In death, as in life, Indira Gandhi continues to be measured essentially by one yardstick – the popular view of her father, Jawaharlal Nehru. And in death, as in life, so measured, she continues to be found wanting.
The comparison is wholly inapt. Indira Gandhi was Nehru’s darling daughter and in later years his confidante. If it was true, as some individuals then believed, that he groomed her to succeed him eventually, though perhaps not immediately, she could also be said to have been his political heir. In any case, she owed her initial selection for the office of Prime Minister in 1966 and some of her popularity to the fact of her being her father’s daughter. But she was not his spiritual heir. Spirit does not travel via genes.
If Indira Gandhi was as shrewd as she was widely believed to be, she should have recognised this deep truth of her being and taken steps to ensure that the Nehru yardstick did not grow so long as to make it impossible for her to measure up to it and to popularize another yardstick which, as it happened, was at once available and more appropriate for measuring her. Sardar Patel was that other yardstick.
It is not possible for me to say whether or not Indira Gandhi knew that she had more in common with the Sardar than with her own father, I did not know her well enough; indeed I doubt if anyone else did, or even cared. She was more of a private person than any other Indian I can think of. On occasions she chatted away gaily. But mostly she told stories about others. She explored herself but she never exposed herself. No well-known Indian other than Gandhiji and to an extent Nehru has engaged in self-exploration.
We know that Indira Gandhi had built around herself a fortress which was manned by yesmen and sycophants. Outsiders were allowed an entry into it but on the understanding that they would not probe, or at least not be seen to probe, the defences of the protected one. The more important point about her, however, was that she had built defences inside of her. Her pride in being Jawaharlal Nehru’s daughter and Motilal Nehru’s grand-daughter was an important component of those internal defences.
Pride Inherited
Indira Gandhi perhaps inherited that pride from her father. Jawaharlal Nehru was proud of being Motilal Nehru’s son despite their sharp ideological differences. But Jawaharlal had a spiritual father in Gandhiji and spiritual uncles in British socialists. Indira Gandhi had nothing else to lean on. Either she was a Nehru or nothing. She even brought in the Nehru name to call herself Indira Nehru Gandhi for some time. This was long before it became fashionable for married women to retain their family surnames.
She was trapped. She could not bear criticism of her father. Or to put it more accurately, she could not accept an objective assessment of his place in Indian history. She had to encourage the expansion and propagation of an already powerful Nehru myth as if it were out of an inner compulsion. This had to involve a neglect and even denigration of other stalwarts of the freedom movement with the exception of Gandhiji. Sardar Patel had to be a victim of the Nehru myth. He was, by common reckoning, the tallest Indian apart from the Mahatma and Nehru; he was seen to be Nehru’s rival in both personal and ideological terms; and, as it were, to complete the picture the RSS-Jana Sangh sought to take him over. Subhas Bose too suffered neglect. But that does not concern us in the present context.
Myth making is an essential part of Indian civilization. It has produced thousands upon thousands of bards and till this century few historians. Jawaharlal Nehru was excellent material to be shaped into a myth. The Indian intelligentsia needed the myth in order to overcome the deep sense of inferiority the British had imposed on them. Being insensitive to the need for consolidation at home which is what Sardar Patel presided over when he secured the merger of princely states into the Indian Union, they (the intelligentsia) were more than willing to gloat over Nehru’s foreign policy achievements.
Myth Propagation
But Indian bards are practical men; they have to be, because they too, like the rest of us, operate in conditions of scarcity. The propagation of the Nehru myth was thus contingent on the fact of Indira Gandhi being in power. A kind of symbiotic relationship developed. The myth depended on her for its propagation and she depended on it for her survival in office. But symbiotic relations are not equal. One party suffers. In this case Indira Gandhi was bound to be the loser.
More like the Sardar and less like her father, Indira Gandhi was a realist, not a visionary; a doer, not a theoretician-preacher, a manipulator of men, institutions and situations, not a grand architect; it is open to doubt whether the relationship between ends and means ever worried her as it worried Nehru; the ends were given, as they were given for Patel – the unity and integrity of India above all for both – and the necessary means had to be shaped and used with courage and determination, even ruthlessness, whatever and whoever it might offend and hurt. The situation in India in 1966, as revealed in the 1967 election results, needed such an individual at the top.
There were, however, two important differences between Patel and Indira Gandhi, one of position and the other of personality. The Sardar was never the boss; he had to bow to Gandhiji on important issues and take his colleagues with him; he could not order them about. Indira Gandhi emerged as the boss in 1969; she did not need to defer to anyone; she had no colleagues; she had only followers and opponents, actual or potential.
And the Sardar did not see himself either as the bearer of a great family name or as a man of destiny. He might have served as India’s Bismarck but he did not think of himself as India’s Bismarck. In any case, Bismarck did not found a dynasty. Indira Gandhi was on all accounts very differently made and motivated. Especially after the Bangladesh war in 1971 she saw herself as a woman of destiny.
Insecure Feeling
It is easy to characterize this self-esteem as megalomania or an expression of a deep feeling of insecurity. Indira Gandhi was an insecure person at least partly because she was not and could not become another Jawaharlal and there was a touch of megalomania about her personality despite her basic realism. But both these traits were transmuted by the intense fire of patriotism which finally consumed her.
Martyrdom of necessity involves a willing self-sacrifice, or to put it differently, an invitation to death and only those so possessed as Gandhiji was, or Indira Gandhi was, can send out such an invitation. In Indira Gandhi’s case, she literally sent out the invitation. She brought back the guards who were to gun her down.
Despite her modernism which was genuine in many ways, Indira Gandhi was quintessentially Indian. This is not so much a reference to her religiosity and her visits to temples and saints as to her incapacity to separate the personal from the impersonal and larger. The two merged to produce a great deal of confusion and trouble both for her and the country. In a modem democracy this must be considered impermissible and the Indian intelligentsia have by and large so considered it. But there is a deeper truth about India which they have not understood. The Avtar concept embodies one aspect of this truth and the Buddhist Bodhisattva and the Jain Tirthankar the other. In both cases the great man is equated with God.
It is difficult for me to say whether or not Gandhiji belonged to this tradition, that is, whether or not he saw himself as the principal instrument for the regeneration of India. But he invoked his “inner voice”, he also told us that he was not willing to subordinate his judgment to the scrutiny of other human beings or to human reason. Similarly, his readiness to go it alone in pursuit of independence by non-violent means or in opposition to communal holocausts in Calcutta, Noakhali and Bihar, placed him solidly in the old tradition whereby the yogi seeks to redeem his followers and even the others by his own power and grace. Indira Gandhi was, of course, not a female Mahatma. She used state power where he used will power which he called soul force. I am not about to equate them. All I wish to say is that in judging her we should not fail to take note of our traditions. It is not natural for us to separate the personal from the larger cause we may be trying to serve. We are at our best when the two merge.
To be continued
The Times of India, 31 October 1985