Indira Gandhi. . .thirty two years after 1984

In November 1971, Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger kept Indira Gandhi waiting for forty five minutes in the White House, where the Indian Prime Minister had gone for an official meeting with the American President. Nixon and Kissinger, none too happy with Mrs. Gandhi over her support for the Bangladesh liberation struggle being waged by the Mukti Bahini at the time, were simply doing their bit to humiliate the Indian leader. When finally they appeared, their visitor kept her cool. She went straight to the point, which was to point out that the American administration was wrong to support Pakistan's Yahya Khan junta when its soldiers were committing genocide in Bangladesh.

The next day, it was President Nixon's turn to pay a return visit to the Indian leader at Blair House in Washington. Indira Gandhi kept him waiting for forty five minutes before deigning to emerge from her private quarters and greet the President. Nixon, with Kissinger in tow, got the point. India's Prime Minister would not be made light of. In her five years as her country's leader, up to that point, Mrs. Gandhi had learned the hard way how important it was to let her counterparts in the West know that she and her country would not stand being treated in cavalier or dismissive fashion. In 1966, Lyndon Johnson lectured her on what India needed to do to feed itself. 'Never again', said the daughter of Jawaharlal Nehru as she headed home. Once back in her country, she set her green revolution in motion. India would feed itself, would be a different land.

Thirty two years after her assassination, Indira Gandhi remains a fundamental point of reference in any deliberations on the nature of political leadership. There were all the low points in her exercise of power, the most telling among which was her decision to go for a state of emergency in June 1975 and under its provisions have India's opposition politicians, veterans as well as new generation ones, carted off to jail. She pampered her younger son Sanjay Gandhi and looked away from all the wrongs he was busy committing in the Emergency period. Inder Kumar Gujral, the minister for information, unwilling to take orders from the callow young man, who held no political office, saw himself transferred as ambassador to Moscow. The censorship clamped on the media did not worry Indira Gandhi, for she thought she was doing her country a world of good through restoring discipline everywhere. It did not occur to her that the Emergency was corroding the fundamentals of India's democratic ethos.

When she eventually lifted the Emergency, she called new elections for March 1977. She lost them, decisively.
And yet there were all the high points in her career. On the late afternoon of 16 December 1971, she told a cheering Indian parliament, "Dacca is now the free capital of a free country." She was unassailable, as invincible as a goddess. She had not only assisted Bangladesh's people, through providing their guerrilla army with moral and material support and giving shelter to ten million refugees fleeing the murderous Pakistan army, but also carried on a global campaign to drum up support for the Bangladesh cause. She travelled the world, asking government leaders in every capital she visited to pile pressure on the Yahya Khan regime toward a political solution to the crisis in East Bengal and to ensure safety of life for the imprisoned Bengali leader Sheikh Mujibur Rahman. In early April 1971, when Tajuddin Ahmad told her Bangabandhu was in Bangladesh leading the resistance against Pakistan, Mrs. Gandhi knew better. Her intelligence agencies had already confirmed that Bangladesh's leader was in solitary confinement in Mianwali in Pakistan's Punjab province.

It did not matter to Indira Gandhi that Pakistan's leaders, military as well as civilian, were forever denigrating her before, during and after 1971. During the election campaign in Pakistan in 1970, for no rhyme or reason, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto unabashedly termed her as 'mai', a pejorative term referring to maid servants in Urdu. At the height of the Bangladesh conflict, General Yahya Khan contemptuously called her 'that woman.' Such uncouth behaviour affected her not in the least. Indeed, hours before President Bhutto was to arrive in Simla for talks with her in the aftermath of the 1971 war, she was horrified to find, in the bedroom set aside for Bhutto, a portrait of hers on the wall above the bed. She swiftly ordered it removed, for she had little wish to humiliate the leader of a nation vanquished by her army. She had the curtains on the doors and windows removed and quickly replaced by new ones that were clearly more aesthetic in appeal.

But epithets had been hurled at Indira Gandhi before. A cantankerous Morarji Desai, unable to accept the young woman's ascension to the office of India's Prime Minister following the death of Lal Bahadur Shastri in January 1966, dismissively referred to her as a 'chhokri', a mere slip of a girl. In 1969, upon the death of President Zakir Hussain, the old men who had helped her to assume prime ministerial office and who were better known as the Congress Syndicate, pushed Neelam Sanjiva Reddy forward as their man to succeed Hussain. Mrs. Gandhi did not take it lying down. She put up V.V. Giri as her candidate. In the event, Giri was elected President. The Prime Minister was able to cut her links to the old men and assert her leadership over the country.

An electoral defeat such as the one which laid Indira Gandhi low in 1977 would have consigned any other politician to history. The Janata government, led by Morarji Desai, went out on a limb to humiliate their nemesis. The new government had, of course, much justification for a prosecution of the fallen Prime Minister and her son. But when the quest for justice and rule of law slipped into being a campaign of revenge on the part of the new government, things began to fall apart. Party infighting forced Desai to resign. His successor Chaudhry Charan Singh too did not last long. Mrs. Gandhi, by that point already back in parliament as a lawmaker from Chikmagalur, was ready to go to the electoral hustings in 1980. She came roaring back to power. The Janata men simply fell by the wayside. India's natural leader, as so many perceived her to be, was back in office.

Should Indira Gandhi have stayed her hand over the issue of Sikh extremism as typified by Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale? The clear truth is that in June 1984, Bhindranwale and his heavily armed band of fanatics, ensconced in the Golden Temple in Amritsar, were hardly in a mood to reach an understanding with the government, one that would have them vacate the holy place. To suggest, therefore, that Mrs. Gandhi did grave wrong when she ordered the army to storm the Golden Temple would be naïve. Her murder was a direct consequence of the attack on the temple, but when the army rushed into the temple, it was a necessary act aimed at not only neutralizing Bhindranwale but also restoring the sanctity of the place. Mrs. Gandhi took a calculated risk and by so doing demonstrated a necessary firmness of leadership.

For Bangladesh's people, memories of Indira Gandhi come in layers of gratitude. She did not have to support the Bengali cause, but she did. She had no obligation to provide refuge to ten million Bengalis, but she did. Her cooperation and support boosted the Bengali national cause, through helping to set up a Bangladesh government-in-exile and coming forth with military assistance to the Mukti Bahini in its war against the Pakistan army. For nine long months, Indira Gandhi made sure that Pakistan's military rulers did not commit the folly of executing Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman in the secrecy of the cantonment in Mianwali. She deferred to Bangabandhu when the latter made it known that he would like her to take her army back home from Bangladesh. The last of India's soldiers left Bangladesh on Bangabandhu's birthday in March 1972.

There is too the fact that the people of Pakistan, or whatever has remained of the country after 1971, need to be grateful to Indira Gandhi for what she did not do. With Bangladesh liberated, with her army on the western front deep inside Pakistani territory, India's leader could have substantially reduced West Pakistan in size, if not exactly finish it off. Her sense of geopolitical realism came into play when, in unilateral manner, heeding the plaintive notes from Washington through her allies in Moscow, she called a ceasefire on 17 December 1971.
A poignant image of Indira Gandhi emerges along a mist-laden memory lane. Asked by a western journalist in the course of a television interview in 1971 why India supported the Bengalis against Pakistan, she silenced her questioner with a withering response. Why did the Western powers, she asked, act against Nazi Germany when Adolf Hitler was busy murdering Jews and other people in Europe?

(Indira Priyadarshini Nehru Gandhi, Prime Minister of India, was born on 19 November 1917 and assassinated on 31 October 1984)