Daugther of Power

Daughter of Power
Indira
The Life of Indira Nehru Gandhi
By Katherine Frank
Reviewed by- SHASHI THAHOOR
The Washington Post
February 10, 2002

John McDonnell/The Washington Post
Prime Minister Indina Gandhi
during a state visit to Washington in 1982

0f the dozen prime ministers who have ruled India, the world's most populous democracy, since independence from Britain in 1947, none evokes the extremes of adulation and hatred that Indira Gandhi does. Katherine Frank's monumental biography is really two books in one: a superb study of the young Indira Nehru, meticulously researched and compellingly written, followed by a disappointingly pedestrian account of the older Indira Gandhi, politician, prime minister and autocrat.

As a story of the events in a remarkable life, Indira is an impressive, even gripping read. Frank revisists all of the amazing transformations that Gandhi went through: the frail, sickly young woman who emerged from the shadow of her father, Jawaharlal Nehru, to political prominence in her own right; the conflicted bride of the mercurial Feroze Gandhi, whose early death left her a widow with a fortuitously famous name (Feroze was no relation to the Mahatma); the risé to the prime ministry upon the sudden death of the incumbent, her father's successor Lal Bahadur Shastri. Her careen in office, as Frank describes it, was no less eventful: There were Gandhi's first tentative, uncertain missteps as India's leader, followed by electoral setbacks and then a ferocious reassertion, in which she defenestrated the old guard who had put her in office, split the ruling party and assumed unchallenged power; the "annus mirabilis" of 1971, when she followed a sweeping electoral victory on the slogan "Garibi Hatao" ("Remove Poverty") with a thumping military triumph against Pakistan in the war that created Bangladesh; the years of stagnation afterward, leading to mounting popular protests, and again her fierce retaliation with a proclamation of emergency rule in 1975 that suspended India's democracy for 22 months while a pliant Congress Party president meretriciously proclaimed, "Indina is India and India is Indina°; electoral defeat thereafter, nearly three years in opposition, then another comeback in 1980; and finally her assassination in 1984 by the forces of Sikh extremism, forces she had herself primed for petty partisan purposes, the demon devoured by the monster it had spawned.

Frank, who has outstanding biographies of Emily Bronté and Lucie Duff Gordon to her credit, has all of the essential details right, and she weaves them into a compelling narrative, told with understanding and sympathy. But what did Indira Gandhi stand for. Frank disappointingly fails to analyze her subject's beliefs. As Nehru's daughter and political heir, Gandhi had acquired much of his vision, but she also distorted it to conform to her own proclivities. She took great pride in having been born in November 1917, at the time of the Russian Revolution. From her father she had learned to be skeptical of Western claims to stand for freedom and democracy when India's historical experience of colonial oppression and exploitation appeared to bear out the opposite. These convictions fitted in with her domestic left-wing political strategy; her need for Soviet support on the subcontinent against a United States-backed Pakistan-China axis; and her dark suspicion, born more of personal insecurity than of any hard evidence, that the CIA was out to destabilize her government as it had done Allende's in Chile.

Nonetheless, Gandhi once memorably confessed (in a quote that does not appear in Frank's book): "I don't really have a political philosophy. I can't say I believe in any ism. I wouldn't say I'm interested in socialism as socialism. To me it's just a tool." But tools are used for well-defined purposes, and it was never clear that she had any, beyond the politically expedient. The 1971 electoral and military triumphs-the first over a sclerotic and discredited political establishment at home, the second over a sclerotic and discredited martiallaw establishment next door-saw her at her pinnacle. India's leading modern painter, the Muslim M.F. Husain, depicted her as a Hindu Mother Goddess. The imagery was appropriate: Indeed, at her peak, Indira Gandhi was both worshiped and maternalized. But it was not to last. She was skilled at the acquisition and maintenance of power, inept at wielding it for larger purposes. She had no real vision or program beyond campaign slogans; "remove poverty" was a mantra without a method. Her only ideology was somewhere to the left of opportunism.

Frank makes no real effort to analyze Gandhi's deep mistrust of everyone but her own sons, her blindness to ,their limitations, her promotion of mediocrity and sycophancy, and her intolerante of dissent. Frank is silent on the cynicism with which Gandhi encouraged (and initially financed) the fanaticism of a Sikh fundamentalist preacher, Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale, in orden to undercut her political rival, the moderate Sikh Akali Dal. Frank does not dissect the Gandhi paradox-so skilled at acquiring power, so tentative in wielding it. One scarcely realizes that Gandhi's murder by her own Sikh security guards carne toward the end of an inglorious second term of office, at a time when the prospects of reelection looked remote.

This is not to imply that Frank, whose mastery of the facts is unquestionable (despite a dozen mostly trivial errors that her editors should have caught), has failed to look beyond received wisdom. She has, and she demonstrates, for instante, that Gandhi's famous childhood identification with Joan of Arc was a fabricated piece of adult self-mythologizing. Frank probes impressively into the nature of the young Indira's education and illnesses (she is the first to establish conclusively that Gandhi suffered from tuberculosis). Indian reviewers have made rather too much of some restrained speculation about Gandhi's sex life, but this occupies barely a couple of pages in a 567-page book. Frank's style is highly readable and only occasionally racy. Indira is a serious biography, footnoted with the precision and diligente of a scholar who has gone to great lengths (to track down, for instante, a doctor who treated Gandhi's "early menopause"). But for all its good qualities, Frank's book is weak on the politics, failing to discuss Gandhi's deinstitutionalization of Indian democracy or to explain the grim legacy of failure and paranoia she left the nation.

For one who has worked so hand and who shows so much sympathy for her subject, Frank leaves too many questions unasked. Why did a woman brought up in privilege feel so insecure? Why did her 15 years in office (with the exception of 1971) have so little to show for themselves? How did she, with her crushing parliamentary majorities, miss so many opportunities to resolve some of India's most persistent problems? How could she encourage so much sycophancy and corruption, trusting, by her own admission, "men who may not be very bright but on whom I can rely"? What led a secular rationalist-a woman who was so agnostic that she took her oath of office as prime minister without the customary referente to God-to become religious and superstitious in her last years?. Too often, Frank seems to take Indira Gandhi at her word, seeing a defender of the poor and the wretched where others only saw an unprincipled opportunist. On her subject's authoritarianism, Frank's rather light verdict is that Gandhi "was guilty of hubris but not megalomania." But this conclusion is not substantiated by the prime minister's emasculation of party, parliament and civil service, and the destructiveness of her actions in Punjab, Kashmir, Andhra Pradesh and even Sri Lanka in the months leading up to her assassination. When she returned to office in 1980 and was asked how it felt to be Indias leader again, she snapped at her questioner, "I have always been Indias leader."

To many at the time it seemed that way, and yet, in the almost unrecognizable politics and society of today's India, another epitaph seems more likely to endure. Asked a few months later "what one thing" she wanted to be remembered for, Gandhi bitterly replied, "I do not want to be remembered for anything." As the party she enfeebled flounders in opposition, as Indias fractious federalism throws up multiparty coalitions as fan removed as imaginable from the centralized "priministerialism° of Indira Gandhi, it seems she may get her wish after all.

Shashi Tharoor (www.shashitharoor.com) is the author of "India: From Midnight to the Millennium" and, most recently, the novel "Riot."