Nonetheless, Indira Gandhi once memorably confessed, “I don't really have a political philosophy. I can't say I believe in any ism. I wouldn't say I'm interested in socialism as socialism. To me it's just a tool.” But tools are used for well-defined purposes, and it was never clear that Indira Gandhi had any, beyond the politically expedient (one observer sardonically said her politics were “somewhere to the left of self-interest”). The 1971 electoral and military triumphs — the first over a sclerotic and discredited political establishment at home, the second over a sclerotic and discredited martial law establishment next door — saw Indira at her pinnacle. But it was not to last. Mrs. Gandhi was skilled at the acquisition and maintenance of power, inept at wielding it for larger purposes. She had no real vision or program beyond campaign slogans; “remove poverty” was a mantra without a method. Her only ideology seemed to be opportunism, garbed in socialist rhetoric.
As mounting protests in 1975 threatened to bring her down, a High Court judge convicted the prime minister on a technicality of electoral malpractice in her crushing 1971 victory. Mrs. Gandhi, it seemed, would have to resign in disgrace. Instead, she struck back. Declaring a state of emergency, Indira Gandhi arrested opponents, censored the press, and postponed elections. As a stacked and compliant Supreme Court overturned her conviction, she proclaimed a “20-point program” for the uplift of the common man. Its provisions — which ranged from rural improvement schemes and the abolition of bonded labor to mass education and urban renewal — remained largely unimplemented. Meanwhile, her thuggish younger son, Sanjay, ordered brutally insensitive campaigns of slum demolitions and forced sterilizations. The Nehruvian compact with the people was ruptured, even as a meretricious slogan spouted by a pliant Congress Party president proclaimed, “Indira is India and India is Indira.”
Nehru's daughter had betrayed her father's democratic legacy. But — blinded by the mirrors of her sycophants, deafened by the silence of the intimidated press — Mrs. Gandhi called an election in March 1977, expecting vindication in electoral victory. Instead, she was routed, losing her own seat and the reins of office to an opposition coalition, the Janata (People's) Front. She quietly surrendered the reins; she had flirted with autocracy for twenty-two months, yet she was ultimately the daughter of the man who had done more than most to entrench democracy in India.
But the fractious Janata government could not hold together. By their mistakes, ineptitude, and greed (cynically, if artfully, exploited by Mrs. Gandhi and Sanjay) they opened the way for her improbable comeback. In January 1980, Mrs. Gandhi, having split the Congress once more and unembarrassedly renamed her faction after herself (as Congress-Indira, or “Congress-I”) was prime minister of India again.
The rest of the story is more familiar, and all tragic. The reckless Sanjay died in the crash of his stunt plane (one editor, Arun Shourie, wrote that “if he had lived he would have done to the country what he did to the plane”). Mrs. Gandhi, having systematically alienated, excluded, or expelled any leader of standing in her own party who might have been a viable deputy (and thus a potential rival) to her, drafted the only person she could entirely trust — her self-effacing, nonpolitical, and deeply reluctant elder son Rajiv — to fill the breach. (Indira Gandhi's deep mistrust of everyone but her own sons, her blindness to their limitations, and her intolerance of dissent remain profound and inescapable flaws.)
Rajiv had barely begun to grow into the role when Mrs. Gandhi was assassinated by the forces of Sikh extremism, forces she herself had primed, along with Sanjay, for narrow partisan purposes. There is no excusing the cynicism with which she encouraged (and initially financed) the fanaticism of a Sikh fundamentalist preacher, Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale, in order to undercut her political rivals, the moderate Sikh Akali Dal. As the murders ordered by Bhindranwale mounted, Mrs. Gandhi had little choice but to destroy the monster she had spawned, at a terrible price for Indian democracy and ultimately for the prime minister herself. Mrs. Gandhi had created the problem in the first place and let it mount to the point where the destructive force of “Operation Bluestar” seemed the only solution. Her earlier failure to nip the problem decisively in the bud demonstrated once again the Indira Gandhi paradox: so skilled at acquiring power, so tentative in wielding it. Her murder by her own Sikh security guards came at the end of an inglorious second term of office, at a time when the prospects of reelection had looked remote.
Indira Gandhi's was an extraordinary life, but one which raises too many unanswerable questions. Why did a woman brought up in privilege feel so insecure? Why did her fifteen years in office (with the exception of her annus mirabilis, 1971) have so little to show for them? How did she, with her crushing parliamentary majorities, miss so many opportunities to resolve some of India's most persistent problems? How could she encourage so much sycophancy and corruption, trusting, by her own admission, “men who may not be very bright but on whom I can rely”? What led a secular rationalist — a woman who was so agnostic that she took her oath of office as prime minister without the customary reference to God — to become religious and superstitious in her last years?
Some admirers take Indira Gandhi at her word, seeing a defender of the poor and the wretched where others saw only a political opportunist. Whatever she accomplished for the poor — and the evidence suggests her major “socialist” acts, like bank nationalization, did not do much to benefit them — the balance sheet tilts sadly against her. It is difficult to justify Mrs. Gandhi's deinstitutionalization of Indian democracy, or to explain the grim legacy of failure and paranoia she left the nation. The prime minister's emasculation of party, Parliament, and civil service, and the destructiveness of her actions in Punjab, Kashmir, Andhra Pradesh, and even Sri Lanka in the months leading up to her assassination, were undeniably self-destroying. When she returned to office in 1980 and was asked how it felt to be India's leader again, she snapped at her questioner, “I have always been India's leader.”
To many at the time, it seemed that way, and yet, in the almost unrecognizable politics and society of today's India, another epitaph seems more likely to endure. Asked a few months later “what one thing” she wanted to be remembered for, Indira Gandhi bitterly replied, “I do not want to be remembered for anything.” Since the party she enfeebled heads a coalition government pursuing policies diametrically opposed to hers, and since India's fractious federalism throws up multiparty coalitions as far removed as imaginable from the centralized “priministerialism” of Indira Gandhi, it seems she may get her wish after all.
31. The Spy Who Came In Through the Heat
I RECENTLY HAD THE GREAT PRIVILEGE OF BEING THE FIRST outsider, unconnected to the security community, to deliver a lecture within the premises of RAW, our country's external intelligence agency. The occasion was the first R. N. Kao Memorial Lecture, on the fifth anniversary of the death of the legendary Rameshwar Nath Kao.
I had never met the man in whose honor I spoke. But his story is a compelling one — from joining the police as a twenty-two-year-old in 1940, moving to the Intelligence Bureau in 1947, winning numerous honors and medals, and serving in 1963 as the first director of the Aviation Research Center, India's first technological intelligence agency. In 1968 Kao took charge as the first head of a new external intelligence agency with the innocuous name of the Research and Analysis Wing. (I am told that many of the agency's professionals prefer to speak of it as “R & AW,” whereas like others infected by the media, I like the sound of RAW.)