Remembering Indira Gandhi

Thirty years ago this day Nehru’s daughter and India’s third prime minister Indira Gandhi was gunned down by her guards. Her stay in power and her life follow the same binary pattern. Her detractors can only see evil in what she did; her party continues to practice hagiography. The fact is that she was a complicated and insecure person and, to an extent, her insecurities mirrored those of India of that age. Together, they brought much grief to the country.

Gandhi’s journey began at just about the time India was entering a maelstrom. The year 1962 marked the end of the tranquil era that began with Independence. The generation of founders had departed. Her baptism with fire began with economic problems she inherited. In 1966, she took what was perhaps the only right economic policy step almost until 1980: she devalued the rupee in response to a growing balance of payments problem. As later events proved, this was a response to a crisis and not a deliberate step. In fact, her economic policies were closely intertwined with her political tactics. In a bid to undercut the dominant faction in her party she sought an independent power base, appealing directly to Indians instead of using her party. Gandhi’s alignment with the Left, her decimation of the Syndicate and the nationalization of banks in 1969 were all part of the same package of steps meant to ensure her survival. It was also the fatal first step of mixing economic policymaking and political jockeying that continued to haunt India long after she departed. Even today, the Indian Left remembers those days with misty eyes.

In this and other momentous steps, she systematically undid what her father had tried to institutionalize. Perhaps the most volatile and dangerous of these was her dealings with extremist variants of politics in the country. The consensus since Nehru’s time was that in dealing with demands for separate statehood or even secession from the Union, it was the moderates who were to be encouraged while the extremists were isolated and dealt with by coercive means. Gandhi systematically undid that, the most spectacular example being Punjab. Since the 1950s the leaders from that rebellious province had wanted a separate state with a Punjabi-speaking majority. That demand was not conceded by Nehru and his successor Lal Bahadur Shastri. The wish for a linguistic state was a ruse for a Sikh-majority state. In 1966, within months of becoming prime minister, she accepted the demand. It was a very expensive concession and a fateful mistake. In the end, Punjab was gripped with secessionism that consumed in 1984.

In retrospect, both economic and political decisions of that time reflect Gandhi’s personal insecurities. When she returned as prime minister in 1980, she was more confident and had no use for socialism any more. She tried to undo some of the damage caused by her policies. Experienced civil servants such as Abid Hussain were roped in to prescribe the right steps and liberalize foreign trade and loosen the government’s economic grip. But her political mistakes could not be undone and continued right until her end.

It took nearly two decades after 1984 to turn India into a normal country. The political class today is more secure. India’s ability to handle the situation in Jammu and Kashmir, a far more dangerous problem than Punjab, has been exemplary: the combination of carrot and stick has worked. Even in mid-1990s, after India lost its most potent foreign backer, the Soviet Union, and domestically the P.V. Narasimha Rao government was precariously placed in Parliament, India did not succumb to American pressure to relent on Kashmir. The other trouble spots, Nagaland and Assam, have been, by and large, pacified. The careful and calibrated policies of the 1990s and 2000s—economic and political—owe much to the lessons learnt from the mistakes made in the 1960s and 1970s. If today, policymaking enjoys a much better, cross-party, consensus, it is due to the aversion of the political class for the kind of mistakes made in Gandhi’s time. She tried to rule like a colossus; her mistakes were colossal.

How will India remember Indira Gandhi? Tell us at views@livemint.com

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