Indira Gandhi: A Goddess Emerges – An Excerpt from Rajiv Dogra’s ‘India’s World’
Prepare for war with peace in thy soul.
—Bhagavad Gita
On 11 January 1966, within hours of the death of Lal Bahadur Shastri, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) had prepared its assessment of the scenario after him. Speculating on his possible successors it said, ‘Kamaraj probably has the broadest support within the [Congress] party…’ The CIA paper went on to assert that the ‘former Finance Minister Morarji Desai, Defence Minister Y.B. Chavan and party chief, Kamaraj were the front-runners for the top job.’ Indira Gandhi was considered the least likely in the CIA’s list of dark horses to become prime minister.
Just days after the CIA had made this assessment, she was elected the leader of the Congress legislature party, defeating Morarji by 355 votes to 169. On 24 January 1966, Indira Priyadarshini Gandhi became the third Prime Minister of India.
The party stalwarts known as the ‘Syndicate’ had picked her as someone who enjoyed national recognition but could be counted upon to take instructions from the party. They saw her as a ‘goongi gudiya’, a ‘dumb doll’ who could be manipulated according to their wishes while in power. She must have anticipated these conspiracies, because as early as 1 May 1958, she wrote a letter to her father reminding him of his frustrations with the party intrigues and his desire to resign. She wrote there, ‘Let them try to manage by themselves, otherwise they will drag you down with their own rottenness…’
The wish to get away from it all must have persisted with her, as just before Nehru died, she wrote to her friend Dorothy Norman, a New York-based writer and editor, ‘The desire to be out of India and the malice, jealousies and envy, with which one is surrounded, is now overwhelming.’
Interestingly, within two months of taking office, she visited the US, making it her first overseas trip. According to a presidential aide, Robert Komer, she ‘vamped’ Lyndon Johnson, who was moved to declare that he wanted to make sure ‘no harm comes to this girl.’ He promised $9 million in aid to India; she in turn offered India’s understanding of the American position in the latter’s war in Vietnam.
A condition of the US, in lieu of aid, had been the devaluation of the Indian currency. But her announcement of a huge 60 per cent devaluation of the rupee provoked fierce criticism at home and the fear that India was vulnerable again to foreign pressure. These reactions were formative for her as a leader. The twin, and in some ways conjoined, experience of the Syndicate’s continuing intrigues against her and the disappointment with the American pressure regarding devaluation convinced her to stick with protectionist measures, adopt populist policies, and mistrust dependence on foreign hand. Singed particularly by her confrontation with the Syndicate, Indira began to surround herself with loyalists rather than equals. Along with this slow but steady transformation in her style of governance, she was responsible for a more fundamental shift in Indian politics. This heir of the nationalist founding father was now on her way to becoming an autocrat who would accept no opposition in her determination to provide firm governance. After the break with the Syndicate in 1969, her hold over the party became absolute. As she remarked to a journalist, ‘Where is the party? I am the party.’
Before that assertive avatar, she fumbled in the initial months as the prime minister. Her job was made tougher still by political rivals who kept sniping constantly at her. Ram Manohar Lohia, a socialist leader, for personal and political reasons, had taken it upon himself to trip her with toxic remarks in parliament and acidic speeches outside it. The coinage ‘goongi gudiya’ was his gift to the lexicon of Indian political barbs, and this comment by him during a speech was representative of the venom that Indira had to endure during those early years. Lohia said, ‘Indira should be defeated in the election so that “this pretty woman does not have to suffer pain and trouble beyond her endurance…”’
Indira’s transformation from a ‘goongi gudiya’ to a confident, assertive and decisive prime minister did not take long. Along the way, she took care to discard almost all who had mistakenly considered her a ‘dumb doll’. When her marginalized opponents said, ‘Indira hatao (Remove Indira)’, she countered them with the slogan, ‘Garibi hatao (Remove poverty)’. In fact, some of India’s greatest achievements came about when she was the prime minister. To name just one, the Green Revolution, encouraged by Shastri in his short tenure, saw its full flowering during her rule. With food security for the first time, India no longer had to beseech others for grain, bowl in hand.
But the period that she was the prime minister was tumultuous; she won great victories and suffered some spectacular losses. In one such phase in 1978, Indira was on a comeback trail politically, involving endless campaign travels across the country. One late evening after addressing a gathering, all the while holding a torch that could focus its light on her face in the gathering dark, she turned to the journalist Bruce Chatwin who was accompanying her and remarked, ‘You have no idea how tiring it is to be a goddess.’
Indira is the only goddess that the Indian political constellation has had so far. She may have been flawed, but she loved India and gave it its proudest possible moment. In that period, the US tried to obstruct her with all its might, including by sending a mighty flotilla, the Seventh Fleet, to cow her down. She, in turn, more than matched the Nixon-Kissinger duo trick for trick, frustrating them at every turn. This was no mean feat considering the fact that these two were considered wizards of statecraft.
One of her many diplomatic masterstrokes was the signing, in August 1971, of the Treaty of Peace, Friendship and Cooperation between the USSR and India. It sent out a strong signal to Washington and Beijing that India was no longer alone in the struggle for Bangladesh that it was soon to engage in. Article IX of the treaty said it all:
Each High Contracting Party undertakes to abstain from providing any assistance to any third country that engages in armed conflict with the other Party. In the event of either being subjected to an attack or a threat thereof, the High Contracting Parties shall immediately enter into mutual consultations in order to remove such threat and to take appropriate effective measures to ensure peace and the security of their countries.
It wasn’t the fear of Pakistani might that made India opt for the bear hug, but the possibility that the US and China might directly or indirectly come to Pakistan’s aid. Whatever shine India may have put thereafter on describing the treaty with the Soviet Union as one to promote peace, the world was far from convinced that it was still truly non-aligned. But that labelling, or lack of it, was not a major cause of concern for India, nor was it the first time that such criticism was being made. After all, India had faced a similar verdict when Pandit Nehru wrote to Kennedy in 1962 seeking military help. The principal difference this time was the message that the Indo-Soviet treaty sent out. It spoke clearly of the measures that could be taken in case one of the treaty partners came under attack. This was a significant morale booster for India, at a time when China’s stand remained unclear and the US was doing all it could to trip India.
One example of that attitude was President Nixon’s remark shortly after meeting Mrs Gandhi at the White House in 1971, ‘We really slobbered over the old witch.’ Echoing his boss, Kissinger said, ‘The Indians are bastards anyway.’ Much later in 2005, in a half-hearted attempt at repentance, Kissinger told an interviewer, ‘[The foul language has] to be seen in the context of a cold war atmosphere 35 years ago, when I had paid a secret visit to China when President Nixon had not yet been there and India had made a kind of an alliance with the Soviet Union.’ Kissinger was not being entirely truthful, because that interview was tailored to the interviewer’s taste. His more candid assessment of Mrs Gandhi was in his memoirs: ‘My own views of Mrs Gandhi were similar to Nixon’s, the chief difference being that I did not take her condescension personally.’
Looking back from this distance in time, it was clearly an issue of the egos of two American leaders bent on making their mark in history through an opening to China, which they thought would transform the world and checkmate the Soviet Union. In the American perception, India’s actions were souring that passage. In contrast, the Indian view was coloured by the immediate problem on hand. For India and Indira, the issue was one of morality in international affairs and respect for the human rights of millions of Bengalis who were being targeted by the Pakistani army’s guns, as a result of which ten million East Bengali Hindus and Muslims had fled their land to seek refuge in India while another million plus had been killed by the Pakistani army by that time.
Still, Nixon and Kissinger were fixated on the mythical benefits of their trip to China. Since then, the US has had reason to look back with mixed feelings at that journey and its uncertain results. In contrast, history records the liberation of Bangladesh as Indira’s greatest achievement. But this episode also reflects the sharp differences that two of the world’s largest democracies can be prone to.
It wasn’t just Nixon who had underestimated Indira—so had the Pakistani President General Yahya Khan. He never thought ‘that woman’, as he contemptuously called Indira Gandhi, would risk a military response. Much to his surprise, within a few hours of the Pakistani air strikes on Indian airbases on 3 December 1971, the Indian Army had moved into the then East Pakistan.
The Indian victory over the Pakistani army in East Pakistan was swift and complete. Because it was so overwhelming, the world pondered anxiously if that rout would be extended to the western side of Pakistan, because the Indian army had already advanced significantly in that part as well. But as in her previous moves, this time too, Indira surprised the world by ordering her army to cease fire all along the western front as of 8 p.m. on 17 December 1971.
Kissinger was delighted on hearing this decision. He telephoned Nixon to report the ceasefire in the west, ‘Congratulations, Mr. President. You saved W[est] Pakistan.’
Nixon brooded over it, not wanting Indira Gandhi to gloat in victory. ‘She shouldn’t get credit for starting the fire and then calling in the fire department,’ he said. As noted by Gary J. Bass, ‘Kissinger…spent the rest of the day calling reporters to claim credit… About the Indians, he told the British ambassador, “I don’t know how you tolerated them for those years.”’
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