Implosion (31 page)

Later in 2013, explaining the sacrifices made by his family, he said during a political campaign speech, ‘Communal forces killed my grandmother, my father and will probably kill me too. But I don’t care.’ He went on to expand what he had said earlier, explaining how Beant Singh (one of his grandmother’s assassins) had asked him where his grandmother slept and if her security was adequate. ‘He told me how to lie down if somebody throws a grenade at me. At that time, I did not understand what he meant. Years later, I understood that Satwant Singh and Beant Singh were planning to throw a grenade at her during Diwali... I saw my grandmother’s blood. I also saw the blood of her killers Beant Singh and Satwant Singh. I used to play with those who killed her. I was angry with them for a long time... It took me 15 years to control my anger against them. I understand the pain of losing someone very close. I lost both my grandmother and my father to acts of terror.’
²⁸

Members of the family have not usually been accepted by many of their peers at the start of their political dominance, and have had to fight to keep their positions. Indira Gandhi had to face down powerful regional leaders, which led her to split the Congress and win support with socialist economic programmes and with a 1971 war that turned East Pakistan into independent Bangladesh. Rajiv was accepted as the leader after his mother’s death, though he faced extensive opposition on policies from within the party. Sonia Gandhi played it more cannily and waited until 1998 when the party was desperate for her to become its saviour.

There was, however, a party revolt against her as a foreigner a year later. This led to a split and the creation of the breakaway Nationalist Congress Party in May 1999 by, among others, Sharad Pawar, the powerful politician from Maharashtra who became its leader, and P.A. Sangma, a politician from Meghalaya in the north-east of India, who was later speaker of the Lok Sabha and stood unsuccessfully as a candidate to be president of India. The BJP had been playing up the foreigner angle in 1999 and Sonia had called a meeting of the party’s central working committee to plan a rebuttal. Sangma electrified the meeting by saying the feeling was shared by some in the Congress. ‘We know nothing about you or your parents,’ he said. ‘How do we defend you?’
²⁹
Pawar added that perhaps the party should declare that only an Indian born on Indian soil could head the government. Sonia faced down the revolt, but the event seems to have coloured her tactics since then.

From Nehru to Rajiv

Nehru’s first contribution was leading India into independence with Mahatma Gandhi. He celebrated the moment in 1947 with a memorable speech that still echoes today, marking India’s ‘tryst with destiny’ awakening ‘to life and freedom’ at ‘the stroke of the midnight hour’. Many of his foreign and domestic policies, however, now appear to have been unwise, even destructive, though some may have been appropriate for their time. His controversial economic centralism and cooperative approach to China are now generally regarded as well-meaning but misguided. One biographer has described Nehru, who died a broken man in May 1964 just 18 months after the China defeat, as ‘greater than his deeds’.
³⁰
That seems an apt epitaph. A different first prime minister might have had fewer dreams and made fewer mistakes, but he might not have matched the strong secular and democratic course that Nehru and his fellow leaders set for India in 1947.

Following that ‘greater than his deeds’ thought, Indira Gandhi was not as great as she should have been, and her deeds were more damaging than she probably intended.
³¹
Her mistakes are generally seen as the actions of an insecure woman, desperate to build power and relying too much on her malevolent, power-hungry younger son, Sanjay, who encouraged her to declare and sustain the 1975–77 State of Emergency. She increased her father’s socialist economic controls, though she did begin to unravel them in the early 1980s.
³²
This paved the way for the beginnings of economic liberalization.

Most damagingly, she also opened the doors to widespread corruption, which has eaten devastatingly into politics, business and everyday life. This began the undermining of institutions such as the civil service and the judiciary, leading to the politicization of the civil service and crony capitalism. She also mishandled the Sikhs’ Khalistan independence movement in the Punjab, allowing it to escalate until she ordered the army into the Golden Temple, the Sikhs’ holiest shrine in Amritsar. In foreign relations, she understandably saw the old Soviet Union as a friend that had never let the country down. She practised damaging hegemony in South Asia, though she won massive popularity with the 1971 Bangladesh war.

Strangely, Indira is seen more favourably abroad as a great though flawed leader who did her best to manage a massive poverty-stricken and fractured country. But there was more to her than that. She tried more than any government before or since to protect India’s environment that has been progressively plundered since independence in 1947.
³³
She is also remembered for strengthening the confidence of Indian women, and for her ability to reach out to people and to care. Rescuing a disastrous and corrupt business escapade in vehicle manufacturing that had been started by Sanjay Gandhi, she initiated Maruti Udyog,
³⁴
which became a successful small car joint venture with Suzuki of Japan and triggered a gradual modernization of India’s engineering industry.

Rajiv Gandhi tried to modernize a highly resistant country and curb corruption. Fascinated by technology, he encouraged developments in electronics and telecommunications, and began to computerize government departments and election campaigns. He inspired India’s youth with a vision of a modern India. For eighteen months, he could do virtually no wrong. J.R.D. Tata, the veteran head of Tata, praised him by comparing his methods with those of his mother: ‘You paid money to the Congress and you were in. You got everything you wanted – (industrial) licences, growth, the support of the party. That was the policy. Now Rajiv Gandhi has changed all that,’ Tata said in a magazine interview.
³⁵
Gandhi was even praised after his first year by Atal Bihari Vajpayee, the BJP’s president and later prime minister, who told me, somewhat mischievously: ‘He has made a good beginning. India is moving. As opposed to Mrs Gandhi, he is good.’
³⁶

But India was not ready for Rajiv’s vision of the future, and he was quickly dragged down by vested interests that preferred things as they were and blocked his reforms. Initially he tried to clean up the government and disbanded some of the networks of his mother’s regime, dismissing Pranab Mukherjee, who had been Indira’s finance and commerce minister, and R.K. Dhawan, who had wielded immense power running her office. (Both later worked their way back to the centre of Congress politics. Mukherjee became a minister in the 2004 and 2009 governments and president of India in 2012.) But Gandhi was hit by the debilitating Bofors corruption scandal in 1987, which wounded him politically and continued to haunt the Gandhis. In April 2012, the Swedish police chief who had been in charge of the investigations 25 years earlier, said that Gandhi ‘watched the massive cover-up in India and Sweden and did nothing’.
³⁷

In foreign and regional affairs, Rajiv began to mend fences with the US, and also with China. He went to Beijing (with Sonia) in December 1988 on what was the first visit by an Indian prime minister after the 1962 war, and was welcomed by Deng Xiaoping, China’s supreme leader.
³⁸
He tried (disastrously) to force peace in Sri Lanka where, in 1987, he became involved in an ill-advised and thankless posting of Indian troops to the country’s troubled Jaffna peninsula. He also came (maybe unwittingly) close to war with Pakistan at the end of 1986 when escalating army exercises almost triggered a conflict.

At home, he launched an unsuccessful peace initiative on the Sikh leaders’ demands for some form of autonomy in the state of Punjab. His policies on Muslim rights and Hindu nationalism – including a highly controversial Hindu temple at Ayodhya and an equally controversial ruling on Muslim women’s rights – encouraged communalism and contributed to Hindu-Muslim riots. Overall, his political popularity slipped rapidly from 1986 onwards. Constant reshuffles of ministers (more than twelve in four years), plus defections of some trusted colleagues and changes of senior bureaucrats, made matters worse. Eventually, accused of arrogance and insensitivity – and blighted by the Bofors scandal – he lost the 1989 general election, five years after his landslide victory. He was assassinated in 1991 during the next general election campaign, before he had a chance to show if he could put into practice what he had learned in the mid-1980s.

But Rajiv Gandhi’s legacy should not be dismissed, as it often is by India’s elite, as being of little or no importance. If Nehru was greater than his deeds and Indira was not as great as she should have been, Rajiv’s hopes and dreams were greater than his ability in the 1980s to achieve them. His most important legacy was his vision of a new, young India, and the work he did that led to India’s economic development in the following 20 years. Whether he would have won the 1991 election had he lived, is an open question – results from polling that took place before his death made it appear less than certain. But his death sparked a sympathy wave that returned a Congress government, just as Indira Gandhi’s assassination had done for him in 1984.

Some observers thought that the dynasty’s political dominance was finished. Rajiv Gandhi had not been seen as a successful prime minister, and he had no obvious and immediate family successor. Sonia Gandhi, then 45, was shy and inexperienced, and Rahul and Priyanka were still young (aged 21 and 19). Furthermore, the immediate emergence and acceptance of Narasimha Rao seemed to indicate that the Congress could rule without a Gandhi in charge, even though Rao was chosen only because he was assumed (wrongly) to be too old and unambitious to be significant.

It is never wise to write off dynasties however, because admirers and advisers continue to cling to a family, even if it fades for a time, imbuing it with an aura of importance in the hope that it will gradually regain influence and eventually return to power. That is what happened during the 1990s. Sonia Gandhi gradually emerged from the mourning and seclusion of a widow and eventually became the Congress party’s leader, fulfilling her unexpected legacy as head of the family and re-establishing the dynasty with unexpected skill and patient determination. At the same time, her two children, Rahul and Priyanka, grew into potential future heirs, enhancing the dynasty’s image of perpetuity.

Notes

1
.   JE, ‘What can we do but vote for her son?’
Financial Times
, 21 December 1984

2
.   JE, ‘Rajiv Plea to Shun Violence – Son named Prime Minister after assassination of Indira Gandhi’,
Financial Times
, 1 November 1984

3
.   
http://ridingtheelephant.wordpress.com/2009/10/31/indira-gandhi-%E2%80%93-a-
flawed-legacy-25-years-after-her-death/

4
.   Sunil Khilnani, ‘States of Emergency’,
The New Republic
, 17 December 2001,
http://www.newrepublic.com/article/states-emergency

5
.   Kuldip Nayar,
Beyond the Lines
, p.169, Roli Books 2012,
http://www.amazon.com/Beyond-Lines-Autobiography-Kuldip-Nayar/dp/8174369104

6
.   Ibid., p. 131.

7
.   
http://www.dnaindia.com/india/report_43-years-on-mystery-shrouds-post-mortem-of-lal-bahadur-shastri_1279124

8
.   Kuldip Nayar,
Beyond the Lines
, p.169, Roli Books 2012

9
.   Frank Moraes,
India Today
, p. 232, Macmillan, 1960: ‘There is no question of Nehru’s attempting to create a dynasty of his own; it would be inconsistent with his character and career’,
http://www.amazon. co.uk/India-Today-Frank-Moraes/dp/B0007ITK9M

10
. Katherine Frank,
Indira – The Life of Indira Nehru Gandhi,
.p. 250–251, HarperCollins, London 2001,
http://www. harpercollins.com.au/books/Indira-Life-Nehru-Gandhi-Katherine-Frank/?isbn=9780007372508

11
. Krishna Nehru Hutheesing,
Dear to behold; an intimate portrait of Indira Gandhi
, p. 149, Macmillan 1969,
http://books.google.ae/books/about/Dear_to_behold.html?id=mY8BAAAAMAAJ&redir_ esc=y

12
. Katherine Frank,
Indira
, p. 273.

13
. P.N. Dhar,
Indira Gandhi, the Emergency and Indian Democracy
, p. 329, OUP 2000,
http://books.google.ae/books/about/Indira_Gandhi_the_emergency_and_Indian_d.html?id=EzRuAAAAMAAJ&redir_ esc=y

14
. Nicholas Nugent,
Rajiv Gandhi Son of a Dynasty
, p. 47, BBC Books 1990, UBS Delhi 1991,
http://books.google.ae/books/about/Rajiv_ Gandhi.html?id=gxxuAAAAMAAJ&redir_esc=y

15
. JE, ‘The only man for the job’,
Financial Times
, 3 November 1984

16
. NDTV,
Walk the Talk
,
Indian Express
, 7 March 2004,
http://www. indianexpress.com/oldStory/42528/

17
. ‘Her class of ’84’,
The Times of India
, 9 June 2004,
http://timesofindia. indiatimes.com/city/Her-class-of-84/articleshow/727253.cms?