How a ‘dumb doll’ became ‘The Empress of India’!

 

A tribute to Indira Gandhi on her death anniversary

How a ‘dumb doll’ became ‘The Empress of India’!

Jawaharlal Nehru had already plunged into the freedom movement before Indira was born. On 5 October 1917, Annie Besant- founder of the Indian Home Rule League- was received at Allahabad Railway Station and carried in a procession by a huge crowd, including the nationalist leaders Jawaharlal Nehru, Sarojini Naidu and Bal Gangadhar Tilak, to Pandit Motilal Nehru’s palatial Anand Bhawan. Indira was born six weeks later on 19 November. She was born into a famous family that made huge sacrifices and dedicated totally to the cause of independence of India. She had grown up as a ‘freedom’s daughter’, deprived of normal childhood, as both her parents were deeply involved in the freedom struggle. To Nehrus the national duty came first before the personal life. 

Indira as a child was neglected. She had to change her schools several times. She often lived a lonely life in Anand Bhavan.  She was a weak child, having one ailment or other all the time. Like her mother, she was also a TB patient. In November 1924, Kamala Nehru gave birth to a boy.  He was premature and died two days later When Gandhi heard the news, he sent a telegram on 28 November: ‘Sorry about baby’s death, God’s will be done’. It was destiny. Had the boy survived, the history of Nehru family would have taken a different course. Because she was sick and suffering from TB, and not in good health, doctors advised Indira against getting married, and if she ever married not to have a child. She married Feroze Gandhi much against opposition, defying all odds. But she had a very troubled married life. Both Feroze and she wanted divorce at some time. Yet again the destiny cast its spell. Feroze died in 1960; that paved the way for Indira to play a bigger role in national politics. Her famous surname Gandhi became synonymous with the Congress Party. And ‘The Gandhi Family’ continues to determine the course of Indian politics.

 

Indira was not interested in politics, When Pandit Nehru died, she was no one in the Congress. She was not a member of Parliament. She widely travelled with her father, met the world leaders getting the first-hand knowledge of international relations; well informed about world politics than her contemporaries. And yet she wanted to settle down in England for a quiet life. As Katherine Frank writes in her biography Indira: The Life of Indira Nehru Gandhi, “the irony of Indira’s secret dreams and plans in the autumn of 1963- dreams of escape not only from politics but from India as well and above all the dream of ‘finding herself’ -was that she was nurturing them at precisely the time that many others assumed she was manoeuvring to take over power from her father.”

 

Then, how could Indira Gandhi become the Prime Minister of India? In 1963, an American Journalist Welles Hangen wrote the book entitled After Nehru, Who?  He interviewed the aspirants to the Prime Ministership ‘after Nehru’- Morarji Desai, Krishna Menon, Lal Bahadur Shastri, Y.B. Chavan, Jayaprakash Narayan, S.K. Patil, and Brij Mohan Kaul. The Chief Minister of Madras K. Kamaraj came out with a plan in August 1963- called the Kamaraj Plan- that cabinet ministers and chief ministers should resign to take up organisational work for the party.  Desai charged that the plan was not Kamaraj’s idea, but rather Nehru’s plot to install Indira Gandhi as his successor. Indira pointed out that if her father wanted her to succeed him, he would have asked her to get elected to Parliament, but during the run-up to the 1962 general election and earlier they agreed that she ’should not go into Parliament’. Kamaraj resigned as the Chief Minister and became the President of the Congress Party.

 

The Congress held its annual session at Bhubaneshwar in January 1964. Nehru suffered a stroke. Congress leaders like Orissa Chief Minister Biju Patnaik’ urged Indira to take over as Deputy Prime Minister. She refused. On 22 January 1964, Lal Bahadur Shastri re-joined the Nehru cabinet as Minister without Portfolio and assumed major responsibilities. An Indian Institute of Public Opinion survey carried at that time on the question of ‘After Nehru, who?’ placed Shastri as first choice, Kamaraj second, Indira third and Morarji Desai fourth. Pandit Nehru who ruled India for 18 long years, during her crucial formative period died on 27 May 1964. Some three million people lined on the streets, standing ten to twenty deep, when his body was carried to cremation site. Shastri met Indira at Teen Murti Bhawan on 30 May and urged her to take on the leadership of the country, which she refused. 

Kamraj, the Congress President, and the Syndicate backed Shastri and after a good deal of manoeuvring, Desai reluctantly withdrew from the field, and Shastri became the unanimous choice of the party. He was sworn in as the Prime Minister on 9 June, taking over from the Acting Prime Minister Gulzarilal Nanda. He wanted Indira in his Cabinet and offered her the post of the Minister of External Affairs that she refused. She eventually joined his Cabinet, on the persuasion of President Radhakrishnan, as the Minister of Information and Broadcasting. Shastri died of heart attack in Tashkent on 11 January 1966.

 

Having lost the position to Shastri in 1964. Morarji Desai was determined to win the race this time. There were seven aspirants for the Prime Ministership- Desai, Indira, Gulzarilal Nanda, Y.B. Chavan, S.K. Patil, Sanjeeva Reddy and Kamaraj. Kamaraj, although a highly skilled politician, lacked a national following. To those who prevailed on him to succeed Shastri, he responded, “No English, no Hindu. How?”.  His refusal cleared the way for Indira Gandhi.  What went in her favour? She “was a national leader; she spoke English and Hindi; she was not identified with any caste, region, religion or faction; she was popular among Muslims, Harijans and other minorities and with the poor. Above all, she was a Nehru. For all these reasons, she emerged as the choice of the Syndicate who had anointed Shastri and now turned to her”.

 

Indira was everything Desai was not. For the Congress bosses her greatest asset was her weakness, their perception that she was weak.  So, the choice of Indira was actually a negative decision. Kamaraj persuaded his colleagues that Indira would do their bidding, that they could run the show, as it were, by remote control. They would thereby enjoy that rarest form of political power, which gives the privileges of decision without its responsibilities. They believed this possible not only because she lacked administrative experience, but also because she was a woman. Kamaraj and the Syndicate assumed that Indira would be ‘pliable, weak…a lump of clay they could mould and remould according to need’. And ‘as a Nehru, she would also, crucially, help win the 1967 election for the Congress’, after which she could be dumped. The old guards in the Congress grossly misjudged Indira Gandhi- staunchly independent and courageous- hailed by the press as ‘the only man in a cabinet of old women.’

 

Indira Gandhi was the choice not only of Kamaraj but also of the powerful Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister D.P. Mishra, who was a key player because of his influence with other chief ministers. He was able to persuade eight chief ministers to back Indira and on 15 January they issued a statement supporting her. And four more chief ministers jumped on Indira’s bandwagon later on the same day; and she had the support of 12 out of 14 chief ministers. She also found another important ally in the President of India Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan. He was an old friend of Nehru. He ‘coached her on how to manoeuvre’. Indira emerged ‘as a coalition candidate’, thanks to the efforts of Kamaraj, Mishra and Radhakrishnan.

On 19 January 1966, the day of the Congress Parliamentary Party election, Indira went to Rajghat and Shanti Van and paid homage to Mahatma Gandhi and her father.  At the Congress Parliamentary Party election meeting, some 526 MPs were present. Indira Gandhi was elected as the leader of the Congress Parliamentary Party.  She had beaten Desai, 355 votes to 169. She emerged from Parliament to be greeted and garlanded by the jubilant crowd waiting for her. ‘Indira Gandhi Zindabad’ filled the air along with ‘’Lal Gulab Zindabad’. On   24 January, she was sworn in as the Prime Minister.

 

It was a Hat Trick for Allahabad, with all the first three Prime Ministers of independent India hailing from that holy city of ‘Sangam’. And ‘from her first moments as Prime Minister Indira was perceived as her father’s inheritor, even as his reincarnation’. Thus, Indira Gandhi, mocked as a ‘dumb doll’ by her political rivals, was destined to become the most powerful Prime Minister- ‘The Empress of India’, leading the world’s largest democracy for nearly two decades. She was history’s chosen child; left an indelible mark on history. In 1999, she was voted as the’ Woman of the Millennium’ in a poll conducted by the BBC.

 

In hindsight, one can argue that without Indira Gandhi at the helm of affairs. there would have been no green revolution; no nationalisation of banks; no abolition of purses and privileges of princes, and most importantly no liberation of Bangladesh and dismembering of Pakistan, demolishing the two-nation theory that led to the partition of India, which secured India the greatest military victory in history. And, of course, without her as the Head of the Government, there would been no call for the ‘total revolution’ and the nation-wide campaign to remove her from power by Jayaprakash Narayan and the opposition leaders leading to the declaration of emergency.