offensive preceded by aerial operations
of preventive interdiction in the zone of Jaisalmer. The Indian general command
was initially surprised from the strength of the attack and from its extension.
At the beginning, the Pakistan advance was fast, but in few days the situation
changed in favor of the Indians. The Pakistan impossibility to open a second front
at east how it had happened in 1947 consented to the Indians to assemble their
own efforts, focusing them against the province of the West Punjab. The superiority
of the Indian aviation that in the desert between the two nations destroyed thousand
of hostile tanks, made the rest. Already at the end of the month of December,
the war had been virtually won by Indians, even if peace was signed at distance
of years.
The victory of India involved serious consequences on political level from
both parts. In Pakistan, President Yahya Khan was forced to resign, replaced by
Bhutto. Oriental Pakistan conquered independence with the name of Bangla Desh
and Indira Ghandi was transformed in a national hero, guaranteeing herself the
victory in the 1972 elections. Her behavior during the war was unexceptionable.
Every time that was necessary to adopt a crucial decision, Indira took it with
full responsibility. The steadiness that she had shown in time of peace was also
transferred in the war events.
It is demonstration of it, the authorization given by her to use napalm against
the Pakistan tanks. Although that weapon didn't serve for destroying the tanks
directly, it was a good mean to stop the support infantry and to interdict the
stricken zones for a long time. The material destruction and the losses of human
lives were justified by Indira with the necessity to stop the offensive, showing
herself as a real Machiavelli in a female body.
The seventies between success and failure
The fantastic economic and military successes reached in the first five years
of power excessively influenced the action of Gandhi in the following period.
Thinking already consolidated the industrial reform of the country, she underestimated
the course of the financial crisis that crossed the world in 1973. India even
if on the way to the full development was still tormented from the same problems
with which Nehru had had to fight. They were expressed in all their gravity in
a series of popular and syndicate protests that upset Delhi and the north of the
country, complaining wage amelioration and better conditions of life for the middle
class, still too poor according to the international standards. Indira sentenced
that they were only signals of nervousness entirely instigated by her political
enemies. Also if this were partly true, since the party of the Congress preserved
its traditional divisions, the malcontent of the population was real.
The inside opposition in the party decided that it was the proper moment for
an attack without precedents against the Prime Minister and it used as pretext
the 1972 vote campaign. Few testimonies exist of as the facts really were but
the sworn depositions given in 1975 to the High Court of Allahabad convinced the
judges of the presence of some anomalies in the election of Indira Gandhi to the
Parliament. The order was imparted to abandon her hardly conquered seat and she
was banished by the administration for a six-year period. Indira, who had always
sustained the reasons of the pure democracy, accepting the verdicts of the polls,
took a drastic decision. Rather than passively accepting the sentence, she proclaimed
the state of emergency in the country, imprisoning the political opponents and
suspending civil liberties.
The season of the tensions that would have had definitely to consolidate her
power didn’t do anything else other than speed up the decline. The antidemocratic
behavior caused the alienation of the consent of the people that didn't recognize
in her anymore a worthy successor of Nehru. The decrease of consents was so strong
that in 1977 the party of the Congress lost the power. The defeat provoked the
division of the party that till that moment had been postponed by the necessity
of remaining to the government. In 1978 the supporters of Indira created the Congress
Indira Party that consent her to return in Parliament again after a period of
brief absence. Reentered in the environment that was more congenial to her, Indira
started also to plot a hold web of friendships and alliances with other parties
of opposition. Her ability was great and already in 1980 she was named for the
fourth time Prime Minister. At her side she wanted her son Sanjay, preparing a
succession that would have been able to originate a real dynasty.
The twilight and the disappearance
1980 can be considered to all the effects the year of the apogee of Indira
Gandhi. It was, however, a brief glory. Already in that year, in fact, Sanjay
lost the life in an air accident. The great pain of mother didn't let her lose
of sight the situation of the country. She called the active politics the second
son Rajiv, educated in Great Britain and married with an Italian woman. From more
parts because of this choice she was accused of nepotism and it was only the beginning
of the great problems that the eighties reserved her. The increasing wealth of
the states of northern India had let revive independent feelings of the local
populations, never really calmed. Among the most restless ones, there were the
Sikhs, inhabitants of the prosperous state of the Punjab. The great commercial
and industrial ability of this people had modernized their region, up to make
it the richest in the whole India, with 92% of the cultivable lands artificially
irrigated and the totality of the villages served by the electric energy. Prosperity
also corresponded with the desire to found an autonomous state with the name of
Khalistan. The wish of liberty was not entirely founded on the intention to hold
for them the produced wealth, but also on a deep religious difference. The Sikhs,
though being of the Hindus at the origins, are monotheists and they profess equality
between the men, denying the subdivision in castes. The center of the religious
power, the Gold Temple of Amritsar, became also the fulcrum of the political executive
around the figure of the fundamentalist Jarnal Singh Bindranwale.
The relationships between central government and Sikh rebels were enough moderate
at the beginning, but both factions didn't have any intention to withdraw from
their own positions. For whole 1983 demonstrations of protest embarrassed the
government of Indira who, however, always repressed them staying within the legality.
All this increased the attrition until the summer of 1984, when the Sikh community
was assembled in arms in Amritsar around its own leader, complaining once for
all the independence. Indira judged that the time of the negotiations was passed
and she sent the army with the assignment to put down the revolt. The operation
“Blue Star” was an assault to what of most sacred could exist for the
people Sikh. More than six hundred persons were killed from the government soldiers,
among them Bindranwale, but, even more serious facts, the Gold Temple was seriously
damaged.
The answer of the Sikhs was univocal: revenge. A revenge entrusted to the people,
a revenge of race. Indira was not careful of those threats of death that she considered
words said to the wind, so much that she took the decision to maintain in her
own personal guard two Sikhs. It was the most serious error of evaluation of her
life. On October 31 1984, while she was leaving her house to visit the American
actor Peter Ustinov in New Delhi, she was murdered by those two persons who didn't
have any hesitation to unload against her their revolvers, also knowing that they
would have immediately halted, as then indeed it happened. The promised revenge
had been gotten. However, the family line at the government of India was not interrupted.
Rajiv Gandhi replaced her mother as Prime Minister.
In the few days following the death of Indira, the Sikhs were object of massacres,
with over 3000 unjustified deaths. Rajiv had a least part or nothing to do with
that events and this was also recognized by the moderate wing of the Sikh Party,
the Akali Dal that in 1985 concluded a momentary peace with the government. The
weapons would have kept silent for little time. In 1991 Rajiv was killed from
a bomb attack expert during an electoral rally, continuing the sad destiny of
those people who have the name Gandhi.
Painting a portrait of how the character of Indira was, it is certainly arduous.
For her adversaries she was cold and calculator, because contrarily to the common
Indian tradition, she always openly spoke also of inconvenient things for who
hear, while supporters followed her also in the most serious errors that she committed
during his/her long permanence to the power because of its magnetic personality.
It is not up to whom is writing to decide who was right, yet a certain admiration
cannot be hidden for a woman that has been able to drag her immense country from
the Middle Age to the twentieth century.
Sources and other recommended readings: “Interview with the history”
by Oriana Fallaci, Rizzoli 1974, “Indira Gandhi” by Francelia Butler,
Chelsea House 1986, “Indira Ghandi” by Nayana Currymbhoy, Franklin Watts
1985, “My Truth” by Indira Gandhi, Grove Press 1985, “Indira Gandhi:
Ruler of India” by Carol Green, Childrens Press, 1985, “Sikhs, Gold
and blood on the golden lake” by Paolo Galliani, Historia, Quadratum Publishing
1995.
Beginning of Page
|
