Incidentally, India’s first Deputy Prime Minister Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel’s official birthday, 31 October, is also the martyrdom day of his daughter-like Indira Gandhi, the Prime Minister of India. The daughter of the first PM Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, Indira Priyadarshini - dear to behold - was shot by two of her security guards on 31 October 1984 at 9.20 a.m. as she was walking from her residence to her office. Riddled by bullets, she fell mortally wounded to the earth, surrounded by growing things. She fell close to grove of kadamb saplings she had planted that rainy season, after the June tragedy in Punjab. She had ordered an Indian military operation, Operation Blue Star, which was carried out between 1 and 8 June 1984, to remove militant religious leader Jarnail Singh Bhinderanwale and his armed followers from the buildings of the Harmandir Sahib complex in Amritsar. Immediately after her death, the Sikh President of India, Zail Singh, got her son Rajiv Gandhi sworn in as the Prime Minister. Smt. Gandhi’s death led to the killings of more than 3,000 Sikhs in Delhi. Rajiv too was blasted off in 1991 by the LTTE militants at Sriperumbudur.
Indira was born at Allahabad on 19 November 1917. It was the year of the Russian Revolution. She was the only child of her parents, Jawaharlal and Kamla Nehru. Nehru family was a family of freedom fighters and right from her grandfather, Motilal Nehru to Indira Nehru Gandhi were jailed during the freedom movement. She got married to a Zoroastrian, Feroze Gandhi, in 1942, went to Kashmir for honeymoon for two months and on return Indira had to go to jail when Gandhiji gave a call of “Quit India” in August 1942 along with most of the Congress leaders, including Gandhiji, Kasturba, Pandit Nehru, Sardar Patel, Maniben and Maulana Azad. They were sent to jail by British authorities. As her married life turned out to be traumatic, she focused more on politics.
Having been elected to the post of the President of Congress in 1959, followed by her induction in the Union Ministry, she was and being elected as the Prime Minister in 1966 for the first time. She could change her image of being a “Goongi Gudia”( dumb doll) to “the only man in the Cabinet”. Indira could establish grip over the party by “using” senior leaders like K. Kamraj and industrial magnates like K. K. Birla. She got rid of her own Deputy PM Morarji Desai, who was also the Union Minister in her father’s cabinet, managed to get her own nominee V. V. Giri elected to the post of the President of India at the cost of making the official candidate, Neelam Sanjiva Reddy, loose and splitting the party in 1969.
When PM Indira Gandhi was disqualified as the elected Member of Parliament from Rae Barelly after losing the court case in Allahabad High Court in 1975, she was keen to resign as the Prime Minister but was persuaded by her “kitchen cabinet”(Siddharth Shankar Ray, Rajani Patel and H. R. Gokhale) to impose the Emergency and even extend the term of the Lok Sabha for one year. During 19-month long Emergency, she imprisoned most of the opposition leaders but declared the Lok Sabha elections in January 1977. When the elections were held, not only the Congress lost but PM Indira Gandhi along with her younger son, Sanjay Gandhi, both the villains of the Emergency, were defeated from their own seats.
“Shrimati Indira Gandhi had one good quality of not being pressurized by anyone. But she was self-centred. Whatever she did was aimed at keeping herself in power,” K.S. Sudarshan, an arch-enemy of Nehru family and the God-father of Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) told Shekhar Gupta on 17 April 2005 at RSS headquarters, Nagapur. The late RSS Sarsanghachalak (Chief) considered Smt. Gandhi “among our great leaders” adding, “I don’t think Vajpayee has done anything great.” Gupta, the then Editor-in-Chief of Indian Express Group and presently the Chairman of Editors Guild of India, records his most talked about NDTV interview with Sudarshan in “Walk The Talk: Decoding Politicians”. His book carries the NDTV interview of Sonia Gandhi, her daughter-in-law and former President of Indian National Congress (INC) saying: “There is no way we can say the Emergency was right and-as Indira Gandhi herself said- It wasn’t right.”
Indira Gandhi may be called a dictator or an autocrat, but she was groomed by her father to fight and her killer’s instinct made her stage a comeback in power in just a gap of three years even after losing 1977 election. Even when the cow-belt or a Hindi belt discarded her leadership, the Southern India stood by her. She returned to the Lok Sabha from Chikmagluru, Karnataka. Incidentally, when this writer started working as a political correspondent with the Hindi section of Hindusthan Samachar, a National News Agency at Mumbai, almost the very first assignment was Smt. Gandhi to interact with her at Santacruz Airport VIP Lounge! She was on her way to Chikmangaluru after losing her Rae Barelly seat in U.P. After all Smt. Gandhi was a human being. She always felt lonely even among the crowds. Her father and mother never had a happy life together. She herself lost her husband at an early age. Her younger son, Sanjay, died in an accident leaving her to drag her elder pilot son, Rajiv, to be on her side in political life despite her Italy born wife, Sonia, not in favour of joining politics. Smt. Pupul Jaykar has presented the real Indira in her first ever biography “Indira Gandhi: A Biography”. It was Smt. Gandhi who in the '70s first asked Smt. Jayakar to write her biography. Says Smt. Jayakar: "She was prepared not only to help me, but to spend time with me to enable me to understand the contradictions that made her life so complex and obscure." It was in 1986 that she decided to write the biography.
As a Prime Minister of India, Indira Gandhi maintained as a top leader of the Non-Alignment Movement (NAM), her father had nourished. Never accepted dictates from USA or USSR then. One would be tempted to give due credit to her for her contribution in the liberation of Eastern Pakistan making her the Bangladesh in 1971. Under her leadership, the State of Sikkim was merged with India following the referendum in 1975. She never compromised the national interests and could never be bullied by the Super-powers. Every ruler has some drawbacks or weaknesses but it is a time to pay tribute to such a great leader of India evaluating her contribution.
Next Column: Swami Dayananda Sarswati on 1857
(The writer is a Socio-political Historian. E-mail: [email protected] )
