It is tempting to take the view that the country should have been spared the unseemly slanging match between Mrs Indira Gandhi and her widowed daughter-in-law, Mrs Maneka Gandhi. The argument in support of this proposition would run as follows: Maneka exasperates the Prime Minister on account of her ways and the sharp differences in their outlooks and family backgrounds. But that is no reason why Mrs Gandhi should have allowed herself to refer publicly to the way Maneka behaved and dressed in the wake of Mr Sanjay Gandhi’s death. The daughter-in-law has sought to project herself as a political opponent of Mrs Gandhi. But she does not amount to much in that role. And even if she did the latter would not have been justified in drawing attention to Maneka’s personality traits which she finds distasteful. But Mrs Gandhi’s recent charge that the daughter-in-law was a plant in her house has given an altogether new dimension to the issue and it is in this context that we have to discuss it. The charge also raises several questions. When did the Prime Minister discover that Maneka was a plant? Before Mr Sanjay Gandhi’s death or after it? What did she do to cope with this problem? Would she have packed off Maneka if the latter had not defied her openly last year and addressed the Lucknow convention organised by the Sanjay Vichar Manch? Has the “plant” compromised the national interest by leaking confidential information which became available to her by virtue of her presence in the Prime Minister’s house? Why has the Prime Minister raised this issue at this stage? No one outside the circle of Mrs Gandhi’s closest advisers can claim to know answers to these questions. But that only makes it all the more necessary to raise them.
Mrs Gandhi is in some ways frightfully frank. In 1975, for instance, she warned her opponents several times that she would take drastic action if they continued their efforts to push her into a corner and to force her to step down. During the hearing of Mr Raj Narain’s election petition against her before Mr Justice Sinha of the Allahabad High Court, and then of her appeal before Mr Justice Krishna Iyer of the Supreme Court, her lawyers left no room for doubt that serious consequences would follow an adverse judgment against her. Of course, her lawyer did not say in so many words that she would go so far as to proclaim an internal emergency, suspend vital parts of the Constitution, arrest thousands of her opponents and impose censorship on the press. But soon it became quite clear that her detractors had been ill-advised to ignore her warnings. We do not know whether once again Mrs Gandhi is similarly proclaiming her intention to take some drastic action. But going by her record, not only in 1975 but also earlier in 1969 and later in 1978 when she split the Congress, it would, in our opinion, be wrong to ignore altogether such a possibility.
Being completely in the dark about the evidence in Mrs Gandhi’s possession, or the lack of it, we are in no position to judge whether or not she is justified in saying what she has said, and in taking or not taking action against Maneka. We are also in no position to say whether her move is defensive or offensive, or a bit of both. All that we can do right now is to say that Mrs Indira Gandhi does reveal her intention beforehand, that she may well mean what she has said regarding Maneka being a plant, and that if this is indeed so, it will be wrong to continue to treat the Maneka affair as a mother-in-law-daughter-in-law dispute. It is possible that we are making false comparisons and that we are attaching too much importance to a “casual” remark. But Mrs Gandhi is not known to make such serious charges casually, and that an apparently faltering formulation by her, as in this case, is not necessarily an expression of indecision. She can be vague and confused on purpose. It is also possible that we are being too logical, and that, too, on the basis of false comparisons. But the only other option open to us is to take the view that Mrs Gandhi does not mean what she has said. We are reluctant to take this option in view of our experience of the Prime Minister in the past. And, of course, we are not trying to give credence to Mrs Gandhi’s charge or discredit it. We are interested only in examining its possible implications.