Implosion: India’s Tryst with Reality

by John Elliott

  A later coincidence helped promote the name of the modern dynasty. Indira Nehru married Feroze Gandhi, a young Parsi political activist, whose family name was spelt Gandhy (though some members of the family deny this).

  Sunil Khilnani, a historian who has been working on a biography of Nehru, has written that the change of spelling was done at Nehru’s suggestion to hide Feroze’s Parsi origin.4 Whatever the reason, it gave the family an association with the stronger brand name that still causes helpful confusion today. No one knows how many of the poor, who have instinctively voted Congress in past general elections, believe that the Gandhis are descendants of the nation’s founding father, but there must be many. (Foreigners who do not know India well also assume that there are direct family links.)

  It seems that Nehru did not consciously set out to found a dynasty, which contrasts sharply with the family’s later, more overt, ambitions. While he was prepared for Indira to be involved in politics and have a chance of becoming prime minister after him, he did not want to trigger an automatic succession. As it happened, she did not become prime minister until 20 months after her father’s death when his immediate successor, Lal Bahadur Shastri, died during a visit to Tashkent in the then Soviet Union. Kuldip Nayar,5 a veteran journalist who was Shastri’s information officer, writes that Shastri was convinced he was ‘not uppermost in Nehru’s mind’ as the successor and says that when asked directly who he thought Nehru had in mind, Shastri replied: ‘Unke dil main unki saputri hai – ‘In his heart is his daughter’.6 (The circumstances of Shastri’s death are a mystery.7 Suggestions that he was poisoned have most recently been raised by Kuldip Nayar,8 who was with Shastri in Tashkent at the time.)

  Other writers disagree about Nehru’s intentions. Various historians and biographers have argued, as Frank Moraes did in 1960, that Nehru did ‘not want to create a dynasty of his own’.9 Katherine Frank, in the most detailed biography of Indira Gandhi, writes that Nehru ‘had always gone to great lengths to avoid any behaviour that could be interpreted as nepotism’.10 She quotes an earlier biographer and Nehru family member saying that he was ‘not grooming her [Indira] for anything’ and that he had said he did not want to ‘appear to encourage some sort of dynastic arrangement’.11 Nehru was not keen on Indira being made a member of the Congress party’s central working committee (CWC), but did not stop her becoming a somewhat reluctant party president in 1959. Some Congress leaders undoubtedly had ulterior motives in promoting her, assuming that she would be malleable and would act as a conduit to Nehru at a time when there was rivalry between Shastri and others to become Nehru’s eventual successor.

  Indira’s own views are not clear and it seems that insecurity and a wish for privacy made her at times something of a reluctant heir apparent – she initially resisted taking the party presidency in 1959 and refused a second term. When she was questioned about becoming prime minister by journalists on a visit to New York in April 1964 (just a month before Nehru died), she said she ‘would not’ like the job. The journalists pressed her, and eventually asked, ‘But are you going to say that you would refuse to serve?’ To which she answered: ‘Well, shall I say that 90 per cent I would refuse.’12 She did avoid the job a month later, but took it in 1966, having served in Shastri’s government as information minister. She had strong personal ambitions to exercise power, and these were initially more concerned with her own authority than with dynastic perpetuity. Later she wanted to be succeeded by her younger son Sanjay, whom she had brought into politics to help her in the 1970s. Sanjay revelled in the brutal exercise of crude political power and, according to P.N. Dhar, one of her closest officials, ‘was impatient for the driver’s seat’ by 1976.13 He played a leading role in enforcing Indira Gandhi’s controversial State of Emergency (1975–77).

  With a career as an Indian Airlines pilot, Rajiv Gandhi never wanted to enter politics, and only did so reluctantly to help his mother after Sanjay was killed when a light plane he was piloting over Delhi crashed in June 1980. I met Rajiv in January 1984 and asked him whether he would one day succeed his mother. He was an MP and a Congress general secretary at the time and had made a success of organising preparations for the 1982 Asian Games in Delhi.14 ‘That’s a very long way off,’ he said.15 But if something were to happen to his mother, was he ready for the top post, I asked, echoing the question asked of his mother 20 years earlier. ‘That’s a very difficult question because I’ve only been in this game for a couple of years. Yes, I think I’m in it for life, but I do think I need more experience,’ he replied. In it for life indeed – and his widow after he was assassinated in 1991, and their children too.

  Sonia Gandhi had no political ambitions for years after she entered the family, but eventually became active a few years after Rajiv’s death when she was encouraged by a coterie of eager courtiers to do her dynastic duty. She has said that she felt ‘cowardly to just sit and watch things deteriorate in the Congress for which my mother-in-law and the whole family lived and died’,16 though that may not have been the complete story. Some private sources have suggested to me that she feared legal action over a 1987 Swedish Bofors gun contract that had dogged her husband’s later years, and needed to get into politics so that she would have the power to defl ect official investigations and legal cases. Others say she wanted to rebuild the power and influence of the family in various ways so as to secure them an elite, stable future.

  Basically, however, she felt she had to act as a bridge for the dynasty so that the succession would pass via her from Rajiv to their son Rahul (or, as a second option, if Rahul failed, their daughter Priyanka). That has made her the family’s most single-mindedly dynasty-driven member, determined to secure the top slot in the Congress and thus access to prime ministership. Perhaps her determination to ensure the succession stems partly from the insecurity of being foreign-born and not a blood relation of the Gandhis, plus an Italian mama’s concern to ensure her family’s station in life. Rahul and Priyanka, says their tutor, were ‘taught of sacrifices and patriotism from the cradle to adulthood’.17

  Sonia cleverly sustained her ambitions when the Congress unexpectedly won a general election in 2004 by making Manmohan Singh the prime minister, while she stayed in overall charge. She then pushed Rahul, who was reluctant to take on a major role. When he was a teenager, Rahul once told his father that he wished they could go back to happier days when Rajiv had been an Indian Airlines pilot with no political aspirations. ‘I can’t now, because now I have a belief in my people. There is no going back,’ was Rajiv’s reply, according to Mani Shankar Aiyar, a leading Congress politician and Rajiv confidante.18 Aiyar said that was ‘the ethos of these kids growing up’. Rahul tried to buck that trend and not live up to the ethos, preferring to spend long and unaccounted-for time abroad and it took a long time for his mother and others to rein him in. Eventually, in July 2012, making a rare public appearance at an official function in Delhi, he announced: ‘I will play a more proactive role in the party and the government,’19 which he eventually did six months later when he became vice president of the Congress and official number two to Sonia.20

  Other members of the Nehru-Gandhi family could have bid for an active political life, but none has done so, apart from Maneka Gandhi, Sanjay’s widow, and her son, Feroze Varun Gandhi. Maneka and Sanjay had a stormy six-year marriage before his death. She did not get on with her mother-in-law, who preferred the quieter and more cooperative Sonia, and eventually Indira threw her out of the family home in March 1982.21 A year later, I interviewed Maneka for the FT on the first anniversary of her eviction. She had just founded her own political party, the Rashtriya Sanjay Manch, and I asked the inevitable question about her prime ministerial ambitions. She said it was ‘a bit early to say “yes” at the age of 26’, but when I tempted her further, she said (with hindsight, somewhat unrealistically), ‘If I’ve gone into something, I might as well make a success of it.’22

  She eventually became an MP in 1989, having merged her party with t
he then Janata Dal, and held various ministerial posts, moving on after a spell as an independent to the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). She remains an MP but is no threat to the mainstream dynasty, though she hopes that her son Varun, who became a BJP MP in 2009, will emerge as a national figure. Feroze has adopted his father’s hard-line approach to politics and transformed himself during the 2009 election campaign from a soft-spoken young man to a ranting Hindu nationalist speaker, delivering widely condemned tirades against Muslims.23 This was said at the time to be a carefully planned and orchestrated strategy aimed at developing a distinct dynastic brand but, although he was elected to parliament, the BJP has been slow in encouraging him to develop into a national figure.

  To return to my initial question, the efforts of successive members of the family to perpetuate the dynasty have been far more important to its survival than the course of events – and that has become increasingly true with successive generations. Nehru seems not to have been wholly committed to the idea of his daughter succeeding him, whereas Indira saw first Sanjay and then Rajiv as her helpers and likely successors. Rajiv did not have time to consider such things before his death, and would probably have said that Sonia was a most unlikely successor because of her foreign and non-political background. Sonia then saw it as her maternal and dynastic duty to bridge the gap and establish Rahul as the born-to-rule successor, and pushed this far more overtly than earlier generations had.

  Tragedy, Death and Acceptance

  The family’s history has been laced with tragedy and the premonition of death. Sanjay Gandhi was killed in a plane crash. Indira Gandhi then unwittingly sowed the seeds for more catastrophes when she encouraged a militant Sikh leader to become a political activist in Punjab in the late 1970s, and condoned separatist Tamil activity in Sri Lanka in the early 1980s. That led to her assassination by her Sikh guards in 1984, and indirectly to her son Rajiv’s killing by a Tamil suicide bomber in 1991. Indira had a premonition of her own death, and Sonia has said the family feared for Rajiv’s life: ‘After my mother-in-law (Indira) was killed, I knew that he too would be killed... all of us, my children and me, knew that it was just a question of when,’ she said in a television interview in 2004.24 She pleaded with her husband not to become prime minister but he held her hands, hugged her, and said he ‘had no choice’, adding, ‘he would be killed anyway’.25 Indira Gandhi said earlier that Sonia had threatened to leave him if he entered politics.26

  Rahul Gandhi spelt out the trauma of assassination – and how it lives on in the minds of his family – when he accepted his appointment as vice president of the Congress in January 2013. In an unexpectedly emotional speech, he referred to Indira Gandhi’s killing by her Sikh security guards: ‘When I was a little boy I loved to play badminton. I loved it because it gave me balance in a complicated world. I was taught how to play, in my grandmother’s house, by two of the policemen who protected my grandmother. They were my friends. Then one day they killed my grandmother and took away the balance in my life. I felt pain like I had never felt before. My father was in Bengal and he came back. The hospital was dark, green and dirty. There was a huge screaming crowd outside as I entered. It was the first time in my life that I saw my father crying. He was the bravest person I knew and yet I saw him cry. I could see that he too was broken.’27

  Later in 2013, explaining the sacrifices made by his family, he said during a political campaign speech, ‘Communal forces killed my grandmother, my father and will probably kill me too. But I don’t care.’ He went on to expand what he had said earlier, explaining how Beant Singh (one of his grandmother’s assassins) had asked him where his grandmother slept and if her security was adequate. ‘He told me how to lie down if somebody throws a grenade at me. At that time, I did not understand what he meant. Years later, I understood that Satwant Singh and Beant Singh were planning to throw a grenade at her during Diwali... I saw my grandmother’s blood. I also saw the blood of her killers Beant Singh and Satwant Singh. I used to play with those who killed her. I was angry with them for a long time... It took me 15 years to control my anger against them. I understand the pain of losing someone very close. I lost both my grandmother and my father to acts of terror.’28

  Members of the family have not usually been accepted by many of their peers at the start of their political dominance, and have had to fight to keep their positions. Indira Gandhi had to face down powerful regional leaders, which led her to split the Congress and win support with socialist economic programmes and with a 1971 war that turned East Pakistan into independent Bangladesh. Rajiv was accepted as the leader after his mother’s death, though he faced extensive opposition on policies from within the party. Sonia Gandhi played it more cannily and waited until 1998 when the party was desperate for her to become its saviour.

  There was, however, a party revolt against her as a foreigner a year later. This led to a split and the creation of the breakaway Nationalist Congress Party in May 1999 by, among others, Sharad Pawar, the powerful politician from Maharashtra who became its leader, and P.A. Sangma, a politician from Meghalaya in the north-east of India, who was later speaker of the Lok Sabha and stood unsuccessfully as a candidate to be president of India. The BJP had been playing up the foreigner angle in 1999 and Sonia had called a meeting of the party’s central working committee to plan a rebuttal. Sangma electrified the meeting by saying the feeling was shared by some in the Congress. ‘We know nothing about you or your parents,’ he said. ‘How do we defend you?’29 Pawar added that perhaps the party should declare that only an Indian born on Indian soil could head the government. Sonia faced down the revolt, but the event seems to have coloured her tactics since then.

  From Nehru to Rajiv

  Nehru’s first contribution was leading India into independence with Mahatma Gandhi. He celebrated the moment in 1947 with a memorable speech that still echoes today, marking India’s ‘tryst with destiny’ awakening ‘to life and freedom’ at ‘the stroke of the midnight hour’. Many of his foreign and domestic policies, however, now appear to have been unwise, even destructive, though some may have been appropriate for their time. His controversial economic centralism and cooperative approach to China are now generally regarded as well-meaning but misguided. One biographer has described Nehru, who died a broken man in May 1964 just 18 months after the China defeat, as ‘greater than his deeds’.30 That seems an apt epitaph. A different first prime minister might have had fewer dreams and made fewer mistakes, but he might not have matched the strong secular and democratic course that Nehru and his fellow leaders set for India in 1947.

  Following that ‘greater than his deeds’ thought, Indira Gandhi was not as great as she should have been, and her deeds were more damaging than she probably intended.31 Her mistakes are generally seen as the actions of an insecure woman, desperate to build power and relying too much on her malevolent, power-hungry younger son, Sanjay, who encouraged her to declare and sustain the 1975–77 State of Emergency. She increased her father’s socialist economic controls, though she did begin to unravel them in the early 1980s.32 This paved the way for the beginnings of economic liberalization.

  Most damagingly, she also opened the doors to widespread corruption, which has eaten devastatingly into politics, business and everyday life. This began the undermining of institutions such as the civil service and the judiciary, leading to the politicization of the civil service and crony capitalism. She also mishandled the Sikhs’ Khalistan independence movement in the Punjab, allowing it to escalate until she ordered the army into the Golden Temple, the Sikhs’ holiest shrine in Amritsar. In foreign relations, she understandably saw the old Soviet Union as a friend that had never let the country down. She practised damaging hegemony in South Asia, though she won massive popularity with the 1971 Bangladesh war.

  Strangely, Indira is seen more favourably abroad as a great though flawed leader who did her best to manage a massive poverty-stricken and fractured country. But there was more to her than that. She tried more than any
government before or since to protect India’s environment that has been progressively plundered since independence in 1947.33 She is also remembered for strengthening the confidence of Indian women, and for her ability to reach out to people and to care. Rescuing a disastrous and corrupt business escapade in vehicle manufacturing that had been started by Sanjay Gandhi, she initiated Maruti Udyog,34 which became a successful small car joint venture with Suzuki of Japan and triggered a gradual modernization of India’s engineering industry.

  Rajiv Gandhi tried to modernize a highly resistant country and curb corruption. Fascinated by technology, he encouraged developments in electronics and telecommunications, and began to computerize government departments and election campaigns. He inspired India’s youth with a vision of a modern India. For eighteen months, he could do virtually no wrong. J.R.D. Tata, the veteran head of Tata, praised him by comparing his methods with those of his mother: ‘You paid money to the Congress and you were in. You got everything you wanted – (industrial) licences, growth, the support of the party. That was the policy. Now Rajiv Gandhi has changed all that,’ Tata said in a magazine interview.35 Gandhi was even praised after his first year by Atal Bihari Vajpayee, the BJP’s president and later prime minister, who told me, somewhat mischievously: ‘He has made a good beginning. India is moving. As opposed to Mrs Gandhi, he is good.’36

  But India was not ready for Rajiv’s vision of the future, and he was quickly dragged down by vested interests that preferred things as they were and blocked his reforms. Initially he tried to clean up the government and disbanded some of the networks of his mother’s regime, dismissing Pranab Mukherjee, who had been Indira’s finance and commerce minister, and R.K. Dhawan, who had wielded immense power running her office. (Both later worked their way back to the centre of Congress politics. Mukherjee became a minister in the 2004 and 2009 governments and president of India in 2012.) But Gandhi was hit by the debilitating Bofors corruption scandal in 1987, which wounded him politically and continued to haunt the Gandhis. In April 2012, the Swedish police chief who had been in charge of the investigations 25 years earlier, said that Gandhi ‘watched the massive cover-up in India and Sweden and did nothing’.37