By G Waugh
We have a couple of kids playing in the hall. Over the years despite having understood each other so well, both of them always love to remain at loggerheads to one another. They quarrel at the drop of a hat, they start hitting one another, whine and yell and roll over one another within minutes. So, it is mandatory that you always have a referee waiting at the corner of the hall ready to plunge into action as soon as things get ugly. After a bout ofname-calling and intense fighting, I sometimes manage to bring them together and establish peace by luring them into a truce. But I know pretty well, how fragile such a truce can turn out to be and how temporal the peace so established could end up being.
The first few minutes of the ceasefire could be of course, reasonably calm and easy. But the clock is always ticking and you never know when the pages of the painstakinglycomposed truce shall be torn to shreds and the cries for the next battle are heard.
Lofty ideals such as democracy, human rights, secularism are all like that. We have remained slaves and barbarians for the major portion of our civilization. Even basic values such as treating everyone equal and providing equal opportunities for all are all extremely new things that still haven’t beensufficiently internalized by us. Such values and ideals even if they appear simple today of course in retrospectneed learning, proper understanding and most importantly practice so that they become an inextricable part of our daily habit and behaviour.
This is what I understood and took a while to realize when I completed the last few lines of Indira Gandhi’s biography written by Anne Frank.
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Almost sixty percent of the biography is laced with letters written by Indira to her father, to her confidante in London and hearsay from Indira’s friends and relatives. These portions are the best pages of the book- we really get a peek into Indira’s personal life and also gratifyingly, mostly into her head. It is so moving to see such a troubled childhood torn between the love for her constantly ailing mother and a perennially absent father. Indira’s poorly nourished physique and slightly grotesque appearance is often referred to and she is forced to live under some kind of an inferiority complex.
Indira seems to have inherited her mother’s ill-health to her misfortune and a great part of her adolescence is spent in Europe for medical treatment. Her health doesn’t improve at all for years together and she is even advised not to marry and have kids. Indira despite putting up a brave face to all her physical issues doesn’t show signs of being an independent woman at all.
Psychologically too, after her mother’s early death she tethers her life to her father’s prospects and assists him in whatever he does. After her marriage to Feroze, she pins all her life’s hopes on him. Even after she gets wind about Feroze’s adulterous affairs, she doesn’t want to divorce him. She decides to separate from him not officially but she keeps returning to him despite living under her father’s auspices. She is troubled all the while between a father who hates his son-in-law of course with good reason and a husband who hates her for leaving him for her father.
In most of her letters to her close friend in London, Indira appears to me like a little child who needs some petting, advice and sound direction. There is not much intelligence apparent in her despite her proficient reading habits and Nehru is totally against her succeeding him politically not only because he doesn’t want to encourage dynastic politics and set a bad precedent for other politicians to follow but also on account of his perceived lack of intelligence and ability in her.
Indira suffers heavily in emotional terms after her husband’s untimely death for almost three years. By the time she recovers, it is Nehru’s turn to leave her. All that is left for Indira are her children and she decides to leave the country and settle in a place far away from India.
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What comes after is well known to everyone but what took me aback in the remaining portions of the biography is how abruptly she turns into a powerful and a charismatic leader who without doubt appears to have a magical finger on the pulse of her people. Even Katherine Frank, the author too must have had doubts about how this transformation came about since after her elevation to the presidency of the Congress Party, her correspondence to her friend in London diminishes and diminishes almost to a naught. So, nobody really has an idea of how a sickly, emotionally subservient woman who thinks she has no distinguished place in India’s politics suddenly emerges into a fully formed anda highly qualified politician.
Nationalization of banks, abolition of privy purses, introduction of Green Revolution that skyrockets India’s positionto the top among exporters of foodgrain, almost every move of her is a sixer- in the sense of how the general public perceive Indira. Post 1973, after her ground breaking success in truncating Pakistan in the Indo-Pak War of 1971 to almost half its size, she fires well-meaning advisers like P.N. Haksar and others who slowly start questioning her decisions and thought processes that reek of complacency and arrogance. She soon surrounds herself with a coterie of opportunists and sycophants just like how Jayalalithaa did in her last decade or so who start paving the path to her political collapse and eventual disgrace.
Katherine Frank’s description of Indira’s disastrous last decade (her victory and comeback in 1980 is only a minor peak) is swift and succinct but very familiar to those who already know enough of India’s political history. Indira whose love for her country which propelled her towards getting involved in India’s struggle for Independence and whose devotion to the poor and their well-being drove her towards left-leaning policies in the early years of her Prime Ministership, post 1975 appears to be a largely changed woman who would do anything including serving her own country on a platterif her elder son Sanjay wants to devour it. Indira’s excuses that she didn’t know any of her son’s atrocities and her reluctance to take any action to curtail him runs completely in contrast to how she was portrayed in the first half of the book.
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India, my father used to remark had never been an evolved country when it came to politics. We have had kings, caste, superstitions, autocracy and religious rituals for centuries together and such a largely changeless society was thrust with democracy as soon as the British left us. We were used and inured to autocratic rulers and their excesses for centuries together as a result of which even after the introduction of the ballot and the establishment of a participative democracy, we loved to worship and remain subservient to our rulers.This kind of slave mentality thrived even during the Nehru era who tried his best despite obvious flaws, to build institutions that could distribute hitherto concentrated political power into as many hands as possible.
Nehru’s seventeen-year rule, with all its flaws and deficiencies shattered the expectations of the West that the political unity of India and its newfound tryst with liberal democracy after the exit of the British was only going to be temporal and largely illusory. India soon began to draw great pride calling itself the largest democracy in the world and every subsequent election held began to mark the record each time for the greatest number of people queueing up to elect their ruler in any place of the world. Despite the scars of Partition, India’s political unity appeared to be pretty safe and surprisingly resilient. India’s impressive economic performance achievedthrough democratic means surprised China who was on the other hand applyingrepressive measures and deploying coercive apparatuses only to end upharvesting the same level of economic gains as India in the early 1970s. In short, India was turning out to be a model democratic state for other liberated Third World nations to follow.
But Indira’s dizzying rise to her political peak in 1971 marked a point of inflection. Her government soon began to train and fund armed rebels in neighbouring Sri Lanka and provide support to militant communalists in Punjab. Corruption soared to unprecedented levels, inflation grew and food prices skyrocketed. Both India’s extreme Left and Right stood to gain from such a pathetic state of affairs. All such forces assembled under one large umbrella offered by a Gandhian named JP Narayan who demanded ‘Total Revolution’ to overthrow India’s so-called Empress.
The imposition of Emergency that gave rise to censoring of the Press, witch-hunting, arrests and annihilation of Indira’s political enemies, compulsory sterilization campaign for India’s poor -one after another started sending out wake-up signals to those almost moribund doomsday prophetsall over the world who had badly wanted India to break into pieces at the beginning of its independence.
But the worst part of all this is only how a majority of Indians responded to these measures. In the first few months, the Emergency was never acknowledged as a violation of one’s own constitutionally guaranteed rights. Indians, a majority of them did not get offended or incensed when they were told not to publicly voice their opinion against the government. When sterilization was becoming almost compulsory, Indians did not get slighted that a democratically elected government is peeking into their bedrooms with audacity and royal abandon. When thousands of people were arrested and kept in custody without trial, common masses barely took notice.
Had Indira managed to just moderate Sanjay’s excesses and even slightly discipline overbearing Congress workers and rogues, India would have had no qualms living under a perfectly authoritarian state for decades together. It is this tendency to consciously remain blind to one’s own rights and privileges, worship and obey rulers and bureaucratsno matter how openly criminal and self-serving they are found to be, that nags me whenever we chest thump to the world that we are the largest living democracy in the world.
Even quite recently just to catch very few rats that were hoarding tons and tons of India’s black money in cash, the government asked each one of us honest, hard-working, tax paying citizens to stand in queue, empty our pockets and stand half-naked for a search. What did we do in return? Just try to remember how gleefully we offered ourselves for such a blatantly dictatorial move and how such a crude violation of our human and economic rights not even once featured in our thoughts when we queued up to re-elect the same government almost three years later.
I sometimes when I think about India’s innocent masses who deem it their duty to cast their vote every five years despite being woefully ignorant about politics and economics, get reminded of a quote often attributed to Winston Churchill,
‘The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter’.