Indira: The Life of Indira Nehru Gandhi
by Katherine Frank
Reviewed by Shalendra D. Sharma
Katherine Frank has written a superb biography
of one of the most powerful women in the twentieth century,
Indira Nehru Gandhi. As India's third prime minister (in 1966-77
and again in 1980-84), Mrs. Gandhi (as she was popularly known),
played an important role in shaping the destiny of the world's
largest democracy. While studies of Mahatma Gandhi (no relation
to Mrs. Gandhi) and Jawaharlal Nehru (Mrs. Gandhi's father)
abound, there are few book-length studies on Mrs. Gandhi.
This gracefully written volume fills the lacuna in the literature
and will be widely consulted for many years to come.
The great strength of this book is that it
uncovers the personal Indira by carefully drawing from unpublished
sources and more than a hundred interviews with people who
best knew her. The result is a beautifully drawn portrait
of a woman whose life was marked by surprising contradictions.
We learn how the only child of Nehru, whose early years were
marked by loneliness, and who remained aloof and solitary
all her life, nevertheless learned to effectively communicate
with India's masses. We learn how Mrs. Gandhi, who was fluent
in English and Hindi, rose to power in a country with more
than 850 million people who spoke scores of indigenous languages.
We learn how someone born to a wealthy and highly westernized
family found her political constituency with millions of the
poor, the illiterate, and the dispossessed.
However, what we do not adequately learn about
is the "political" Mrs. Gandhi. This is a major
weakness, as Mrs. Gandhi is generally seen as lacking her
father's political acumen, in particular his commitment to
parliamentary democracy and the rule of law. Indeed, the most
egregious legacy of Mrs. Gandhi's long reign was the progressive
weakening or the deinstitutionalization of the Congress Party.
Since the 1920s, when Mahatma Gandhi transformed the Congress
into a mass organization, the prodigious "Congress system"
has dominated Indian public and political life. As the hegemon
of the dominant party in a competitive party system, it served
as the "ordering mechanism," providing the organizational
and normative linkages between the political center and the
sprawling periphery, its "accommodative politics"
and centrist consensus bringing a measure of coherence and
stability to an otherwise fragmented and "unaggregated"
polity.
The emasculation of the federal and coalitional
pillars of the venerable Congress system that began imperceptibly
in the mid-1960s was the result of forces emanating from both
the state and society. As the head of the Indian state, Mrs.
Gandhi's Machiavellianism, her obstructionism, and intransigency,
and the criminalization of politics under her son and putative
heir Sanjay (who died in a 1980 plane crash), contributed
greatly to the Congress's organizational decline. As prime
minister and later as Congress party president, Mrs. Gandhi
repeatedly demonstrated cavalier disregard for both constitutional
and legal constraints, winking at the violations and transgressions
of her coterie and using her position to centralize power
in order to perpetuate her cult of personality and further
dynastic ambitions. Further, Mrs. Gandhi's imperious, self-righteous,
and inquisitorial governing style—in particular her
reliance on "populist waves" to secure electoral majorities
and her pervasive habit of reconstituting party committees
through ad hoc appointments of the presidents of the leading
bodies of the Congress—resulted in the erosion of intra-party
democracy and accelerated the trend towards political and
institutional decline. In fact, nepotism, corruption, and
venal personal conduct became such a pervasive part of the
political culture that the new breed of Congress politicians
engaged in an orgy of self-aggrandizement and manipulation
of the political process. Indeed, the thoroughness of the
Congress's degeneration was made vividly manifest with the
imposition of a 20–month-long authoritarian "emergency
regime" in June 1975, and later in 1978, when its name was
changed to Congress (I) for Indira Gandhi — sadly epitomizing
the transformation of one of the twentieth century's great
political organizations into a family dynasty.
These gaps notwithstanding, this is a first-class
biography by an acclaimed biographer. It is a must read for
anyone interested in learning about a remarkable woman and
the country she led for some two decades.
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