Gandhi, Indira

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GANDHI, INDIRA

GANDHI, INDIRA (1917–1984), prime minister of India (1966–1977 and 1980–1984). Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru's only child, Indira Gandhi was elected to succeed him as prime minister, just two years after his death. Born in Allahabad in the palatial mansion of her grandfather, Motilal Nehru, Indira was reared in lonely luxury. Her mother, Kamala, soon after Indu's birth, was incurably afflicted with tuberculosis. Indira seemed so frail a child that her "Auntie Nan," Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit, the first woman to preside over the United Nations General Assembly, feared that "Indu-Boy" (as Nehru fondly called his daughter) might somehow have caught her mother's illness. Indira would emerge more powerful, however, than any man in Nehru's Cabinet.

Education and Marriage

Indira learned her best lessons in history and politics from her brilliant father. During several of the long years Nehru spent behind British bars, he wrote weekly letters to his daughter, offering her "glimpses of world history." She had another remarkable teacher as well, Bengal's Guru-Dev (Divine Teacher) Rabindranath Tagore, to whose private college Shanti-niketan (campus of peace) she went for little more than one year, obliged then to accompany her mother to the Swiss sanatorium in which she died. Nehru was released from prison to visit his wife and daughter in Europe and went to Moscow for the tenth anniversary of the birth of the Soviet Union. Both Nehru and Indira were to remain ardent Socialists for the rest of their lives. Indo-Soviet friendship became a powerful pillar of Prime Minister Gandhi's foreign policy. V. K. Krishna Menon, Nehru's alter ego in London, became Indira's close friend and adviser. Her future husband, Parsi Feroze Gandhi, long devoted to her sick mother, accompanied Indira in her travels around Europe just prior to and during the first few years of World War II. Nehru strongly opposed the marriage, but Indira prevailed, marrying the husband she chose in March 1942.

Political Power

Indira's son Rajiv, heir to her premier power, was born on 20 August 1944. Her second son, Sanjay, born three years later, died in a stunt plane crash in Delhi three years before his mother. Indira's own passion for power was long hidden behind her seeming disinterest in office, but as Nehru's official "hostess" and constant traveling companion during his decade and a half as prime minister, she learned all that was required to be chosen by her Congress Party colleagues as India's first female prime minister in 1966. Her first half decade at the top proved so successful that Indira Gandhi was virtually worshiped by millions of Indians and Bangladeshis as an incarnation of the "Mother Goddess" Durg?. She led India to victory over Pakistan in the Bangladesh War, when Dhaka surrendered in mid-December 1971. "Madam" Gandhi had signed a twenty-year Indo-Soviet Treaty of Friendship that June, which provided India with heavy Russian tanks and artillery for its campaign across Bangladesh, as well as potential "nuclear support" if India were ever threatened with a U.S. attack. The independence of Bangladesh, after a quarter century as East Pakistan, diminished what remained of Pakistan by more than half its population, also stripping Islamabad of most of the hard currency earned from the export of Bengali jute. Indira Gandhi thus towered over South Asia as its most powerful premier, hailed by her own people as "Mother India," admired by Bangladeshis as their nation's "Liberator," feared by Pakistan's fallen General Yahya Khan and by his humiliated successor, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto.

Decline and Fall

Though Indira reigned supreme in foreign affairs, domestically she faced increasingly difficult problems and mounting political opposition. Global inflation of crude oil prices hit India's economy harder than it would have in times of peace. Unemployment rose sharply and strikes wracked Bihar and Bombay soon after the war had ended in so stunning a victory. Railroad workers and miners joined in slowing down, if not closing, crucial sectors of India's urban economy. Former Congress colleagues of Nehru called upon his daughter to either take appropriate action in helping heal open wounds or "step down." Bombay's Congress leader, Morarji Desai—who had run unsuccessfully against Indira for Nehru's mantle, later joining her as finance minister in her Cabinet—resigned after she ignored his advice. Now he led a popular Janata (People's) Party opposition movement, together with Bihar's Jaya Prakash ( J. P.) Narayan, Nehru's oldest Socialist comrade-in-arms, aimed at forcing Indira to resign or suffer ignominious national electoral defeat.

In May 1974, faced with mounting internal opposition, Indira Gandhi triggered India's first underground nuclear explosions—warnings both to Pakistan's bellicose new premier Bhutto, as well as to Morarji and J. P., of just how powerful "Mother India" was. But Janata Party opposition only grew louder, and in June 1975, Allahabad's High Court Justice Jag Mohan Lal Sinha found Prime Minister Gandhi guilty of two counts of electoral malpractice, each carrying mandatory penalties of resignation and abstention from elective office for six years. Rather than step down, however, Gandhi had her president declare a "National Emergency," giving her dictatorial powers, imprisoning her opposition, including Morarji and J. P., banning every opposition party, shutting off power to Delhi's news presses, and canceling elections. India remained under her autocratic power in darkness and fear for a year and a half, from 26 June 1975 until 18 January 1977. Indira Gandhi's "Emergency Raj" was the most shameful and tragic period in more than half a century of India's independent rule.

The Janata Party's victory in national elections of April 1977 appeared to end Gandhi's political career. Yet constant squabbling among the aged leaders of that coalition only proved them impotent to solve any of India's most pressing problems, reopening doors of power to "Madam Gandhi," who returned in January 1980, on a popular wave of electoral support. Gandhi was faced in her last four years with growing opposition from Punjab's Sikh community. Militant Sikhs demanded an independent nation-state of Khalistan (Land of the Pure). Gandhi tried to counter Punjab's most popular Sikh leaders with younger candidates of Sanjay's choice, whom she thought they could "control." By early summer of 1984, however, it seemed clear to her that "Sant" Bhindranwale, who seized control of Amritsar's Golden Temple, was no "Saint" at all, but a fanatical extremist determined to lead a Sikh revolt against India. In June she unleashed the army, whose Operation Bluestar left Bhindranwale and all his followers inside the temple compound dead, claiming the lives of one hundred Indian troops and later of Indira Gandhi herself, who was gunned down in her Delhi garden by two of her own trusted Sikh guards on 31 October 1984.

Stanley Wolpert