Today, it is exactly 25 years since the assassination of Indira Gandhi. Its memory is still fresh in the minds of Delhi-ites. There is so much to recall and to sort out that it is hard to make sense of what she was all about.
In the end, though, after another 25 years have gone by, the usual question that history asks will remain: was she a good ruler or bad? And, as Sir Jadunath Sarkar has demonstrated in the case of Aurangzeb, the answer will depend on which period one is looking at. Aurangzeb was fine, said Dr Sarkar, from 1669 to 1682; it was only after that he slowly became what his eventual reputation would be based on.
In a similar way, Indira Gandhi was pretty much all right until mid-1973, that is, the first seven years. This was the phase when she turned the Congress into a radical force by splitting it (1969), nationalised the banks because politics demanded it (1969), entered into the treaty with the USSR because the international situation required it (1971), split Pakistan because it had to be split (1971) and restored the fortunes of the Congress in the States (1972) after the electoral debacle of 1967.
But major triumphs are always short-lived. The period between 1973 and 1975 was a terrible one for rulers the world over. There was the first oil price shock and the drought/inflation (1973). The political agitation against high prices turned into one against her. However, one can quite plausibly argue that these are normal in politics and that too much should not be made of such things.
But what made these years different for Indira Gandhi was Sanjay Gandhi. During these two years he emerged as the boy to whom mummy could not and would not say no. So for the next six or seven years, until his death in the plane crash of 1980, Indira Gandhi ceased to be the person the country had known between 1966-73.
In an imperceptible and insidious way, the centre of power shifted from her to Sanjay. There is enough documentation of this in the memoirs of civil servants of the period, as also in the files.
What everyone informally knew in Delhi was formalised on June 26, 1975 when Indira Gandhi ended democracy in India by declaring a state of internal Emergency because a High Court had held her guilty of electoral malpractice. It was Sanjay who instigated her, aided and abetted by a few others in the party. During the next two years, she began an attack on democratic institutions whose effects are still being felt.
She was defeated in the general election of 1977 but thanks to the internal divisions in the Janata Party which had replaced the Congress, she managed to persuade enough voters to vote her back into power in 1980.
Thus began the third and last phase of rule, from 1980 to 1984. The twin shocks of the defeat in 1977 and the death of Sanjay brought forth a third version of Indira Gandhi. She became indecisive, distracted and opposed to change. She stopped even the minor economic and social reforms that had begun in 1977 under the Janata Party.
Three personas
In my view, this last manifestation of her is a major cause for the confusion about her contributions to India. Her post-1980 persona simply doesn’t jell with the pre-1977 one. People tend to mix up the phases and take one view or the other about her. Ideally, however, she should be judged as three very different people.
The fulcrums around which Indian politics revolves have varied more-or-less with each decade. Indira Gandhi was involved in it for 27 years — from 1957 when she had the elected Communist government of Kerala dismissed until her death in 1984.
By the end of the 1950s, nationalism had worn thin. By the end of the 1960s, economic growth was passé and attention had shifted to equity and distribution. By the end of the 1970s, after nearly 15 years of growing unemployment, attention began to shift back to growth. This was perhaps best captured by the late L. K. Jha in his 1981 book An Economic Strategy for the 1980s. Indira Gandhi rejected its basic premise that the time had come for the state to withdraw from the economic stage. Nor, as it happens, did she expand the state’s role very much. She simply persisted with the status quo, which she seemed to find very comforting, but which froze India in time.
Autocratic
However, even if the country did not change, its main agent of change, the Congress Party, changed — for the worse. It has always been an undemocratic outfit, with Gandhiji always insisting on imposing his will on it. But in the 1980s, in a continuation of the process that began in June 1975, the Congress went from being merely undemocratic to becoming completely autocratic. That was the only change that Indira Gandhi wrought in her third persona. That legacy still lives on.
So how do we judge her? When asked this question, most people say “by the damage she inflicted on our democratic institutions.” But as we have seen, all of them have gradually repaired themselves, The only institution that has not been able to do so, in spite of brief attempt in the 1990s, is the Congress Party. Her legacy of the Congress as a private limited company has proved very enduring. This, perhaps, is her real legacy, the one that Sonia Gandhi is at pains to preserve.
Nevertheless, election results notwithstanding, the moral is clear: the damage you do to other things will eventually be repaired by others. But to repair the damage you do to your own, there is no one.
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