Temptations of the West: How to Be Modern in India, Pakistan, Tibet, and Beyond

by Pankaj Mishra

  These were also the affectations of the half-literate landlords he represented. In Bengal, where India’s first modern culture was almost a century old, these aspirations to respectability would have been met with sarcasm. Rabindranath Tagore and then Nirad Chaudhuri wrote witheringly of the shallow and ostentatious Anglicization of socially ambitious Indians. In feudal North India, which possessed little of the self-confident egalitarian spirit of the Bengal Renaissance, the meeting of East and West usually resulted in tackiness and a crude kind of snobbery: Nehru’s younger sister, who was educated by an English governess, looked down upon Nehru’s wife, Kamla, mostly because the latter could not speak fluent English.

  As his letters to this sister, Vijaylaxmi Pandit, reveal, Nehru was closer to her than to the woman his father had bullied him into marrying; he later gave her glamorous ambassadorial jobs in London, Moscow, and Washington. At a crucial moment in India’s transition to independence in 1947, Nehru confided more in Lord Mountbatten, the pompous and incompetent last viceroy of India, than in many of his Indian colleagues, including Gandhi. But then Nehru’s greater intimacy with English or Anglicized people, which Gandhi himself remarked upon, was hardly the result of his upbringing in Allahabad.

  His intellectual and emotional outlook was formed by his early years in England, by the strain of liberalism in English life, of which the Fabians, whom he admired, were an obvious manifestation. This later made him a hero to Anglicized Indians. But in India he was restless and alienated, with a mystical longing for the Himalayas, and he was actually floundering until he met Gandhi. For it was Gandhi who set Nehru out on the path to individual greatness by first alerting him to his world—the awakening Nehru later elaborated upon in such books as The Discorery of India—and then by anointing him, among many deserving aspirants, his political heir.

  After independence, India became Nehru’s private laboratory for the ideas—a state-controlled economy, industrialization—that he had picked up from his reading and travels. It also forgave mistakes of the kind—his refusal to share power with Muslim leaders made the partition of India inevitable; his complacent belief in pan-Asian solidarity led to India’s military humiliation by China in 1962—that would normally be expected to taint any political career.

  Other postcolonial leaders were similarly unassailable. But unlike Nasser, Nkrumah, and Sukarno, Nehru was aware of the dangers in his situation. In 1937 the Modern Review, a prominent Indian magazine of the time, published the following anonymous analysis of Nehru: “He has all the makings of a dictator in him—vast popularity … an intolerance of others and certain contempt for the weak and inefficient … His overmastering desire to get things done, to sweep away what he dislikes and build anew, will hardly brook for long the slow process of democracy …”

  This remarkably acute description of a postcolonial leader in a hurry is more remarkable still when you learn the author was Nehru himself. It was the kind of comment that probably made him appear to his daughter like “a saint who strayed into politics.” Certainly, such self-awareness was absent from Indira’s own life; the gap between father and daughter was wide. “You are such a stranger to me,” Nehru once wrote to her, “and perhaps you do not know much about me.”

  Indira, in fact, liked to think of herself as a “tough politician,” one of her more accurate self-descriptions. Interestingly, very little in Indira’s early life hinted at the toughness. Born in 1917, just as the freedom struggle switched into high gear, she grew up in a distracted household. Nehru was usually away, in prison or traveling across India. It was Indira who accompanied her perennially ill mother to various spas and sanatoriums in India and Europe and, in the process, drifted through nine schools in Switzerland, England, and India without distinguishing herself at any of them. Her star fellow pupil at Badminton School in England was the English novelist Iris Murdoch, who later remembered Indira as being “very unhappy, very lonely.”

  This unsettled upbringing probably only deepened the usual teenage insecurities. She was tall for her age and thin; she had a large nose and skin that she saw as too dark. Mrs. Pandit, who didn’t think Nehru’s wife was good enough for him, also didn’t much rate his daughter, Indira, whom she described as “ugly and stupid,” a remark that Indira overheard as an adolescent and took with her into her tormented old age, its wound still unhealed, or so she claimed to a close friend a few months before she was assassinated in 1984.

  Indira later tried to inject some excitement and glamour into what had been a dull, anxiety-infested childhood and adolescence. In his biography, Dom Moraes reports her claim that from her house in Allahabad she saw the British police shooting dead Chandrashekhar Azad, an Indian revolutionary. This, though, is quite implausible, given the considerable distance between Anand Bhavan and the park where Azad was killed. And the most convincing rebuttal of her claim that she was ill-treated in a British prison comes from Mrs. Pandit’s daughter, Nayantara Sahgal, who, in a shrewd book about her ambitious cousin, excerpted letters written by her mother at the time from the same prison, all of which attest to the kid glove treatment the Nehrus generally got from their British jailers.

  “She lives in a world of dreams and vagaries,” Nehru had noted when Indira was seventeen years old. “Extraordinarily self-centred … remarkably selfish,” he wrote to his sister. “She must have depths.” Nehru hoped that his daughter would travel and learn languages and then “with this background of mental training and a wider culture discover the fascinating place that is India,” just as he himself had. With this in mind, while in prison, Nehru dedicated a book of letters about world history to her; she didn’t read it until several years later. After his wife Kamla’s death in 1936, he arranged for Indira to study at Somerville College, Oxford, but she preferred to hang out with some fashionably left-wing Indian friends in London and failed her Latin exams twice.

  He was probably most disappointed by his daughter’s intention, soon after returning from England in early 1940, to marry one of the hangers-on at Anand Bhavan, a young Parsi man called Feroze Gandhi (no relation to Mahatma). He registered his own protest against the “absurd haste of a marriage” and then brought much pressure to bear upon Indira through his friends and relatives. Mahatma Gandhi, worried that Indira might be getting swept away by her sexual feelings for Feroze, recommended a celibate marriage to her, a proposal Indira responded to with some obvious irritation. Surrounded by powerful men and their bullying advice, she wished to be, for once, her own person, and it is hard not to sympathize with her, even though the marriage was, as everyone expected, a disaster. Feroze was as unformed as she was, and although he eventually became a vigorous parliamentarian, prior to his early death in 1960, Indira remained, much to his resentment, in thrall to her father’s immeasurably greater power and style.

  Harold Laski, whom Indira met in England, had noted her “timid desire to submerge [her] personality in [her] father’s” and warned that “you’ll just become an appendage.” This was just what she did become in the years after independence: Nehru’s companion on his trips abroad, a housekeeper, and the host of official parties at Nehru’s house in New Delhi, the quite solemn occasions devoted to classical Indian dance and music, whose Gandhian austerity drove out at least one guest, W. H. Auden, who later complained to Nicolas Nabokov about the alcohol-free evening with the Nehrus.

  In one of her letters to Dorothy Norman, a Manhattan socialite whom Indira had befriended during her visit to New York with Nehru in 1949, Indira confessed to not having found her “métier.” She also confided to Norman her desire to retire to a small house in England with her two sons, Rajiv and Sanjay. She claimed to have little in common with the Indians she and her father were surrounded by: “They amuse me and they irritate me and sometimes I find myself observing them as if I were not of the same species at all.”

  Nevertheless, for someone so much at odds with her environment, Indira was quick to accept, and then grow into, the responsibilities thrust upon her by the coarse po
liticians she complained about, the powerful regional bosses of the Congress who brokered the party’s compact with the popular mass base that the freedom movement had created, and who made her, in 1959, the president of the party. Just a few months later the first ominous sign of her authoritarian ways appeared when she persuaded Nehru to dismiss, on spurious grounds of law and order, the Communist government in the South Indian state of Kerala; it was the first democratically elected Communist government anywhere in the world.

  The ease and speed of Indira’s ascent to the prime minister’s office, two years after Nehru’s death in 1964, surprised everyone at the time. It looks inevitable in retrospect. In the mid-1960s the Indian economy was crippled with food shortages, and there was much dissatisfaction with the way things had gone since independence.

  Successive governments had remained preoccupied with Nehru’s ambitious blueprint of an industrial and technical infrastructure for India, a strategy that, while creating thousands of exportable scientists and software engineers, doesn’t directly address India’s basic problems of poverty, disease, and illiteracy, problems that Indira spoke of constantly but did little to solve. The vast, complicated administrative network the British had set up to retain their hold on India had remained intact, except that the civil bureaucrats, the unaccountable rulers of India during colonial times, had to accommodate for the first time the ambitions of elected politicians.

  The state-controlled economy encouraged corruption as much as inefficiency, and the bureaucrats and politicians parceled out its large and varied booty of big public projects, defense contracts, bribes from businessmen, jobs, foreign trips, telephone connections, etc., a serious, steady internal plundering of the overcentralized state’s resources that in the early nineties would expose India to the drastic therapies of the IMF and the World Bank. National politics became and, beyond the excitement of new slogans and personalities, had remained a set of transactions, with regional and caste leaders delivering votes to a broadbased national party like the Congress in exchange for a share of the power and resources at the center.

  There were regular elections, which, along with freedom of the press, are the major achievements of Indian democracy, and the Congress often lost at the state and local level. But these setbacks did not much weaken the party’s stranglehold—quite like that of the PRI in Mexico—over the immensely powerful federal government in Delhi. Its supremacy wasn’t successfully challenged by other parties until 1977, after a spell of dictatorship, and then only, as it turned out, for the sake of rewiring the network of patrons and clients the Congress had set up. Not surprisingly, despite universal suffrage, India has been very slow to develop, beyond a small minority privileged by caste, class, and education, a sense of citizenship or an awareness of the individual rights enshrined in the country’s radically democratic constitution—hence the Nehrus’ own family servant futilely expecting to be favored with a pension that was, after a lifetime of service, his by right.

  The democracy Nehru wanted to create had barely thrown up any real challenges or potential political heirs to him. Indira’s own long proximity to power had made her ambitious, despite all her fantasies about becoming a London house owner, and as a minister in the cabinet of Nehru’s immediate successor, Lal Bahadur Shastri, she quickly showed a talent for the constant petty intriguing of Indian politics. She publicly disparaged the dhoti-clad Shastri, also a native of Allahabad but from a much humbler family. Some Anglicized admirers of Nehru in Delhi, who became Indira’s advisers, strengthened her conviction that only someone from the Nehru family could provide enlightened leadership to India. As it happened, after Shastri’s unexpected death in 1966, the party bosses found themselves unable to trust each other as supreme leader and ended up elevating a pliant-seeming Indira as the prime minister of India.

  Indira quickly outgrew her patrons, however. She was offered a fresh start by the Congress Party’s dismal performance in the national elections in 1967; she declared herself a socialist, committed to destroying the sinister influence she claimed big landlords and businessmen had over the Congress and the Indian government. She nationalized banks and insurance companies, stopped all government privileges and payments due to the royal families of India, and announced various programs for eradicating poverty. Garibi Hatao (“Remove Poverty”) was the obvious but effective slogan she used in the national elections in 1971 to win overwhelming support among traditionally poor low-caste Hindus and Muslims, who, weary of the many middlemen and false promises since independence, saw the daughter of Nehru as their true savior.

  Things briefly appeared to be working out for Indira. The introduction, during Nehru’s time, of high-yielding crops had made India self-sufficient in food production in the late sixties. Indira encouraged this “Green Revolution” and also made herself popular among the relatively affluent class of cultivators by offering them state-subsidized power, water, and fertilizers. Events outside India also helped Indira to marginalize the Congress power brokers. In 1971, the Pakistani Army responded to the disaffection among Pakistan’s eastern Bengali-speaking population with a near genocide.

  Millions of Bengali refugees arrived in India subsequently, straining an already shaky economy. Indira prepared India well for the war with Pakistan that began to seem imminent as the Indian Army trained and armed Bengali insurgents; she swiftly secured military and diplomatic support from the Soviet Union after it became clear that Richard Nixon, who suspected her of being an intellectual, would “tilt” toward Pakistan. India eventually fought and won a short war with Pakistan and carved out a new nation. As the liberator of Bangladesh, Indira became, briefly, a universally celebrated figure. No longer the “dumb doll” that a particularly bitter critic of the Nehru dynasty had dubbed her at the beginning of her time as prime minister, instead she embodied Shakti, the Hindu metaphysical concept for female energy and power.

  Indira’s speeches grew more confident, full of references to her family’s prestige and self-sacrificing spirit. She also used the opportunity to banish all remaining and potential rivals within the Congress and to reward her lackeys with important positions in the executive, legislative, and the judiciary. The man she appointed as the president of the Congress Party soon devised the slogan “Indira Is India, and India Indira.” The president of India during much of Indira’s tenure in the early 1980s was Zail Singh, famous for claiming that at her command he was ready to wield a broom and become a lowly sweeper. But the sycophancy alone wasn’t enough; most of the men Indira promoted were also required to put a fixed amount of money into her coffers.

  This new ruthless and amoral side of Indira was almost all that India saw of her for the next decade. It bewildered and alienated even the few friends she had made during her insecure early years; the relatively frank letters to Dorothy Norman became dull rituals before ceasing altogether around the time of the Emergency. Indira’s later years leave any potential biographer with little else to detail besides the intricacies of Indian politics. Indeed, much of Indira’s life seems to show how a not particularly sensitive or intelligent woman was exalted by accident of birth and a callow political culture into the chieftancy of a continent size nation and how a drab inner life came to be filled with an exaggerated sense of self and mission and an all-consuming quest for personal power.

  The autocrat’s search for unqualified loyalty usually ends within her own family. Indira’s closest colleague in the seventies was her younger son, Sanjay Gandhi; while holding no official position, he had by the time the Emergency was declared in 1975 become the de facto ruler of India. Like many other undereducated scions of third world dynasties, Sanjay had a weakness for cars. In the late sixties he abandoned his apprenticeship at the Rolls-Royce factory in England, where he was regularly arrested for speeding, and came back to India with the ambition to make small cars for Indian consumers. Indira’s government awarded his new company a license despite competitive applications from Toyota, Renault, and Citroën. The nationalized banks adv
anced him generous loans; government officials bullied car dealers into placing large cash orders. No usable cars ever emerged from Sanjay’s factory. Nevertheless, banks and industrialists continued to fund his company, and Sanjay diversified into equally bogus “consultancy services” in order to channel the incoming money into his personal accounts.

  His little racket was one of the many instances of the crony capitalism that flourished alongside the rhetoric of socialism. Such brazen corruption, which had become commonplace in India by the early seventies, was made still more intolerable for the poor by rising inflation. Successive droughts and an inefficient and venal public distribution system had made food scarce. The Congress started doing badly in local elections. Large-scale protests by students and workers erupted across India in the run-up to the declaration of the Emergency in June 1975. Jayaprakash Narayan, an old Gandhian idealist, emerged from retirement to lead the growing opposition to Indira.

  Indira, in turn, denounced the agitation for her removal as part of a broad CIA-backed conspiracy. She had already used the military and the police to crush a Mao-inspired insurgency in Bengal, and when a delayed court judgment invalidated her election to the Indian Parliament and made it imperative that she resign, she decided to do away with the fast-unraveling façade of democracy.