TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/caps/84/84.1

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                                                                                November 12, 1984

Sad, Lonely, but Never Afraid

Indira Gandhi:  1917-1984



An interviewer once asked Indira Gandhi if it was true, as he had
heard from one of her aunts, that she had been the family pet.
"Would you say," he pressed on, "you were a spoiled child?"
Gandhi's crisp answer:  "No."  There was a long pause, and then
she added, "On the contrary, I felt rather deprived of
everything."  After another pause, Gandhi began talking about
when she was three and all her English dolls and dresses had to
be destroyed because Indian nationalists were boycotting foreign
goods. "My first memory was of burning foreign cloth and
imported articles in the courtyard of the house. The whole
family did it."

The next year, hardly aware of what was happening, she perched on
her grandfather's knee as he and her father were sentenced to
prison for opposing British rule in India. Her father,
Jawaharlal Nehru, was to spend years in prison while his only
child grew into a shy, frail adolescent. He wrote her a long
series of laboriously educational prison letters, now widely read
in Indian schools, that covered the whole history of the world.
"They were the only companionship I had with my father," she
later recalled.

It is difficult to assess the enigmatic and contradictory
personality of the woman who led India for most of two decades,
but the roots must lie somewhere in those years of loneliness.
Daughter of a champion of democracy, she made herself at one
point a virtual dictator. She could be warm and charming but also
arrogant and ruthless. She always had a look of sadness. "I
like being Prime Minister, yes, but ... I am not ambitious," she
once said. And on another occasion:  "I could have become an
interior decorator. I could even have become a dancer."

When Indira Priyadarshini (the second name means Dear to Behold)
was born on Nov. 19, 1917, in Allahabad in the northern state of
Uttar Pradesh, the Nehru family servants gathered around to pay
homage to the master's elaborately swaddled infant, and one of
them misguidedly congratulated Nehru on the birth of a son.
Perhaps he did wish for a political heir; if so, it had to be
Indira, for there were to be no other children.

As a little girl, Indira liked to climb on a table and, as she
recalled, "deliver thunderous speeches to the servants."  Once
the foreign-made toys had been destroyed, she arranged her
Indian-made dolls in Indian circumstances, some as demonstrators
marching for independence, some as British police clubbing them
on the heads.

Her mother Kamala was a demure and subservient woman who had been
found for Nehru by his father; it was an arranged marriage, and
the acquired bridge was greatly scorned by Nehru's Westernized
female relatives. While the men were in prison, Kamala developed
tuberculosis, so she was sent to Switzerland to convalesce.
Indira went with her, to two bleak years at a school near Geneva;
then, after Kamala's death, she went on to Somerville, a women's
college at Oxford. One relief from her loneliness was a
penniless but galvanizing Indian student in London, Feroze
Gandhi.

Feroze had been studying in Allahabad some years earlier when the
sickly Kamala collapsed while marching in an anti-British
demonstration outside his college. He took her home, became
slightly infatuated with her and lingered around the house as a
friend of the family's. He hardly noticed Indira, who was five
years younger than he. But after the two had returned home to
India from blitzed and threatened London, Indira announced in
1941 that they wanted to get married. Nehru was dismayed; he
needed Indira to run his household. Feroze had no money, no job.
"Nobody wanted that marriage, nobody."  Indira said later, but
she was adamant. Nehru himself wove a pink cotton sari for her
to wear as her wedding dress. In 1944, Rajiv was born, and two
years after than, Sanjay.

Nehru never ceased to make demands on Indira, and his daughter
never stopped acceding to them. She repeatedly left Feroze's
home to preside over social functions for her father. When Nehru
became independent India's first Prime Minister in 1947, Indira
moved back into his house with her two sons and became his
official host. That was in effect the end of her five-year
marriage, though she never divorced Feroze. He won a seat in
Parliament in 1952, occasionally made bitter sarcasms about Nehru
and died of a heart attack in 1960.

As "the nation's daughter," Indira accompanied Nehru everywhere,
to Washington three times, to Peking and Moscow. Usually she
walked a few steps behind her illustrious father, always
deferential, ready to be of use. Nehru trusted her and confided
in her, but even as she neared 40 she had no political status,
made few speeches, offered little advice. She knew everyone, but
no one took her very seriously.

In 1955 the Congress Party asked her to serve on the 21-member
administrative working committee. She did well, organizing
charities, making speeches for social-welfare causes and traveling
widely on party business. But those efforts would hardly have
made her president of the party within four years. Her elevation
was partly an honor to Nehru, then at the height of his power,
and partly the result of a complex intrigue. Younger officials
in the party opted to use Gandhi as a well-liked figurehead with
which to challenge the old-line bosses who traditionally
dominated Indian politics.

Gandhi proved a surprisingly forceful administrator of the party
bureaucracy. She weeded out a number of time servers, promoted
younger officials, negotiated agreements among rival factions;
she also played a key part in ousting a Communist state
government in Kerala. But after a year she quit, saying that she
had to devote all her energies to her father.

Now past 70, and more than a decade in office, Nehru was becoming
increasingly disillusioned and crotchety. Sometimes he snapped
at Indira, too, saying "Don't talk nonsense" or telling her to
keep quiet. She unfailingly did as he ordered. One night in
January 1964, Nehru finished a speech, then suffered a stroke and
collapsed in Indira's arms. For more than four months, she not
only nursed him but aided him in running the country from his
sickbed. When Nehru died of another stroke that May, a dry-eyed
Indira supervised every detail of the tumultuous funeral and flew
in the plane that scattered his ashes across the countryside.

Then she collapsed in tears. Almost every time someone spoke to
her, she would start crying. Nehru's successor, Lal Bahadur
Shastri, wanted her to serve as Foreign Minister, but she wanted
no public office at all. Only after ten days of Shastri's
pleading did she agree to serve as Minister of Information and
Broadcasting, a minor post. After less than two years in office,
Shastri suddenly died, and the Congress Party bosses could not
agree on a successor. They turned to Mrs. Gandhi as someone who
could serve while the struggle for power went on.

And so, at the age of nearly 50, and with very little official
experience, Indira Gandhi almost accidentally became the leader
of India's millions. She seemed to have no clear idea of what to
do. The economy lurched into a major recession, bad weather
brought threats of famine, and a general election the following
year sharply reduced the Congress Party's majority. "The Prime
Minister has no program, no world view, no grand design," one of
her aides later commented. Mrs. Gandhi corroborated that
analysis, in a way, when she said, "I have a housewife's
mentality when I go about my job. If I see something dirty or
untidy, I have to clean it up."

Yet to the astonishment of her original supporters, Mrs. Gandhi
turned out to be a fighter. In 1967 she proposed a controversial
ten-point program that included nationalizing the commercial
banks and cutting off the government's $6 million annual
subsidies to a variety of maharajahs and princelings. When
conservative opponents rallied around her chief rival, Deputy
Prime Minister Morarji Desai, she dismissed him from her Cabinet.
When the party chiefs, angered by her leftward turn, expelled her
for "grave acts of undiscipline," she went to the Parliament and
won a vote of confidence. When she called a surprise election in
1971, she triumphantly captured more than two-thirds of the
seats. And when civil war broke out between the two regions of
neighboring Pakistan, she sent in troops to help transform East
Pakistan into the new nation of Bangladesh.

Mrs. Gandhi was at the peak of her power, but she was still
unable to deal with the huge problems of governing India. the
costs of the 1971 war, which had brought millions of refugees
pouring into India, helped send the economy into another spin.
The badly divided Congress Party was widely accused of graft and
incompetence. Mrs. Gandhi's main interest was in claiming the
role of a great power. She detonated India's first atom bomb in
1974 and reached out for Soviet aid and weaponry to re-equip
India's armed forces.

Then came the great crisis and the great fall. In 1975 a court
in Allahabad convicted Mrs. Gandhi of having violated the
electoral law by misusing government property in her last
campaign. The court not only canceled her election to Parliament
but barred her from holding office for six years. Her opponents
in Parliament immediately claimed that the ruling meant she must
resign as Prime Minister, but Mrs. Gandhi instead declared a
state of emergency. The police rounded up and jailed opposition
politicians, union leaders, student demonstrators -- some 50,000
people in all. Civil liberties were suspended, the press
censored. Even her old rival Desai, by then 79, who had claimed
that "Mrs. Gandhi is worse than Hitler or Stalin," was hauled off
to prison. Some believed she acted under the malign influence of
her younger son Sanjay, but she defied all critics. "In India,
democracy has given too much license to people," she said.
"Sometimes bitter medicine has to be administered to a patient to
cure him."

Mrs. Gandhi surprised everyone by calling elections early in
1977. She apparently believed that the people would once again
rally behind her. To her consternation, the vote went
overwhelmingly against her. Desai emerged from prison to become
the new Prime Minister. Mrs. Gandhi was arrested on a charge of
corruption, then released, then rearrested the following year and
released again.

Mrs. Gandhi's opponents soon fell to quarreling with one another,
and when the nation once again voted, in January 1980, it swept
her right back into power. Having freely given up her office
before being re-elected, Mrs. Gandhi to a certain extent had
healed the injuries that she had inflicted on Indian politics and
on her own reputation. By now she had become a national heroine.
"Indira zindabad [Long live Indira]!" the crowds would shout
wherever she went. Millions knew her simply as Madam or Madamji,
or Amma (Mother), or even just She.

Inevitably, perhaps, Mrs. Gandhi attracted more violent emotions.
"Once a man poked a gun at me," she said not long before her
death. "Another time, in Delhi, someone threw a knife at me.
And then, of course, there are always the stones, the bricks, the
bottles."  When she was speaking to a crowd in Orissa in 1967, a
stone smashed her in the face, breaking her nose and cutting her
lip. She pulled her sari over her face to cover the blood, but
refused to leave the podium. "I am frequently attacked," she
said. "But I'm not afraid."  That was the kind of woman who died
last week; not afraid, only surprised at the men who shot her as
she was greeting them in her garden.

By Otto Friedrich