Insecure daughter, Betrayed wife, National heroine, tough dictator. She was many things to many people and even today she is the most remembered political figure across the nation. Travel anywhere and ask and the one person they all remember is Indira Amma or Indiraji.
Sagarika Ghose's book, Indira almost throws a floodlight on the woman who ruled the nation for two decades.
“Who was she really close to? Her mother?
Ghose has in fact taken the stylistic freedom of writing writes letters to Indira throughout the book as a way of understanding her better. Is there something about her that still eludes her, she says: ''Who was she really close to? Her mother? Feroze? Sanjay? Who did she feel really intimate with?
These are searching questions with difficult answers. After all, she was an incredibly paradoxical person – and Sagarika admits that that was the reason she wrote those letters because there were so many things about her that she found mystifying. How could someone as astute as her, for example not see what she was doing by encouraging Sanjay the way she did? Or building up a Bhindranwale and then sending the Army into a place of worship? Could she not see the effects this would have? She must have.
Indira Gandhi was a very complex person. No doubt about it. There have been more than 800 books written about her and yet one can write reams about the woman who foxed everyone. Her contradictory personality foxes and intrigues me, like someone who is all sweetness and charm one minute and the next minute a cold and aloof stranger
It was 1971 when Indira Gandhi defied the US and liberated Bangladesh from Pakistan in face of strong global opposition. But she showed steely resolve in her decision and was hailed by no less than Opposition leader of that time Atal Bihari Vajpayee as Durga riding a tiger. A Congressman from Assam famously coined the term India is Indira, Indira is India. The woman-politician had arrived on the world stage dominated by men.
The nation fondly remembered her as the Durga who won India its first decisive military victory in centuries and the strong stateswoman who had the courage to look American bullying in the eye and not blink. But then she is as much remembered as the terrible dictator who imposed the Emergency and tried to destroy institutions ranging from her own party to the judiciary; she is also seen as the woman who shied away from tackling the many of the problems that afflict Indian democracy even today. Even so, for politicians, Indira is the very definition of a strong leader, and a role model on both sides of the aisle.
In this spellbinding story of her life, journalist Sagarika Ghose has excavated not just Indira the iron lady and political leader but also the flesh-and-blood woman. Born in 1917, Indira soon found her life swept up by Gandhi’s call for freedom and Swadeshi. Her family home became a hub of the national movement and Indira marinated in a political environment from an early age. But she also saw politics of another kind. Her sickly mother and she were the targets of unkind attacks from her aunts. And her celebrated father, who had no patience for illness, was desperate to sculpt his daughter into his version of perfection – but Indira simply couldn’t keep up with his expectations. Despite Nehru’s disappointment and dismissiveness, Indira rose to become the unquestioned high command of the Congress and, indeed, the most powerful prime minister India has ever had.
This no-holds-barred biographical portrait looks for answers to lingering issues: from why Indira revoked the Emergency to her son Sanjay’s curious grip over her; and from her bad marriage and love affairs to her dangerous religious politics. This is the only book you need to read about Indira Gandhi.
She reminds one of Tennyson’s poem, The Lady Of Shalott. A person of great personal charm and grace, yet caged in a fortress or a castle of her own insecurities, anger, suspicions and paranoia of others. She was indeed a half hearted dictator because while she imposed the Emergency, she also lifted it. The only “dictator” in history to put an end to her own dictatorship and submit to the power of the vote.
India’s most formidable politician, she was someone who dominated our political narrative and forged a cult of personality so deep that we still feel the reverberations today. Indira Gandhi loomed larger than life for much of India’s post-independence history. On the centenary of her birth, renowned journalist and author Sagarika Ghose takes a look back at Gandhi; delving into not just the wily political animal but the woman with a complex private life. For anyone interested in the making of modern India, Indira: India’s Most Powerful Prime Minister by Sagarika Ghose (Juggernaut Books) is a must read.
It’s not an easy to write a book on Indira Gandhi, a woman with so many shades, so many ideologies, so many colours. And the subject is surely a huge challenge and a great delight for biographers because of the glaring contradictions and the general accusation that she was devoid of any ideological moorings.
Sagarika Ghose's book is one in the hundreds of biographies written about the first woman prime minister of India, though there have been many prime ministers in the subcontinent which is especially significant that the great democracy of the United States of America is still not ready to elect a woman to the highest office in the country.
Where Sagarika has tried to be different is that she has tried to bring Indira alive for an entirely new generation who have little clue of the great woman and her troubled journey in politics – a family of greats and a family that has also suffered great tragedies in its personal life. Mother and son assassinated by militant outfits which they tried to subdue, and another son killed in a terrible air crash.
What this book also strives to achieve is draw a holistic picture of an otherwise enigmatic and paradoxical Indira. On the one hand, she was hailed as the living epitome of Goddess Durga, fearless and bold while, on the other hand, she was known to be meek, insecure and submissive in private.
The only person Indira could really relate to was her mother Kamala Nehru who was elegant and beautiful and yet felt ignored at Anand Bhawan where Nehru’s sisters treated her with scorn because she was not used to the high-life of the Nehrus. Nayantara Sahgal writes, in her book, how at the time of Kamala Gandhi’s death, Indira “saw her (Kamala) being hurt” and “was determined not to be hurt.”
Her to be husband Feroze Gandhi came to her life around Kamala Nehru’s death, as a pillar of support. As Indira confessed several years later that Feroze “was always there for me", she couldn’t have let him go away. The marriage, however, didn't work and she blamed herself for her two kids, especially Sanjay, growing up without a father. Indira could see her own plight in Sanjay’s. Coomi Kapoor writes in her book, The Emergency, that Sanjay adored Feroze Gandhi and “believed that his father had been abandoned and that the neglect of his well-being had led to his early death from a heart attack.” This sense of guilt seemed to have made Indira gloss over Sanjay’s excesses.
Today the present Prime Minister Narendra Modi is rightly or wrongly in some slanted way compared to Indira. But Sagarika has resisted the temptation of making any such comparisons. It’s not a scholarly book on Indira Gandhi, but for anyone looking for a primer on the great woman, Indira Gandhi, it is worth a read.