The Times Great Women's Lives

by Sue Corbett

  If the events of 1971 seemed to have left India and Mrs Gandhi in a position of unchallenged hegemony in South Asia, the social and economic problems facing the country internally were not thereby eased. At the beginning of the decade there had been hopeful signs that India might at last be on the threshold of self-sufficiency in food production. This optimism and in particular premature claims made on behalf of the “green revolution” were rudely shattered by droughts in 1972 and 1974.

  With industrial production stagnant, and, labour unrest widespread, the economic future was not bright. Admittedly, many of the causes for this state of affairs were beyond Mrs Gandhi’s control; among them, worldwide inflation, a precipitate deterioration of India’s terms of trade, and, most savage of all, the fourfold increase in the price of oil at the end of 1973.

  Politically, Mrs Gandhi soon found that the huge majorities she enjoyed in the central parliament and in most state legislatures could not insulate her from the popular unrest born of economic dissatisfaction.

  In the states of Bihar and Gujarat, in particular, this opposition assumed formidable proportions, and parties of the right, left and centre began to coalesce under the leadership of the veteran Gandhian socialist, Mr J. P. Narayan. It was in this movement that Mrs Gandhi saw the threat to national security which provoked her to proclaim the Emergency in June, 1975; her critics, on the other hand, believed it was a threat to her position from within her own party which led her to impose such draconian discipline upon the entire country.

  There was certainly some basis for the critics’ doubts. The Allahabad High Court had found her guilty of certain technical offences in connexion with her own election to Parliament which while trivial in themselves were an embarrassment involving automatic disbarment from office unless the Supreme Court ruled the conviction out of order. Mrs Gandhi had staked her personal reputation on victory in an election in Gujarat state forced on an unwilling Congress Party by a threatened fast to death by her old rival Morarji Desai; she had lost.

  Opposition newspapers were making much scandal about corruption alleged to involve some of her closest associates, even her family, and in Parliament there were almost daily accusations of dishonesty against her Government. The tension in Delhi in June built up with the oppressive heat to breaking point and a vast opposition rally called for Mrs Gandhi’s resignation and threatened the kind of civil disobedience in the capital which even neutral observers feared could lead to grave disorders.

  Mrs Gandhi struck on the night of June 25-26. Opposition leaders and cadres all over the country were arrested. So were some Congressmen. The press was subjected to total censorship and decree after decree followed restricting civil liberties and stifling protest. It was known that the Cabinet only learnt what had happened some hours afterwards, but if there was any disapproval voiced nobody knew about that, and when Parliament met it was without most of the Opposition leaders. It endorsed all the constitutional changes Mrs Gandhi wanted, some plainly designed to secure her own position.

  There were many Indians who believed that Mrs Gandhi had acted for the safety and security of the state, and that the discipline which followed the emergency was beneficial and necessary to end a period when liberty had degenerated into licence. Businessmen welcomed the sudden end to strikes and constant agitation in factories and offices, and the public were happy to find India’s vast army of civil servants politer and more punctual about their duties.

  Alongside the benefits of the emergency, however, some very disturbing factors were developing which, because of the effectiveness of internal censorship and the control over the foreign press, were not widely known outside the areas affected. Measures taken to control the growth of the population, however well-intended, led to great resentment. Sterilization was the favoured method and stories of compulsory operations spread like wildfire over northern India. Many dwellings were bulldozed in Delhi’s old city as part of a slum clearance campaign without consideration for the residents. Police and officials behaved in a very high-handed fashion, and more and more public attention was focused on Sanjay Gandhi.

  He took over the leadership of the youth wing of the Congress party and his influence on the development of the emergency was watched with growing apprehension by Congress politicians and public alike. Arrests were widespread and the suspension of the normal processes of the law whereby prisoners could appeal against continuing detention was seen as a further step towards the establishment of a dictatorship.

  If there were still plenty of sycophants ready to reassure Mrs Gandhi that the people were enthusiastically supporting her measures she must have also heard other voices indicating that all was not in fact well. In any case, within weeks of announcing the postponement of the general election, she decided after all to go to the country and chose March, 1977, for polling. Political prisoners were released and emergency restrictions began to be eased. Nevertheless, in a remarkably peaceful election, right across northern India, where the emergency measures had pressed the hardest, the Congress party was defeated.

  Mrs Gandhi lost her seat to an old enemy, Mr Raj Narain; Sanjay was humiliatingly beaten in a neighbouring constituency and many of the ministers who had been Mrs Gandhi’s closest allies were also rejected by the electorate. The Janata Party, composed of four somewhat disparate political parties with their latest ally, the Congress for Democracy, formed a Government. For Mrs Gandhi, her cup of bitterness was filled when her old rival, Mr Morarji Desai, whom she had imprisoned throughout the emergency, was chosen as Prime Minister and Mr Jagjivan Ram, the man she regarded as an arch-traitor, became Defence Minister.

  It was nevertheless a public sensation when Mrs Gandhi was arrested early in October 1977 on charges of alleged misuse of her official position. The magistrate before whom she was produced ordered her unconditional release and there was widespread disquiet over what was seen as Government bungling of a vital matter. Mrs Gandhi, however, lost no time in making much political capital out of the affair.

  In May 1978, interim reports from Mr Justice J. C. Shah’s commission appointed to investigate allegations of misuse of power and other excesses during the emergency were laid before Parliament. Mrs Gandhi and Sanjay came under heavy criticism; she, it was said, had imposed the emergency in a desperate effort to continue in power despite a judicial verdict against her and she was also held responsible for the illegal arrest and detention of a number of persons.

  The Government accepted the findings in full and they were widely publicized; many voices were raised demanding that Mrs Gandhi and her associates should be brought to trial. There was, however, some conflict within the Janata leadership about the procedure for punishing the Gandhi caucus, with Mr Desai firm in his belief that whatever was done should be strictly in accordance with the country’s legal system. As the result of this and the Indian courts’ susceptibility to procrastination progress was slow and by the time Mrs Gandhi became Prime Minister again in January 1980, any action against her was at an early stage.

  Mrs Gandhi, 20 months after her party’s crushing defeat in the post-emergency general election, served notice that she was determined to stay in public life by winning a remarkable victory in a by-election in Chikmagalur in the southern state of Karnataka where her faction of the Congress party was in power. Her decision to seek re-election to Parliament from the south was an interesting one. A defeat in her home state would have been disastrous, so with characteristic political acumen she chose to return to the political limelight by an easier, if unorthodox, route. She won by over 77,000 votes after a bitter campaign.

  Mrs Gandhi took her seat in Parliament on November 20, 1978. A month later, she was found guilty of contempt of the House and breach of privilege. The charges related to the period when she was Prime Minister just before the Emergency; they alleged that she had harassed four minor officials who had been instructed to collect facts for a parliamentary inquiry into her son’s people’s car project. She would almost certainly have been given a
nominal sentence had she not chosen to deny the charges in a defiant and unrepentant speech which angered even MPs anxious to exercise clemency and avoid obliging her the accolade of temporary martyrdom. In the event, she was expelled from Parliament and sent to jail for the rest of the session, which turned out to be one week.

  Before she left for Delhi’s Tihar jail where so many of her political opponents had found themselves, this astonishing woman sang a verse of a popular English wartime song: “Wish me luck as you wave me goodbye”.

  The suicidal activities of the Janata leadership continued, however, and as its political standing collapsed a new election was called for the first week of 1980. Mrs Gandhi had ample ammunition for criticism of the lack of firmness and direction in its rule and, after a further split in her own Congress (I) Party, she entered the fray with no rivals in her own party and a divided opposition.

  The voters turned back to the woman they knew. Her party won 351 seats out of 542 in the Lok Sabha, the lower house of the Indian Parliament. It was a party with only one star; Mrs Gandhi signified her supremacy by standing in two constituencies, one in the south and also in Rae Bareli where she had been humiliatingly defeated in 1977. She won both seats handsomely and, more surprisingly, Sanjay Gandhi won in Amethi, the Uttar Pradesh constituency which had rejected him in 1977, by more than 120,000 votes over his Janata opponent. Mrs Gandhi’s new cabinet was notable chiefly for names omitted rather than those included. None of the men regarded as responsible for the worst excesses of the Emergency were included but observers were quick to detect friends of Sanjay in the list.

  India’s difficulties were no less than before when Mrs Gandhi moved back into the Prime Minister’s office. In Assam an agitation began against the growing presence of what were described as foreigners — people from West Bengal, Bangladesh and Nepal. There were also economic difficulties, and one of Mrs Gandhi’s first acts was to nationalize six large Indian banks in addition to the 14 taken over by the State in 1969 — an action regarded as populist rather than economically necessary.

  Abroad, Afghanistan presented a particularly tricky problem. The world wanted to know where the Indian government stood in relation to the Soviet invasion of a non-aligned Muslim country, with which India had traditionally close ties. It soon became clear that Mrs Gandhi’s suspicions of the United States had not abated. She coupled regret at the Soviet intervention with the charge that the Western nations were also guilty of meddling in the area.

  What seemed to worry her most was the possibility that the United States might re-arm Pakistan, and that those arms might eventually be used against India.

  Then, in June, 1980, she suffered a totally unexpected blow when Sanjay Gandhi, on whom she had come to rely as a close adviser, was killed when the aircraft in which he was stunt-flying over Delhi crashed. Her response was to call on his elder brother, Rajiv, who until then had led an entirely non-political life as an airline pilot; he became a general secretary of the Congress (I) Party and an adviser in Sanjay’s place.

  Her most serious crisis, however, came with the growth of agitation by the Sikhs of Punjab. There was widespread resentment in the Sikh community arising from a feeling that they did not have proper control of their own resources, and a demand by some for new boundaries and a new, Sikh, capital. The extremists wanted virtual autonomy, and terrorism flared up. At the centre of the extremists was Sant Jarnail Bhindranwale, who based himself with his close supporters in the Golden Temple in Amritsar.

  Mrs Gandhi’s attempts to resolve the crisis through political means — including some ill-advised moves by local representatives of her party — came to nothing, and on June 6 of this year she ordered the Army into the temple. The operation was successful, but at least 300 people were killed, and she provoked a wave of revulsion among Sikhs across India.

  Indira Gandhi, India’s third prime minister, was born on November 19, 1917. She was assassinated on October 31, 1984, aged 66

  LAURA ASHLEY

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  FABRIC AND FASHION DESIGNER WHO DREW ON TRADITIONAL ENGLISH STYLES TO CREATE A ROMANTIC VOGUE

  SEPTEMBER 18, 1985

  Laura Ashley, the fabric and fashion designer, died yesterday at the age of 60 as a result of injuries sustained during a fall last week.

  The name Laura Ashley became synonymous with a style of dressing which flew in the face of the successes of the designers who had made London the fashion capital of the world in the 1960s.

  Eschewing the short skirts, revealing lines and bright colours of that era, the Laura Ashley success — which was to prove far more enduring than that of its competitors — was based upon the solidly English virtues of a previous century.

  Flowing lines, traditional Victorian prints and traditional, natural fabrics, not only restored the romance to dress for young women, but also provided an idiom in which the middle-aged woman could see herself as looking attractive in clothes which manifestly suited her and emphasized the dignity of maturity. Thus the Laura Ashley appeal was made right across the rigidly drawn battle lines of generation, and from modest beginnings in the sale of a few printed scarves to a London department store, was to expand remarkably quickly to cross international frontiers as well.

  Owing its business success to Mrs Ashley’s husband Bernard with whom she enjoyed a mutually inspiring partnership, Laura Ashley expanded from clothes and fabrics into wallpapers and soft furnishings and had this year been about to go public with an annual turnover of over £100,000,000 and more than 180 shops all round the world.

  Laura Ashley was born Laura Mountney in Dowlais, Glamorgan, in 1925. The daughter of a civil servant, she was brought up a strict Baptist. She was educated in London but evacuated back to Wales at the outbreak of the war in 1939 and finished her schooling there before training as a secretary. A short spell at the War Office was followed by service in the WRNS — she was afterwards to say she preferred that uniform to any clothes she had subsequently worn. After that she held a post with the National Federation of Women’s Institutes.

  She married Bernard Ashley in 1949. He was trying to make a career in the City and his wife had apparently settled down to domestic orthodoxy when she began printing fabrics, with a silk screen of her husband’s devising, on the kitchen table of her flat during her first pregnancy in 1953.

  She sold her first designs, a mere twenty scarves, to John Lewis in Oxford Street who immediately sold out and requested more. When it became apparent that her design flair was much in demand, her husband left his City job and they went into business, printing fabrics together.

  Their first ventures into garments were smocks and aprons and in 1961 they graduated to dresses, blouses and other clothes.

  But it was not until 1967 with the opening of the first Laura Ashley shop in Kensington that the Ashley appeal made its first great impact on fashion consciousness at large. From then on the 18th and 19th century designs collected by Laura from museums all over the world, the sturdy fabrics, the high necked blouses and, of course, the highly accessible prices, created a vogue which swept the country.

  Locating their headquarters in a disused railway station at Carno in Wales, the Ashleys prepared an assault on the values purveyed by the fevered world of contemporary fashion. And the Laura Ashley qualities of natural fabrics and natural, unforced designs, came to seem to be logical corollary to the move towards healthy, whole-food eating which was also gaining ground under the surface glitter of the 1960s.

  By the early 1970s the Ashleys had opened in Shrewsbury, Bath, Edinburgh and Oxford and had licensed operations in Canada and Australia. Very soon clothes, wallpaper and scent were being sold throughout Europe and across America under the familiar blackberry sprig motif.

  The wholesome virtues propounded by Laura Ashley dresses were echoed in the conditions in Laura Ashley factories. Fried food was not served in Ashley staff canteens and smoking was discouraged. There were no night shifts and the working week ended at Friday midday.

  Inev
itably under the pressure of success a homely style of living for the Ashleys themselves was bound to be a thing hard to maintain. Fear of death duties necessitated a move abroad and the acquisition of a château in Picardy and a town house in Brussels. Communicating between the various parts of the Ashley empire meant private aircraft and the other logistical necessities behind the ability to be in many places in quick succession.

  However Mrs Ashley continued to the end to give forth an invincibly homely air to the beholder, and to seem always rather to belong to the Welsh dressers and fireplaces of her valleys upbringing than to the world of international fashion which she did in fact inhabit. At the time of her death the Laura Ashley look, though it had undergone some modifications of the more “sensible” sort, showed not the slightest sign of waning in its appeal.

  Laura Ashley, fashion designer, was born on September 7, 1925. She died on September 17, 1985, aged 60

  SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR

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  WRITER, PHILOSOPHER AND EXPONENT OF REVOLUTIONARY FEMINISM

  APRIL 15, 1986

  Simone de Beauvoir, who died yesterday, was, in partnership with Jean-Paul Sartre, a leading philosopher-novelist of the existentialist school and later, on her own, a theorist of radical feminism.

  She was born in Paris on January 9, 1908, into a prosperous and cultivated though not exceptionally distinguished family. Her father dabbled in the theatre both as actor and director, but was too conscious of his status as a gentleman to do so for profit. He upheld the traditional French upper-class ethos with something of the same humourless rigidity with which his daughter afterwards attacked it.

  Simone de Beauvoir’s earnestness and intensity revealed itself at an early age. Even as a child she was tormented by doubts about the existence of God and the moral order of the universe, and these doubts prompted her first essays into metaphysics. As an adolescent she resolved to study philosophy, not merely as part of an ordinary student’s syllabus, but as a specialist. Her parents and teachers were discouraging. Philosophy, she was told, was a man’s subject.