“Do you remember how fascinated you were when you first read the story of Jeanne d’Arc and how your ambition was to be something like her?” wrote Jawaharlal Nehru from a British prison in India to his daughter on her 13th birthday in 1930. “In India today we are making history, and you and I are fortunate to see this happening before our eyes. I cannot say what part will fall to our lot, but whatever it may be, let us remember that we can do nothing that may bring discredit on our cause or dishonour to our people. Goodbye, little one, and may you grow up a brave soldier India’s service.”
“It’s a Girl.” The father’s wish seemed fittingly fulfilled last week. Into the oak-paneled central hall of New Delhi’s Parliament House—where Nehru himself had guided India’s fate for 17 years—glided a hauntingly attractive woman, her black hair streaked with grey, her brown eyes moist and mellow. On her brown shawl she wore a rosebud, just as Nehru had always worn one as his talisman of grace and hope in a sometimes graceless and hopeless land. Her hands held palm to palm in the traditional Indian greeting of namaste, she approached former Finance Minister Morarji Desai. “Will you bless my success?” she asked. “I give you my blessing,” he replied. Then Indira Gandhi, the only daughter of Jawaharlal Nehru, took her seat and waited for the parliamentary members of the ruling Congress Party to elect a Prime Minister to replace Lal Bahadur Shastri, who died in Tashkent two weeks ago.
The balloting, done by written vote, and the counting took four hours. Then a party official announced the results: 355 votes for Indira Gandhi and 169 for her only rival, Morarji Desai. Indira walked quickly to the podium, spoke briefly. “As I stand before you,” she said in Hindi, “my thoughts go back to the great leaders: Mahatma Gandhi, at whose feet I grew up, Panditji, my father, and Lal Bahadur Shastri. These leaders have shown the way, and I want to go along the same path.”
Even as Indira spoke, a crowd milled outside the round Parliament building. For days, the result had been a foregone conclusion, but the crowd nevertheless anxiously awaited confirmation.
Finally, as the first members came out, someone shouted, “Is it a boy or a girl?” “A girl,” came back the answer, and up went the cheers. Then a few minutes later, Indira appeared. The patrician profile, the pale smile, the rosebud—all reminded the crowd of their beloved Panditji. “Indira Gandhi zindabadr chanted the throng. “Long live Indira Gandhi!”
Problems Ahead. Thus, into the hands of Nehru’s daughter passed the responsibility of guiding the world’s second most populous nation. From around the world came congratulatory cables—some 10,000 in all. Pope Paul VI sent his blessing, Soviet Premier Aleksei Kosygin expressed “the Soviet people’s deep satisfaction,” and Lyndon Johnson sent a warm invitation to keep the date that Shastri had made for a Washington visit—around Feb. 1. Those who wished India well could only rejoice at the smooth transition of power. Though India is a nation of 480 million people speaking 14 major languages, and plagued by deep religious antipathies, it had proved for the second time in less than two years that it could lose a leader and not lose its head. That fact alone was encouraging to the free world. For all its problems, India has somehow managed to maintain a true working democracy. As such, it stands as a remarkable example in the eyes of the world and a clear alternative in Asia to Red China’s Communism.
Yet Indira Gandhi takes over a nation at the moment of its severest crisis in 18 years of independence. In northern India there is the threat of renewed invasion by the Red Chinese, who have already seized 14,500 sq. mi. of Indian territory. To the east and west lies the dilemma that is Pakistan, and the question of how to proceed with the truce agreement that Shastri negotiated with President Ayub Khan at Tashkent. At home, India is plagued by famine, rising unemployment, and just about every other woe that an overpopulated, poverty-stricken land is heir to.
A Mrs. Roosevelt? At first, some Westerners gasped in dismay at Mrs. Gandhi’s election. They remembered her as the darling of India’s left-wingers,the friend of Firebrand Krishna Menon, and the Prime Minister’s willful daughter who stamped her sandaled feet and threatened to report hecklers in her audience to her pitaji (daddy). At 48, Indira has largely outgrown that sort of thing. The left-wingers may still be enthusiastic about her, but she is better balanced. Menon seldom comes to call, and Indira keeps her temper reined in.
Still, there were lingering doubts about India’s new leader. “She is the Eleanor Roosevelt of India,” commented one observer. “Her response to problems is essentially emotional, and that, unfortunately, is not what India needs now.” Adds another: “She is caught between the realities of today and her hostility toward the former colonial powers.” Foreign diplomats in New Delhi who have withered under her cold glare describe Indira as arrogant and frosty.
People who know her better say that she is merely shy. “If Indira seems curt,” says a friend, “it is because she doesn’t waste time talking rubbish.” Says another: “She’s been a lonely person all her life, and now she will be lonelier than ever. All the troubles will stop at her desk, and she is fully aware of it.”
Historical Heroine. Probably no woman in history has ever assumed such responsibility as now rests on Indira Gandhi. In fact, only one other woman in modern times has ever headed a national government. She is Ceylon’s Madame Sirima Bandaranaike, who was elected the year after her Prime Minister husband was assassinated. Yet the idea of a woman Prime Minister strikes outsiders as more curious than it does most Indians.
Though the great mass of Indian women has lived for centuries under stern Hindu and Moslem restrictions, Indians throughout history have glorified the few, exceptional, highborn women who have excelled as rulers or warriors.
One of the historical heroines of India’s freedom movement is the widowed Rani of Jhansi, who joined the 1857-1858 Sepoy Rebellion against British rule. Leading her small personal army, she captured a British fort and defended it until she was cut down in battle by a British hussar. The big change in feminine status came with Mahatma Gandhi, who urged women of every caste to cast aside convention and share equally with men in India’s struggle for independence. Thousands heeded his call, and as India won freedom, so did many of its women. A woman served as Shastri’s Health Minister, and will probably stay on as Indira’s. A woman is the chief minister of India’s fourth largest state. And women are moving into more and more executive positions in Indian business and government. Today there are no fewer than 59 women in India’s Parliament, v. only 12 in the U.S. Congress.
“I’m not a feminist; I’m a human being,” was the answer Mrs. Gandhi gave last week to the inevitable question about how it feels to be India’s first woman Prime Minister. At another point, she archly expLalned that under the Indian constitution, all persons are equal, regardless of sex. She is, however, vitally interested in improving the lot of Indian women. “If you study history,” she once said, “you will find that where women have risen, that country attained a high position, and wherever they remained dormant, that country slipped back.”
The Monkey Brigade. Judged by that criterion, Indira bodes well indeed for India. “My public life,” she declares, “began when I was three.” Her mother, a frail Kashmiri, was a Congress Party leader in Indira’s native city, Allahabad. Father was heir apparent to Mahatma Gandhi, the leader of the independence movement. Grandfather was a wealthy lawyer and an early member of the Congress movement. The Nehrus’ mansion was a center for illegal Congress Party gatherings. Recalls Indira: “The most important meetings were on our lawn.” Reprisals by India’s British rulers were harsh, and often Indira watched one or both of her parents or grandfather being marched off to jail. A visitor to the Nehru home in those days remembers being informed by a grave-faced Indira that “I’m sorry, but Papa, Mama and Grandpa are all in prison.”
It made for a lonely childhood. “I have no recollection of games or playing with other children,” she recalls. “My favorite occupation was to stand on a high table with the servants gathered around me and deliver thunderous political speeches.” She taught her dolls to march in Mahatma Gandhi’s protest demonstrations. Then other dolls would race up and lead the demonstrators off to jail. One of the callers who sometimes helped the lonely little girl stage the doll demonstrations was a frail Congress Party worker, Lal Bahadur Shastri.
For a few years, Indira was packed off to a Swiss boarding school, but she soon returned, and at age twelve organized a neighborhood society of kids, called the Monkey Brigade, whose small members specialized in sneaking messages past British sentries, picketing stores selling foreign clothes, and freeing adult Congress members from routine jobs. A relative recalls that Indira once rushed up to some British police who were clubbing and arresting Indian demonstrators, crying, “Arrest me! Hit me!”
Lessons by Letter. In those turbulent years, her main education came from the letters from her imprisoned father. Ranging over the wide scope of world history, he tried to impress upon his daughter the necessity for selflessness in the service of freedom. Today the collected letters are read in nearly every Indian school, have made Indira a heroine of the revolution to young Indians.
In 1936 Indira went to England, studied history at Oxford, joined the British Labor Party, and fell under the influence of Krishna Menon, then an agitator in the Indian League’s drive for independence. Poor health and the onset of World War II forced Indira to break off her studies and return home in 1941. She plunged at once into her country’s increasingly bloody battle for independence. Showing some independence of her own, she defied her father and married an obscure Parsi lawyer named Feroze Gandhi (no kin to the Mahatma). Within a few months Feroze and his bride were both in British prisons on charges of subversion. Much like her dolls, Indira had been arrested while leading a parade of women demonstrators down the main streets of Allahabad.
The First Lady. Indira spent 13 months of imprisonment teaching illiterate Indian women how to read. Free again, she and her husband settled in Allahabad and had two boys, Rajiv and Sanjay (now 21 and 19, they are both studying engineering in Britain). The war stopped short of India’s borders; Indira abided by Gandhi’s slogan: “It’s wrong to help the British war effort with men or money.”
With the end of the war came in creased rumblings of independence, and with them the appointment of Nehru as acting Prime Minister. Nehru’s wife had died in 1936, and he summoned his beloved Indu (meaning Moon) to come to Delhi as his official hostess. Over her husband’s strong objections, Indira took the boys and set out for New Delhi on a trip that was to lead her to the highest councils of government. (She separated from her husband in 1947; he died of a heart attack in 1960.)
As India’s first First Lady, Indira ran the Prime Minister’s rambling mansion on Teen Murti Marg with impeccable efficiency, inspected every menu, and made sure that her father took time off to romp with his grandsons and play with the family’s menagerie of baby tigers, monkeys and assorted reptiles. “I once had a baby crocodile,” remembers Sanjay, now an apprentice at a Rolls-Royce plant near Manchester. “It bit everybody except me. But when it bit Mother, it had to go.”
Nehru began giving his daughter minor political chores and taking her along on his frequent trips abroad, where he introduced her to most of the world’s important rulers. She chatted with Chou En-Lai at Bandung, met Tito in Belgrade, and talked with Bulganin in Moscow. By 1955 she had become such a prominent figure on India’s political scene that friends persuaded her to accept an appointment as a member of the Congress Party’s powerful 21-member working committee, which passes on all major candidates and platform planks. Indira Jeeped and flew to every corner of the country, going to villages that had never before been visited by outsiders, much less by someone as important as Nehru’s daughter. She organized countless charities, championed scores of social-welfare causes. Soon she became India’s second most widely known person. It was only natural that in 1959 party officials asked her to take what amounted to the country’s second most important political post—president of the Congress Party.
Dry-Eyed Dignity. “Mrs. Gandhi is putting on a crown more of thorns than roses,” warned one Indian newspaper as she took the job. The barbs, however, were felt by others. Indira weeded out ineffectual party functionaries, promoted capable young workers, and cracked heads to give the party a semblance of unity. Her one year as party boss established Indira’s reputation as an effective administrator. Though she continued to be the party’s ace campaigner, she then went back to devoting most of her time to what she considered her most important job—helping and taking care of her father.
The outside world got the first hint of just how important that job had become one January night in 1964. For months, Nehru had looked frail and sickly. On that evening, after finishing a speech at a party rally in Bhubaneswar, he collapsed. Indira was there to catch him. As Nehru lay ill, Indira carried on—virtually as acting Prime Minister. She helped her father on all decisions—and probably made many of them herself. She limited his visitors to only a few minutes, answered his mail, and supported the pretense that her father was recovering, when everyone in Delhi realized that Panditji was dying.
When death came to Nehru in May 1964, Indira accepted it with dry-eyed dignity, arranged every detail of his funeral, and even flew in the plane to oversee the scattering of his ashes across the countryside. Only when it was all over did shock hit her squarely. For a fortnight she was in depression —and tears.
After her father’s death, she sought something” to keep her mind off events, decided to study anthropology. But she was under pressure to do something quite different. Lal Bahadur Shastri, the incoming Prime Minister, wanted her to become his Foreign Minister. She protested that she wanted to remain out of the limelight. But Shastri insisted. After ten days she gave in on one condition: that she get a less important post.
Language Troubles. As Minister of Information and Broadcasting, Indira managed to make a few improvements. She doubled radio broadcasting time to 18 hours daily and opened the airways to opposition-party members and independent commentators who were free to say what they pleased. Indian listeners could hardly believe their ears, for until then, the radio and TV stations—which are state monopolies—had been used solely as government mouthpieces.
Indira retained her image as a doer in other fields. When riots broke out last year in southern India, against the establishment of Hindi as the country’s official language, Indira flew to the center of the violence in Madras and calmed the Tamil-speaking mobs by promising that the matter would be reconsidered (Shastri later shelved the law).
Selection Process. Destiny may have ordained Indira for India’s biggest post, but it took shrewd politicking by others to get her there. When news of Shastri’s death flashed across India, Delhi buzzed with the names of possible successors. There was S. K. Patil, 65, the political boss of Bombay and favorite of India’s big businessmen. One might consider Y. B. Chavan, 51, Shastri’s Defense Minister, who had won good marks during last fall’s war with Pakistan. There was also acting Prime Minister Gulzarilal Nanda, who had held that post once before during the interregnum after Nehru’s death. And then there was former Finance Minister Morarji Desai, 69, the hard-necked, puritanical Hindu who had lost out in the succession fight after Nehru’s death. Now he was determined not to lose a second time.
The choice rested with the top people of the Congress Party. Normally, that would mean the “syndicate,” the handful of political bosses who have recently dominated the party, and who stage-managed Shastri’s smooth ascension to power. This time the kingmakers were divided. The most prominent of them all, mustachioed Kumaraswami Kamaraj Nadar, 63, had angered the others by holding on to his post as party president for a second term. Without so much as a bow to him, the remaining syndicate members settled on Nanda as their candidate.
They had not reckoned on Kamaraj, a tough, old-line politician, who controls Madras state; he is not above putting the arm on businessmen and just about everybody else in sight to fill the party’s coffers. He has ruled himself out for national office, because he speaks only Tamil. On the news of Shastri’s death, he had flown from his home in the south to Delhi, muttering: “What to do? Unity! Indira?” In Delhi he kept the thought to himself and did his best to find a candidate with the widest support. Neither the syndicate nor Kamaraj wanted the conservative Desai, for he was too strong—and abrasive—a personality for any group of party leaders. Desai was not deterred; he ran his own campaign, appealing to the party members to beat the bosses. Meanwhile, Kamaraj was holding court in a bungalow in Delhi where, one by one, he received the chief ministers of India’s powerful states.
As Kamaraj listened to their views, he began to realize that his first hunch about Indira and, unity was right: she had by far the fewest enemies and by far the widest reputation. With ten of the 15 chief ministers lined up behind Indira, Kamaraj went to Desai, asking him for the sake of party unity to call off his fight. But Desai adamantly refused, vowing to force an election within the party. Now Kamaraj had to bring his candidate out in the open. He sent a message to Indira: “We are old, and the next time you wish to run, we may not be around.” Indira understood. “I will do what Mr. Kamaraj wants me to,” she told newsmen the next day.
This was India’s—and Indira’s—moment. Confident of victory, she cleaned out her desk at the Information Ministry and, the night before the election, had chairs placed on her lawn for the press conference that she was certain she would have to hold the next afternoon.
Catholic Tastes. Those who looked around them at the press conference saw a six-room house. In it, Indira keeps three servants and three golden retrievers. She wakes at 6 a.m., sips a glass of milk as she pores over the morning’s papers. At 7:30 she has a light breakfast. Her father would not tolerate fat people around him, and the 5 ft. 2 in. Indira has done her best to remain slim. As Information Minister, she usually received a stream of visitors after breakfast who were seeking darshan (communion) or asking for redress from grievances. Her day at the office was long; most of her evenings were spent at home reading.
Indira’s taste in music runs from native Indian to Western classical. She keeps abreast of modern trends in art and literature, tries to pop into all new art exhibits in New Delhi, and went to a reading of Beat poetry when she was in London last year.
Last week, of course, was anything but normal. Between hurried meetings with advisers, Indira greeted the throngs of people that came to her home, talking with each guest for about two minutes and then turning to welcome the next. Flowers cascaded into her house from well-wishers. Indira ordered them sent to a nearby orphanage as souvenirs for the children.
This week Indira will first travel to Allahabad, where the ashes of Lal Bahadur Shastri will be strewn on the mingling waters of the Ganges and
Jumna. Then she will return to Delhi, where she and her Cabinet will be sworn into office. The ministerial line up will probably remain much the same as it was under Shastri; no shakeups are likely to occur until after next year’s national elections.
Before Indira can think about elections, she must deal with a set of dizzying problems that are as big and complex as India itself. The most pressing is food. The worst drought of this century has decimated India’s grain harvests. Present estimates place the 1965 crop at less than 75 million tons, a full 13 million tons below the 1964 level.
There is only one place where India can get the grain it needs, and that is the U.S. But the U.S. cut off long-term aid during last fall’s border war, and is now sending grain to India only on a month-to-month basis. Washington is reluctant to grant India a new long-term food agreement until the Indian government finally takes measures to revitalize its famine-prone agricultural system. Washington also wants to see India adopt an effective birth-control program. At the present rate, there will be a billion Indians by the year 2000, and not even the U.S. could feed them.
Shastri sent Food Minister Chidambaram Subramaniam to Washington to discuss emergency help and got a quick assurance of extra consignments. U.S. experts were in India last week, investigating how the limited port facilities could handle the added cargoes. But the long-term agreement will probably remain one of Indira’s most urgent missions.
Also high on her list of priorities is the implementation of the Tashkent agreement, which she praised last week as “a good agreement” and one “I will abide by.” She was already making impressive progress. Last week Pakistan’s Army Commander Mohammed Musa flew into Delhi for talks with his Indian opposite number about a mutual withdrawal from the war front. At week’s end the two sides even began exchanging prisoners of war.
Kicking Out Communists. Whatever Indira’s earlier predilections toward Communism may have been, her actions are apt to be tempered by recent experience. In the mid-1950s, Indira often returned from trips behind the Iron or Bamboo Curtain, bubbling about the beauties of Communism, but she turned out to be a tough, uncompromising anti-Communist when she ran up against Red subversion in India. A case in point was the poverty-stricken state of Kerala in India’s arid southwest. The Communists had won elections for state officers and had been in power for 27 months when Indira popped in for a visit in 1959. She was horrified. What seems to have upset her most were new schoolbooks that depicted Lenin and Mao Tse-tung, instead of Mahatma Gandhi, as the true heroes of the oppressed. “Everything the Communists are doing is wrong,” she cried as she hurried back to Delhi and forced the hesitant central government to oust Kerala’s Red rulers and place the state under federal supervision.
Indira is also likely to temper her policies to fit the thoughts of the three men she seems to trust most. They are Food Minister Subramaniam, Defense Minister Chaven and Economist Asoka Mehta. Like her, they are all Socialists, but in 18 years of experience, they have seen that socialism is not always a cure, and is sometimes a curse for India’s problems. By inclination, Indira prefers public ownership of plants, but her chief economic adviser, Asoka Mehta, is fully aware that government-owned factories have proved to be far less efficient than private enterprise in India. Indira is apt to be very wary of foreign investment in India, but Food Minister Subramaniam realizes India’s desperate need for development capital. Chaven is known to favor a foreign policy that will enable India to receive aid from both the U.S. and Russia.
Indira Gandhi has the same hope. Talking to the press last week, she said: “I think that it is in our interest that Russia and the United States are friendly with each other. I don’t see the world as divided into right and left. I think most of us are in the center. In a country like India, where the basic problem is one of poverty and of trying to convince the average man that you are on his side, you have to be more or less in the center and try and keep as many people with you as possible.”
Not a startling philosophy, but not a bad one for a contemporary political leader who wants to make some progress.
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