Introduction

I don’t think any of our Prime Ministers have lived as intense a life and as extreme a life as Indira Gandhi. Even though she came from as politically well-placed a family as one could in the early years of independent India, her political life almost came to an end many times, yet she bounced back each time.

As India’s third Prime Minister, she led the country through drought, famine, food shortages, economic instability while conducting our first, and successful nuclear tests, launching our first satellite on an indigenous rocket, and putting the first Indian in space, and playing the key role in the liberation of Bangladesh.

She also led an intense private life, battling her mother’s prolonged illness and death during her teenage years, growing up with a largely absent father and then emerging from his tall shadow, enduring a tumultuous marriage that nearly ended in divorce, and later living through the violent death of her adult son along with troubles at home with her daughter-in-law.

Sources

For this episode, I’ve read Indira Gandhi: A Biography by Pupul Jayakar. She was one of the closest friends of Indira Gandhi, which means she unveils conversations and Indira’s thoughts that other biographers did not have access to. And I also read Indira: The Life of Indira Nehru Gandhi by Katherine Frank.

Growing Up

A daughter was born on 17th November 1917 to Kashmiri Pandits, Jawaharlal Nehru and his wife, Kamala Nehru, in Prayagraj, then called Allahabad. She was named Indira after her great-grandmother, and Jawahar’s grandmother, Indirarani. Her parents bestowed on her a middle name, something that would be familiar to you from the first episode - “Priyadarshini”.

This happens to be the name that Ashok mostly used to call himself in his rock edicts. And Jawahar obviously greatly admired him. He heavily pushed and succeeded in making Ashoka’s lion capital the national emblem of our country and putting the Ashoka chakra in our tiranga.

“Priyadarshini” of course means - “dear to behold” or “beautiful to look at”. And Ashoka was kinda ugly with rough skin and a plump body. Opposite of “Priyadarshin”. Indira, while growing up, also struggled with her physical appearance.

The insecurity about her physical appearance was seeded into her by her aunt, Jawaharlal’s sister, Vijayalakshmi Pandit, who used to call her “ugly and stupid”. That shattered her confidence and she started to become an introvert and avoid people, even though ealier she was a mischievous child, always pranking people.

Her aunt probably did not hate her personally, but she was unkind towards her mother, Kamala. Kamala, when she married Nehru, could not speak English, and in Vijayalakshmi’s eyes, was unsophisticated and was now slowly taking her place in the life of her brother.

As I mentioned earlier, growing up, she was initially a mischievous child, but as she entered her teenage years, she became shy and reserved. Her room was the one place where she could be alone in her grandfather’s huge Allahabad home, where she lived with her joint family.

I guess she always had a latent desire to be powerful and a leader because she would enact scenes from the freedom struggle and pretend to be the main character from the epic stories she had read.

When she was 8 years old, her mother had been diagnosed with tuberculosis, and Jawahar decided to take her to Switzerland for treatment. At this point, Jawahar was just a fledgling barrister and was making little to no money, so all the finances were provided by his father, Motilal Nehru, who was a very, very successful lawyer. Jawahar and Indira stayed in Geneva, while Kamala was admitted to a nearby sanitarium, and Indira was admitted to a school there.

Indira’s father made her read heavy books for her age, and this was also when she read about, and must have been inspired by, figures such as Simon Bolivar, who helped liberate many Spanish colonies in South America, Giuseppe Mazzini who played a key role in the unification of much of Italy, and Giuseppe Garibaldi, who helped execute Mazzini’s vision.

By 1930, Kamala Nehru’s health had improved, and they were back in India. Her grandfather, Motilal Nehru, passed away in February 1930, and with his death, she felt all the more lonely in her huge house. Her father was busy with political activities, her mother was sick most of the time, and no one from the house paid much attention to her and she became more and more reserved. It was during this period that she started to learn to deal with loneliness and grief alone and not show it to the world.

On 30th March of that year, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi called on women to participate in the freedom movement and come out of their homes and demonstrate and protest against the sale of liquor and foreign clothes.

Indira too wanted to be a formal part of the movement, but Jawahar did not let her join the Congress, so she started her own rag tag group of child freedom fighters from 5 to 18 who called themselves the Vanar Sena.

Even though her tuberculosis had not fully healed, and it never would, and she was sickly, Indira’s mother found a new zeal and seemed to forget her illness and threw herself into this mission. She organized meetings, conducted demonstrations, and nursed injured freedom fighters.

It was at one such protest that the police lathi-charged her group. A boy who came from a Parsi family that was actually in favour of British rule was watching from a distance when this happened. He jumped in to save Kamala but was arrested and taken to the police station.

This was Feroze Gandhi’s initiation into the Nehru family, and he began frequenting Anand Bhawan (the name of Motilal Nehru’s mansion where four generations of Nehrus lived) and began acting as an assistant to Kamala Nehru.

The next year, when she turned 14, on the advice of MK Gandhi, her father got her admitted into the People’s Own School in Pune.

Nehru was arrested in December 1931, and she wrote to him saying how lonely and sad she was feeling. Her father felt she was being soft and instead of empathising with his teenage daughter, wrote back to her saying, “None of us, least of all you, has any business to be depressed and to look it. Sometimes you will feel a little lonely—we all do that—but we have to keep smiling through it.”

So she began to reveal less and less of her true feelings to her father, because she knew that instead of being validated, she would be scolded.

In school, when her schoolmates would criticize her father for something, she would get defensive of him and snap back. Like her father and grandfather, she had a fierce temper, but while in Motilal and Jawaharlal, it flared up violently but then dissipated in a few moments. Indira’s anger flared up, but she would drive it underground. As Pupul wrote in her biography, “On the surface she would return to calm, but she rarely forgot, and seldom forgave.”

But that would change when she would become Prime Minister.

In 1932, Gandhi was in Yervada jail in Pune when he announced that he would be going on a fast till death unless the British government withdrew their plan of separate electorates for Depressed Classes or Harijans. Dr. B R Ambedkar, who was in favour of separate electorates because it empowered Dalits, and Gandhi met and agreed on a compromise known as the Poona Pact. The British government also agreed, and on 27th September, Gandhi broke his fast. Indira Nehru prepared and made the orange juice that Gandhi drank to break his fast.

Meanwhile, Kamala’s health was deteriorating. Jawahar was mostly negligent towards her or could not give her his time and attention because, of course, the freedom movement demanded all his attention and energy.

Indira later said that it was one of the ways in which her mother influenced her. It was a negative influence. She saw her mother being hurt, and she was determined not to be hurt, or at least not show anyone that she was.

Indira Nehru becomes Indira Gandhi

Feroze had begun to spend more and more of his time at the Nehru household, tending to Kamala. He, being an extrovert, tried to talk to Indira, but she was mostly hesitant. Eventually, Feroze, who had become close to Kamala, told her that she liked her daughter and would like to marry her. Kamala trusted Feroze and was for the marriage, but she knew that her in-laws would not accept it. He was from a different religion, didn't have an illustrious family history like the Nehrus, and his family supported the British. She mentioned this to Indira, that Feroze liked her, but Indira was not interested in him at all. To prevent Feroze from getting hurt, Kamala told him that Indira was just too young to get married so soon.

From Pune, her father sent her to Shantiniketan in Bengal to study under Rabindranath Tagore.

In Shantiniketan, she met Frank Oberdorf, a German who had been enamoured by Tagore and India, and was living in Shantiniketan. Indira was 16 at the time, while Oberdorf was more than double her age at 34. She found in him someone in whom she could confide and talk about her ailing mother, her father, her fears, and her loneliness. Soon, Oberdorf started developing feelings for her and confessed his love to her and constantly told her how beautiful she was.

Indira thought he was teasing her and would get angry whenever he called her beautiful. She had begun to accept her concerns and insecurity about her physical appearance. And when shooting down Oberdorf’s compliments about her being beautiful wasn’t being self-deteriorating or demeaning herself. In her mind, she knew exactly how she looked in an objective way. She knew she had many positives, but physical appearance was not one of them. And she was okay with it. She wasn’t sad about it. It was just the way things were.

Since she thought she wasn’t beautiful, his compliments she received as flattery. And she did not like flattery. Things between them continued like this until she had to go to Switzerland with her mother and a relative, because her mother’s health had started deteriorating once again.

While her mother was admitted to a Swiss sanitarium, she was living some distance off in another house. There would often be sudden storms, and it left in the then-18 year old Indira a lifelong fear of storms, lightning, and thunder.

The doctors there said that Kamala’s case was now beyond hope and that she could die any day. Nehru was in jail at the time back in India, but the British government let him go to Switzerland to be with his dying wife.

On 28th February 1936, Indira lost her mother, who had passed away at the age of 37. Indira was 18.

With her mother gone and her father rarely able to make time for her, Feroze began to fill some of the void in Indira’s life. He had been proposing to her since she was 16, and eventually she developed feelings for him as well, accepted his proposal and decided to get married.

But that was still some time away. For now, she was sent to Oxford University. She wasn’t a particularly bright student and didn’t gel well with the Indian students at Oxford who were intellectually snobbish.

While in England, she became friends with VK Krishna Menon, who would later go on to become India’s third defence minister. In an event organised by Menon, she was asked to read out a message for the audience that had been sent by her father. But then Menon urged her to give an impromptu speech, her two cents to the audience as well. She was on the stage and faltered terribly, and Menon even tried to tell her what to say in whispers, but she just mumbled something. Someone in the crowd shouted, “She does not speak, she squeaks.” After that scarring experience, Indira swore never to speak in public again.

In London, she was ill often and developed lung infections several times. Almost everyone knew that, like her mother, she also probably had tuberculosis, but no one said it out loud. Lonely once more, with few friends, ill with a lung infection, and probably still struggling with her mother’s death, she tried telling all this to her father, even though she knew his response would not be what she wanted. Jawaharlal wrote back saying, ‘Health is not merely a physical condition. It is very much a mental affair. You complain of nerves, put worry and nerves on the shelf. It can be done, it has been done.” Basically, just power through your illness.

And she did. When faced with illness, her mother slowly yielded to it, but Indira powered through. When faced with obstacles in later life, when most people would go under, she would go over.

But another shift was beginning to take place within her. Earlier, she would shun close personal relationships because she felt she had greater and more important duties to take care of, such as contributing to the freedom movement in whatever way she could, but she was now beginning to lean towards having a private, domestic life.

Earlier, if she rationalised her father’s absence in her life by telling herself that it’s not that he did not want to spend time with her, but he had heavier responsibilities on his shoulders, now she began to express anger at him for not being there for her and her mother when they needed him.

But of course, she did not tell all of this to her father, who was in jail in Dehradun at the time. Without emotion and revealing her desire for a permanent domestic life, she said that she wanted to marry Feroze and have children one day.

He did not argue with her much but just advised her that after getting married, she would have to bear children, and she wasn’t fully healed and strong enough for that. But Indira remained stubborn.

In reality, Jawahar was shocked. He had always thought that, like him and his father, Indira would also one day serve the nation in a public way, but his daughter’s recent confessions disappointed and saddened him.

Pupul, in her book, wrote, “For his daughter to turn away from her obligations and lead a life filled with trivialities was totally unacceptable to him.”

Eventually, though, he succumbed and gave his reluctant approval to their wedding. While discussing it with M.K. Gandhi, she told him that she wanted a simple, quiet wedding but he advised against it, and wisely so, because he reasoned that a simple wedding would make people think that the Nehru family was against it, as she was marrying outside her religion.

Her two aunts were against the wedding, and Vijayalakshmi even suggested that she simply be in a live-in relationship with him without getting married. But even they came around to the idea.

And so Indira Priyadarshini Nehru married Feroze Jehangir Gandhi on 26 March 1942 at Anand Bhawan.

Marriage Troubles

In September 1942, during the Quit India Movement, she was attending a meeting in Allahabad when she was arrested and sent to Naini jail as part of the general repression and arrest of national leaders. She was released 8 months later (even though Feroze was still in jail) and decided to spend the summer away from Prayagraj’s oppressive heat in the hill station of Panchgani near Mumbai. She stayed for a few days in Mumbai, then-Bombay as well, in her aunt Krishna’s house. There she felt completely isolated even though she was surrounded by rich men, journalist, elites of the cit,y and foreigners who frequented her aunt’s house. She felt the people around her were so detached from the reality of the nation and what most people of the country were going through.

She wrote to her father, who was in jail, about her feelings. Her father’s reply was: “Almost every person who thinks imagines that he or she is a peculiar person, apart from the rest. And so, of course, every individual is. Then there is the feeling of la lack of sympathy and understanding. True enough, again, for we are all again deep down strangers to each other and even to ourselves. But the doors and windows of sympathy and understanding do not open out of us of themselves: They await our initiative.”

Basically, his advice was: feeling lonely? Seek out other people. You’re not some unique snowflake who can’t find good enough people to talk to or socialise with.

Jumping two years ahead, on 20th August 1944, she gave birth to Rajiv Ratna Gandhi.

Indira’s marriage to Feroze was not a happy one. They fought often, and since Indira was so busy acting as secretary to her father, he felt neglected and often had affairs with other women. Indira was aware of many of them, but we don’t know what she felt about them. She must have felt hurt as any wife would have, but more so because she loved him and had married him against the wishes of her father and family. Maybe she kept quiet about it because she did not want to give her father and aunt the satisfaction that they were right about the marriage not being appropriate.

Anyway, on 14th December 1946, she gave birth to her second son, Sanjay Gandhi, while suffering a massive haemorrhage and almost dying.

Eight months later, India became independent on 15th August 1947, and for the next decade, she rose through the Congress ranks, no doubt aided by virtue of being Jawaharlal’s daughter, because to be honest, she did not have any exceptional skills that marked her out as a great leader.

Feroze had become a member of Parliament. As her prestige and rank in the Congress grew, Feroze started feeling more and more neglected and began to openly flaunt his relationships with other women to humiliate her, or maybe just to get her attention.

As Pupul writes in her book, “Yet throughout this period when she was desperately hurt and angry, in deep conflict over her relationship with Feroze, no evidence of the storms raging within her ever surfaced. She was meeting artists, writers, visiting exhibitions, and going to performances of music and dance. She was deeply involved in her social work and had been appointed to the most important committees of the Congress party. Outwardly, she appeared cool, composed, and decisive in her planning and action.”

She would get the chance to show some of her streak for decisive action in 1957.

The Communist Party had been elected to power in Kerala in 1957 in the state’s first election since it became a state on 1st November 1956. The Party introduced an Education Bill which sought to slip in Communist ideas in even public as well as private educational institutions. Indira Gandhi was against it and, with the support of the Kerala Congress, launched a massive agitation against the Bill and the Communist Party.

She didn’t want to just stop at the Party taking back the Bill, she felt that the Party being in power would attract more and more people towards communist ideas. She wanted them out of power. She, too, leaned left, but the Communist Party was too much for her. Unlike her father, Pandit Jawarhlal Nehru, she did not really believe in democracy as a goal in itself. She believed it was just a means to an end. And if the ends could not be met through democracy, she wasn’t too opposed to taking stronger, authoritarian actions. So she forced her father to dismiss the Communist Party, impose President’s Rule, and then call for fresh elections in Kerala. After those elections in 1960, the Congress emerged as the winning party and formed the government.

In September 1960, her husband, Feroze Gandhi, suffered a heart attack and was in the hospital. Indira Gandhi was at the Delhi airport, returning from a visit to Thiruvananthapuram, when she heard this. She rushed to the hospital. Feroze Gandhi died on 8th September 1960 at the age of 47.

At the age of 43, she was widowed with two sons - Rajiv, 16, and Sanjay, 14. Rajiv and Sanjay were angry with their mother because they felt that she had neglected their father.

Becoming the Third Prime Minister of India

In 1962, China invaded India despite Nehru’s appeasement policies. They were marching on a city called Tezpur, in Assam. But before all of the people could evacuate the city, the city officials and administrators, and the military deserted and fled the city. Indira Gandhi was outraged and wanted to go there to oversee the rescue and relief operations, but her father did not permit it as he feared she could be kidnapped by the Chinese army. However, she did go there against his wishes, and the people cried to her saying that their Prime Minister had abandoned them. She was determined to help them and waited and oversaw the relief operations. The Chinese Army was just 48 km away from the city when they announced a unilateral ceasefire and started withdrawing.

The defeat in the Sino-Indian War of 1962 seemed to take a huge toll on Jawaharlal Nehru, and his health started declining. There was planning and plotting in the Congress party as to who could be the next Prime Minister of India. But Indira stepped in and prevented any one man from being acknowledged as uncontested successor to her father by dismissing possible claimants from positions of power and installing weaker ones instead. Her father passed away on 27th May 1964, and the other Congress members selected Lal Bahadur Shastri as the next Prime Minister, probably because they saw him as weak, as someone who could be controlled.

Shastri, out of courtesy, offered her the Prime Ministership, which was really a um, self-effacing move, because even at this point, I don’t think she had any experience in leading a state, let alone the entire country. Anyway, she declined the offer and was even reluctant to accept a ministership, but finally took on the I&B Ministry after being persuaded by him.

She was in Srinagar in August 1965 when Pakistan invaded the Kashmir Valley. She refused to come back till the situation had calmed down. We eventually gained the upper hand, but the UN intervened to end the conflict before we could make any significant gains. A summit was called in Tashkent, Uzbekistan to formally sign the agreement. India had captured the Haji Pir Pass, which was in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir, but as part of the agreement, Shastri returned it to Pakistan. Indira scoffed at the move, but he was saved from having to face the ire and anger of the public and politicians back home because he passed away in Tashkent itself.

K Kamaraj, who had served as the Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu, was the President of the Congress and decided that Indira Gandhi should be the next Prime Minister. His two main reasons were that there was the upcoming General Elections in 1967 and she, being Jawaharlal Nehru’s daughter, would help them as the public held Nehru in high regard, and the fact that outwardly, she was still very shy and reserved and not very good at public speaking, so they thought she would be a PM who he and the others in the Congress could control.

However, Morarji Desai, the ex-CM of undivided-Bombay, also wanted to be PM. Kamaraj had hoped that everyone would be with him and his selection of Indira and so they wouldn’t have to vote to select the PM, but since Desai wanted to be CM, the Congress had to vote to select between Desai and Indira as their leader in Parliament and hence the PM of India.

Even though in the beginning, when her husband was still alive and before that as well, she did not see herself as the future Prime Minister or the leader of the country or serving the country as her vocation, that had started to change. And even though she did not show it on the outside, she did want to become PM at this point. One day before the election, she wrote to Rajiv who was studying in London, a quote from a poem by Robert Frost, “How hard it is to keep from being king when it is in you and the situation.”

On 19th January, she got 355 votes, whereas Desai got less than half her votes at 169. And as the leader of the largest party in Parliament, on 24th January, she was sworn in as the third Prime Minister of India. She swore in the name of the Constitution rather than in the name of God. This will change when she will swear in for her final term as Prime Minister 11 years later.

There was a severe drought and a shortage of food grains in the country when she became Prime Minister. Opposition members would ask her in Parliament what the government was doing to alleviate the shortage of food grains in the country. She would carefully study the brief prepared by her Food Minister and deliver the prepared speech properly. But if any MP asked a follow-up question or something that she had not anticipated, she would be tongue-tied, embarrassed, and just mumble stuff. That’s where the term “goongi gudiya” or “dumb doll” came from, given to her by Ram Manohar Lohia.

She later confessed that during this period, she was scared of going to the Parliament.

She flew to the United States to meet President Lyndon B Johnson and ask for aid. There was no other way out. Just before leaving the US, she called and thanked President Johnson for his commitment to providing aid, and was very polite to him on the call. But as soon as the call ended, she said,“ Never again will I allow myself to be put into this situation.”, that is, of having to ask for aid.

And she did not. The Green Revolution started under Shastri, but gained full momentum under her, making India self-sufficient in terms of food grains.

She was Prime Minister for a little over a year when the country went into the 1967 General Elections. Although the Congress party managed to win with a thin majority, many Congress stalwarts such as SK Patil and Kamaraj had lost their seats but Indira Gandhi won with a large majority, so within the Congress party, her power increased as strong opponents lost their seats. The party decided that Indira should continue as Prime Minister.

Congress Splits for the First Time Under Indira

Cracks between her and the group of Congress strongmen, nicknamed the “Syndicate”, began to appear the moment she started deviating from party lines and showing that she had a mind of her own, and was not going to be the pliable Prime Minister that they thought she would be. Then, when it came time to elect a new President, she chose a candidate different from what the party chose. Their election was held within the party, and her candidate lost by one vote. She had apprehensions that the new President would ask her to resign and ask the party to choose a new leader and hence a new Prime Minister.

To quote, “To the press who awaited her reactions, Indira Gandhi made an ominous comment; she said that the senior members of the Congress who had voted for Sanjiva Reddy would have to face the consequences of attempting to force a presidential candidate on the Prime Minister. ‘It was,’ she said, ‘an assault on her office and attitudes.”

In another instance, she wanted to nationalise some big banks, but her Finance Minister and Deputy Prime Minister, Morarji Desai, was against it. Indira Gandhi took the Finance ministry from him, although he remained deputy PM and then went ahead with nationalising 14 major private banks. Desai couldn’t watch thi,s and he resigned as Deputy Prime Minister.

She had a vision for the country that was different from the Congress party’s. Neither did the party want a Prime Minister who did not take their suggestions into consideration and enact their policies, nor did she want to be controlled by the Party. Eventually, things came to a head, and the Congress expelled her from the party.

She had joined the party in 1938 when she was 18, and now, 32 years later, she was expelled from it.

The Congress split into two distinct parties: Congress (O) where O stood for Organisation and Congress (R) or Requisitionists, which sided with Indira Gandhi.

With the split in Congress, her side lost their majority in Parliament, but managed to form a coalition government with CPI, DMK and other independents.

However, she knew that her weak government, which was being kept propped up by the support of other parties, couldn’t survive for long and couldn’t take any strong, independent action. So she asked the President to dissolve the Lok Sabha and call for fresh elections.

She campaigned hard during the elections, and when the results came in, her party, Congress (R), had won two-thirds of the seats in the Parliament. On 13th March 1971, she became Prime Minister of the country for the third consecutive time.

Bangladesh Liberation War

In December 1970, the military general, Yahya Khan, who had grabbed power with the help of the army and was ruling as President of Pakistan, called for elections. He thought that he would win the elections and could then hold power legitimately and democratically. However, the Awami League, based in East Pakistan, won 99% of the seats there and won an overall majority in the Pakistani National Assembly as well. When the Awami League’s leader, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, as leader of the majority party, staked his claim to the Prime Ministership of Pakistan, Yahya Khan, backed by the army and bureaucracy, refused.

This was the final nail in the coffin. Bengalis, who formed the majority of East Pakistan, had been subjected to racism and the imposition of Urdu over Bengali in the preceding years. Since Yahya Khan was not handing over power to the democratically elected Awami League, East Pakistan started demanding autonomy and in March 1971, West Pakistan sent in its army to quell the revolt. The Pakistan Army committed genocide, rape, and loot of its own people, with estimates ranging from 50,000 at the very least to 3 million, with the brunt being borne by East Pakistani Hindus. Mujibur Rahman was arrested, airlifted to West Pakistan, and imprisoned there.

Refugees started pouring into India, especially into Assam and West Bengal. Members of the Awami League had taken refuge in Kolkata and even announced the formation of a free Bangladesh government in exile.

Indira knew that India could not sustain its own people and also take on refugees. Besides, there was genocide and violence happening right in our backyard. And she was facing heat from the opposition for not doing anything about the crisis. Field Marshall Sam Manekshaw was summoned, and the possibility of the Indian Army going into East Pakistan to deter the Pakistani Army and stop the flow of refugees was discussed. But he said that monsoon was about to start and East Pakistan with its rivers and tributaries, would be a marshland. Besides, most of the army posted in eastern India was tasked with combating the Naxalites. Moreover, harvest season was coming soon, and roads would have to be blocked to move the army, which meant food may not reach the places they’re supposed to reach on time.

There was also the fear that America could step in to support Pakistan because they were using Pakistan as a conduit to help improve its relationship with China. To deter the Americans, Indira Gandhi signed a friendship and cooperation pact with Soviet Russia.

By the end of August, liberation forces, trained in India, began to infiltrate East Pakistan. Mines were planted in ports of Chittagong and Jalna, and 50,000 tonnes of Pakistan shipment was sunk. It became next to impossible for Pakistan to send in more supplies and reinforcements to East Pakistan by sea.

Seeing that Pakistan could not win the war, and not wanting to surrender, Yahya Khan, asked the US to pressure the United Nations to call for a ceasefire and send in observers to freeze the status quo and find a peaceful solution. However, she did not make the same mistake her father made when it came to Kashmir. She insisted that India would do whatever was necessary to secure her borders and stability and did not care what other countries’ governments said.

She had a scheduled visit to the US in early December. The meeting went terribly. Richard Nixon, who was very racist towards Indians, I mean, you should read some of the things he said about us in the now declassified Nixon-Kissinger tapes. He and Kissinger made many suggestions to Indira on how to deal with Pakistan during their first day of meeting. Indira calmly said that she would consider them and let them know her thoughts the next day.

The next day, however, she dodged every attempt by Nixon to speak about the East Pakistan situation. Instead, she spoke about general world issues and patronised him about his role in pushing for the end of the Vietnam War.

On 3rd December 1971, Pakistan attacked 5 Indian airbases because they thought India was going to airlift troops into Pakistan. Indira Gandhi, who was in Kolkata at the time, flew back to Delhi, was briefed by Sam Manekshaw about the situation, and in early hours of 4th December, ordered the Indian Army to enter East Pakistan.

Within a week of the War starting, the Pakistan High Command in Dhaka was ready to lay down its arms. But Nixon, paranoid that once India obliterated the East Pakistan army, would continue the momentum and attack West Pakistan and, aided by Soviet Russia, capture it went against the advice of his State Department and public opinion, which criticised his administration for supporting Pakistan’s genocide in East Pakistan, and ordered the part of his Navy stationed near the Philippines to move into the Bay of Bengal.

With the American Seventh Fleet 36 hours away, the Indian Army captured East Pakistani ports. They then moved in for the kill and forced a Pakistani surrender in Dhaka on 16th December 1971. Before the Seventh Fleet could enter Indian waters, the war with Pakistan was over, and a new country was about to be born.

Yahya Khan resigned after this humiliating war, and Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto took over as President. Sheikh Mujibur Rahman was still being held in West Pakistan, and had even been sentenced to death. But they knew that if they went ahead with his execution, all hell would break loose, and he was released in early January. He stopped in New Delhi on the way to the newly formed country of Bangladesh, where Indira Gandhi and other ministers received him and wished him luck as he left for Bangladesh to become its first President.

Indira later told Pupul, while speaking of Jayaprakash Narayan and other Opposition leaders who had attacked for not taking immediate action with respect to Bangladesh. “He does not understand that, for action to be potent, time is of the essence. In a war, it is not possible to vacillate or to be weak or to play the role of Hamlet. One has to be really ruthless if the need arises. I am ruthless for what I think is right.”

She didn’t want to start a war that she was not sure that she would win. Hence, she waited, preparing and then when the time was ripe and victory beyond doubt, she struck.

She met with the new President of Pakistan, Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, in Shimla to formally end the war. The meeting was going nowhere, but on the last day, Indira Gandhi and Bhutto came out of dinner with smiles on their faces. Indira had agreed to return 12,950 sq km of captured Pakistani territory to Pakistan and return all 93,000 Prisoners of War captured during the Bangladesh Liberation War. India, on the other hand, got assurance from Pakistan that all issues between the two countires would be resolved amongst themselves without third-party interference and through peaceful methods.

In her biography of Indira Gandhi, Katherine Frank wrote that the reason Indira was so generous towards Bhutto was that she did not want to send him back humiliated. Pakistan had gotten a democratically elected leader after a long time, and she thought that if he went back empty handed, that would prompt another military takeover, and the tumultuous conditions could mean interference of countries like the USA and China in South Asia. Helping Bhutto save face domestically by not humiliating Pakistan too much was seen as a way to ensure regional stability.

Of course, she was attacked fiercely for being so generous to Pakistan back home.

In her reply to Parliament, on 31 July 1972, she said: “All I know is that I must fight for peace and I must take those steps which will lead us to peace. If they do not work out, we are prepared. Had we stood up saying, as when two children are quarrelling, “You have taken my toy: I must have it before I speak to you”, or something like that, if we had that kind of attitude, what would have happened? The time has come when Asia must wake up to its destiny, must wake up to the real needs of its people, must stop fighting amongst ourselves, no matter what our previous quarrels, no matter what the previous hatred and bitterness. The time has come today when we must bury the past.”

She was right about a lot of things, just about Pakistan in this particular instance.

She was hailed as a national hero for splitting Pakistan into two and liberating and helping to form another country. But the tide quickly turned against her. As with the French, who started facing economic troubles after funding the American Revolutionary War, India too started facing economic troubles after the Bangladesh Liberation War, coupled with poor monsoon rains which resulted in crop failures around the country. Prices started to rise and inflation hit an all time high. There were railway strikes, which she dealt with ruthlessly.

After the victory in the War, she started to get a bit arrogant, and started ignoring her advisors, stuck to her decisions even if they were wrong, and started alienating people around her in general. This is also when her younger son, Sanjay Gandhi, became more and more prominent on the Indian political scene.

The Emergency

In the general assembly elections of 1971, Indira Gandhi had won by a large margin against her main opponent, Raj Narain, from the Raebareili seat. Immediately after the elections, he had filed a case against her that she her win was illegal because she had used the help of a government official during her election campaign.

The government official in question had submitted his resignation and started working for Indira Gandhi in a personal capacity, but there was a delay in the resignation being communicated by the PM’s Secretariat to the relevant authorities. So technically, he was still a government official when he was working for her.

Raj Narain wanted her election to Parliament to be declared null and void. Even his own friends had laughed at him for filing the case, because they thought it wouldn’t hold water in court, and no judge would think of dismissing the Prime Minister of the country over such a trivial, technical, and probably genuine oversight.

The case had dragged on and eventually on 12th June 1975, the Allahabad High Court declared that the Prime of Minister of India’s election was null and void and that she would be barred from contesting in elections for the next 6 years on grounds of election malpractice.

Everyone was in shock. To even be proved guilty of such a small, technical fault was crazy, on top of that, her election being declared void and hence since she was no longer an MP, she wasn’t Prime Minister either, and then to be barred from contesting in elections for 6 years.

Indira Gandhi wanted to obey the High Court’s orders and resign immediately. The High Court had pronounced its judgment, and now the next obvious step was to appeal it in the Supreme Court. Her party members poured in with suggestions that if she resigned, so and so could become Prime Minister, and she could be Congress President, till the Supreme Court announced its decision. But her son, Sanjay, convinced her not to resign because if any of her party members became Prime Minister, they might not relinquish the seat for her.

By that time, a huge crowd had started gathering around her home. Some of the people had come of their own accord, concerned that Indira might resign, while many were transported from neighbouring states of Haryana and Uttar Pradesh by Sanjay’s comrades. All of them rallied in support of her and asked her not to resign.

Nani Palkhivala, who would had played a crucial role in landmark cases such as the Kesavanadana Bharti Case and would play a crucial role inthe Minerva Mills case, got the Supreme Court to stay the High Court’s order. The Supreme Court said that she could continue as Prime Minister, but she cannot vote on Bills and motions, and she can’t draw any salary as a Member of Parliament.

This wasn’t the final order because the stay was decided by the vacation judge and it would be taken up again and deliberated upon properly by the full bench of the Supreme Court later.

However, the Opposition parties latched onto this opportunity. They held that Indira Gandhi had no moral right to remain Prime Minister of the country. There was general unrest in the country as well because of unemployment, price instability, and Indira Gandhi’s measures to control the judiciary and political dissent.

She got credible information that Jayprakash Narayan was planning to address a huge crowd at the Ramlila Ground in Delhi, where he was going to call upon the police,the Army, and government servants to not obey the “illegal and immoral” orders of the government.

The government obviously has no power of its own; its power is because it has the sole right to make the police, the Army, and government servants do its bidding. Calling on these instruments of government power not to obey the government was a coup of sorts. It was a clear call for mutiny. Even though he wasn’t calling on them to grab power from the democratically elected government, he was asking them to not follow the orders of the government.

Indira Gandhi was concerned that this was a conspiracy to overthrow her and destabilise the country. And her fear wasn’t entirely baseless. RAW and the Intelligence Bureau had informed that the CIA was sympathetic to anti-Indira movements. And just two years before, the CIA had backed a military coup d’état against the democratically elected President of Chile just because he was a socialist and would be a hurdle in America’s imperialist ambitions in Chile. And Indira was definitely a socialist.

She called in Siddharth Shankar Ray, lawyer and then-Chief Minister of West Bengal and grandson of freedom fighter, Deshbandhu Chitranjan Das. He said that the Constitution allowed a state of Emergency to be declared by the government so that it could assume extra powers if there was a threat to the internal stability of the country.

While she was still mulling the decision to impose Emergency, the next day at Ramlila Maidan, JP Narayan made the speech that she had received information about. He called on the police, army, and government officials to disobey her orders and even said that Morarji Desai and other senior politicians would surround the PM’s house and physically paralyse the government and block railway lines, courts, and government offices from functioning.

So she finally decided that a 6-month-long Emergency should be imposed in the country, which would allow the government to assume extra powers and arrest politicians, activists, and journalists, who, in the government’s eyes, were causing internal instability in the country.

She and Ray met with the President, Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed, at 8 o’clock on 25th June 1975, and informed him that an Emergency was necessary. They returned home, drafted the declaration, and sent it to the President for his signature.

Indira Gandhi had not made a concrete plan to do all the things that the Emergency has now become infamous for. It was supposed to be a temporary measure with one clear objective: to end the threats to the integrity of the country and bring back order.

As the months progressed, however, the Emergency kept being extended by 6 months. She took on more and more power and centralised the government and authority around her and a few trusted aides, which obviously included Sanjay.

There were a ton of positive changes in the daily life of most Indians. Trains began running on time, day-to-day corruption decreased, there were almost no communal riots, there was less garbage and beggars on the streets, and bureaucrats actually seemed to work.

However, it wasn’t a great time for politicians and for people who didn't like the Congress and Indira Gandhi. There were arbitrary arrests, the press was stifled, and opposition to the government and its policies was crushed. Then there were the forced sterilisation drives and forceful and sometimes violent displacement of poor people in Delhi under beautification schemes.

Over in Bangladesh. Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the main man behind their independence, had been assassinated on 15th August 1975, less than 4 years after the country’s independence, and the military grabbed power. Back home, there were conspiracies to get rid of her as well.

Earlier, whenever she was in a crisis or had her back against the wall, she would retreat into herself. Introspect and deal with the crisis, and it mostly turned out to be right.

Years Out of Power

Indira Gandhi wasn’t a power-hungry dictator who wanted power for the sake of it or want to lead the country to destruction just to hold on to power. Most of the excesses of the Emergency simply did not reach her ears, or she might have ended it earlier. The press obviously did not put them in the newspapers because even if they did, it wouldn’t make it past her government’s censorship. And Sanjay, along with her party members and bureaucrats who were the ones actually committing these excesses, kept the truth hidden from her because they knew she might not approve of them.

Right from when she was a teenager, Indira had been very introspective. And towards the end of 1976, she was beginning to doubt the need for prolonging the Emergency anymore. She went to meet Anand Mai Ma, and as per Pupul Jayakar, cried in front of her. She was also corresponding with the spiritual leader, J Krishnamurthi. He continually advised her to do the right thing without fearing the consequences.

And eventually she did. She knew that if she called for elections, she would most probably lose, that the people that she had gotten arrested would be out for her and Sanjay’s blood, but she knew the right thing was to call off the Emergency and restore civil liberties.

On 18th January 1977, she announced her decision to call for fresh elections. Leaders of the Opposition and other people who were arbitrarily arrested were released. Two months later, on 19th March, the country went into the polls.

India, as a nation-state, was less than 20 years old. In those two decades, the people had faced famine, communal riots, invasions, and economic upheaval, but they knew that it was their government and it was doing the best it could to protect and help them. But the Emergency had greatly shattered that trust. People felt like they were there to be used by the government and not the other way round.

In the run-up to the Elections, Indira toured the country, spoke to the people, and rationalised the Emergency and apologized for its excesses. She heard from the people who had been at the receiving end of the atrocities committed by her government. Stories of torture and wrongful arrests, and harassment. She realised how out of touch she had been with the people and the ground reality.

The defeat in the 1977 Sixth General Elections was crushing. Her party won just one seat in the whole of Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Bihar, and Haryana combined.

She resigned as Prime Minister on 22nd March 1977. Since the Janata Party emerged as the largest party, Morarji Desai, being their leader, became India’s 4th PM.

Within a fortnight of being in power, the government set up a commission headed by former Chief Justice J C Shah, to inquire into all complaints of excesses during the Emergency by the PM right down to the lowest-ranking clerk.

Indira slowly began disengaging from politics and started to remove herself from the public eye. She was even contemplating leaving politcs altogether and taking up some work in the children, environment, or wildlife space.

Jayaprakash Narayan, her most bitter critic and rival, now 76, was ailing. Indira Gandhi went to meet with him in Patna. They even made peace and discussed personal matters such as the things Indira’s mother had told and discussed with his wife since she and Kamala Nehru were very close friends.

Slowly, and no doubt supported by Sanjay, she slowly started to pick herself up from her defeatist attitude and began to hit back at the Janata government on issues such as inflation and the black marketing of goods.

On October 3rd, the CBI came to arrest her on some corruption charges that the Janata government had filed against her. The charges against her pertained to the use of jeeps during her elections and an illegal contract given by her government to a French oil company.

She knew she could milk the situation for public sympathy. Indira told the CBI officials that she would not come with them unless they handcuffed her. As she came out of her house in handcuffs, crowds cheered for her and slammed Morarji Desai. She spent the night in jail, and the next day she appeared in a Magistrate’s Court. Since the CBI could provide no substantial evidence to support its charges, she was released unconditionally.

Probably, members of the Janata party didn’t even think that the charges would hold water. They were simply being petty and wanted to humiliate her. But their plan backfired terribly. Now, slowly, the public opinion was turning in her favour. She was being projected as a lonely, frail woman (physically speaking) who was being targetted by the Janata government to divert the people’s attention from its failures at controlling inflation.

But it wasn’t as if everyone had forgotten the Emergency. In Madurai, Tamizh Nadu, her car was attacked and she sustained some minor injuries. While leaving for Chennai from Madurai, the train she was supposed to be in was set on fire. She had only missed the train because of the violence in Madurai. However, in the next train that she took, stones were pelted at her coach.

Members of the Janata Party who had suffered for almost two years before her were now leaving no stone unturned in destroying her reputation. Speakers broadcasted the Shah Commission’s hearings, which were happening inside the court, to large crowds of people who would gather outside to hear the proceedings.

Whenever she was called to answer the charges and defend herself, Indira played two smart moves. First of all, she denied the legitimacy of the whole thing as it wasn’t a court case and merely a fact-finding commission headed by a retired judge, so it wasn’t as if she was legally bound to answer them. When pressed harder, she would refuse to say anything as she was bound by the customary oath she had taken before assuming her responsibilities as Prime Minister, not to reveal secrets of her office.

While she was dealing with all of this, obviously as the leader of the Congress (R) party, it was bringing them bad reputation and might even damage their election prospects. So to save the Party, they expelled Indira Gandhi. She took her supporters from Congress (R) and formed a new party, Congress (I) - “I” standing for Indira - on 3rd January 1978. And they took the symbol of the open palm.

Sanjay Gandhi, who was out on bail in the case of trying to destroy the political satire film, Kissa Kursi Ka, was arrested and his bailwas cancelled. Indira realised that they might come after her again on some new charges and it might not be as easy to get released as she was last time. So to protect herself and her family, she realised that she would have to get herself back in Parliament as MPs could not be convicted while they’re in office. She filed her nomination papers for the by-election in Chikmagalur, Karnataka.

With all the troubles mounting on her and fear of safety for Sanjay and herself, she started to take some refuge in religion. She wasn’t very religious before, but now she would almost always wear a mala of 108 rudra-aksha beads that were given to her by Anand Mai Ma. She even consulted astrologers to find the most auspicious time to file her nomination.

When the results came out on November 7th, she had won the Chikmagalur seat and was now going to be back in Parliament.

However, she wasn’t there for long. The Janata Government moved a motion of breach of Privilege against her. It basically means that while she was PM, she had misused her privileges. Since it wasn’t a judicial process, whether she was guilty or not would be decided by voting in the Lok Sabha. And since the Janata Government had the majority, she was declared guilty and expelled from Parliament, and sent to jail.

She had imposed the Emergency, then suffered a crushing defeat in the 1977 General Elections. She managed to get herself elected again in 1978 and was again expelled and sent to jail. But she didn’t give into self-pity or melancholy this time. She spent a week in jail and was then released.

Even if the Shah Commission found Indira guilty of offences, it couldn’t really punish her or do anything about it. So, the Janata government introduced a Special Courts Bill and got it passed. Under the provisions of this new Bill, they could create special courts to fast-track judgment in certain sensitive cases. This was obviously a way to try to prosecute Indira Gandhi and punish her for the Emergency.

Now, even some of her supporters, who had left the old Congress to form the new Congress (I) with her, began to doubt if she could survive this new Bill. Many of them started to dissociate themselves from her. A rift started to emerge when one of her main critics from her own party, Devraj Urs, who was the CM of Karnataka and the President of the Karanata Congress Commitee was asked to give up the Presidentship since he was already a CM. He refused to do so until a new President was elected.

The party asked him to submit in writing why he shouldn’t be punished by the party for refusing to obey its orders, and he wrote back a letter addressed to Indira Gandhi specifically where he accused her of destroying the party, and that he and his colleagues were facing harassment by her supporters in Working Committee. His tone of voice was contemptuous and misogynistic, and the party expelled him for 6 years. He left the party altogether and formed another party, and many members from Congress (I) went over and joined him.

The Janata Party was jubilant. Things seemed to be only going downhill for Indira. They were slowly beginning to see her as less and less of a threat. She let them think as much and then once again went under the radar and strategise her comeback.

With her party reduced in number and integrity again, the Janata government was jubilant. And she let them believe so, and that she was no longer a major threat to them. Then she decided to go under the radar once more.

Return to Power

Once Indira was out of sight, the Janata government started imploding. In the absence of an external threat, the party that had people from different ideologies started to fight amongst themselves.

In the meantime, she and Sanjay conducted thorough research on each of their parliamentary members, finding out their weaknesses and how they could exploit them. Sanjay Gandhi managed to befriend Raj Narain, the same guy who had kicked off the domino chain, and told him that his patron, Charan Singh, or even he, could become PM if Indira’s party supported him. He began publicly attacking the current PM and party member, Morarji Desai, on nepotism and his son’s corruption.

Indira Gandhi, meanwhile, tried to convince Hemvati Nandan Bahuguna, who had once been her CM of Uttar Pradesh, to draw the socialists away from the Janata Party. When all the pieces were in place, it was time to move in for the kill.

The Leader of Opposition, YB Chavan, moved a motion of No Confidence against the Janata Government on 11th July. Janata Party’s Parliamentary Board asked the 83-year-old to step down as PM since most of the party members now did not want him as their leader, but Desai refused. Then members such as Charan Singh, George Fernandes, Madhu Limaye, Mrinal Gore, Hemvati Nandan Bahuguna, and a ton of junior MPs resigned. Now, since he had no majority, he resigned as PM on 15th July.

12 days later, Charan Singh was invited by the President to form the government. He was told by Sanjay, I guess, that Indira’s 72 MPs would support his government on the condition that her inputs would be taken into consideration on all major policy issues and that all charges against her and Sanjay would be dropped.

A vote of confidence was scheduled on 20th August. He had made it clear that the charges could not be dropped, maybe because it might be seen as backtracking on his part from bringing Indira to justice because of politics, but Indira Gandhi did not tell him that she would be withdrawing support. She wanted to wait till the last day so that he could not go to other parties or independent MPs and ask for support. He was secure under the impression that he still had her 72 MPs’ support. Then, just one day before the Vote of Confidence, her 72 MPs withdrew support. Charan Singh knew that without them, the Vote of Confidence would fail, and he resigned as PM, and fresh polls were announced.

She campaigned hard as ever. When the results came in, Congress (I) had won 351 seats. She was invited by the President to form the government on 6th January 1980. Her astrologers advised her to take the oath on 14th January instead. Earlier, she wouldn’t have even gone to them for advice but, she had started to become more religious. Even in her oath, she took it in the name of God rather than the Constitution as before.

Trouble at Home

India was in bad shape when she became Prime Minister. There was decreasing law and order in the country, inflation and a severe drought in the previous year had reduced our country’s food stockpiles. There were also protests and upheaval in Assam against Bangladeshi refugees as they were worried, and rightly so, that it might lead to the loss of their indigenous culture. Since most of our domestic oil at the time came from Assam, it led to an oil shortage in the country as well.

Many of had the Janata government, and it was becoming increasingly difficult for Indira to implement changes with them in power. So to prop up more Congress state governments, what we would know call a double engine, she dissolved 9 State Assemblies, imposed President’s Rule, and called for fresh elections.

Congress won all the states except Tamil Nadu. When it came to choosing the CM of UP, most assumed that Indira Gandhi would make her son, Sanjay, the PM. But instead she hose VP Singh, who would become PM later, as the CM. Sanjay was angry at this but eventually calmed down.

On 23 June 1980, Sanjay came to meet his mother as usual in the morning in her office, and then left for the flying club that he was a part of. He sat in his two-seater plane. Madhavrao Scindia, father of Jyotiraditya Scindia, who was ex-minister of Aviation, was suppposed to join him. But he was late, so he invited another of his friends, a captain himself, to join him on the plane ride.

While flying, he tried to perform a dive, but wasn’t able to pull up the plane and it crashed into the ground, killing him and his co-passenger.

Indira Gandhi was informed and she rushed to the scene of the accident and saw the mutilated body of her son before he was rushed to the hospital.

Her son was dead.

She was standing outside the hospital room, wearing dark shades to hide her possibly teary eyes. Everyone knew what this meant for her. The most important person in her life, whom she loved and leaned on for support more than anyone else was dead. It’s difficult, as a parent, to lose their child, especially a grown-up and to her she was more than just a son. Pupul writes that she once called him her elder brother.

Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Chandra Shekhar, both future PMs of India, were there to offer their condolences. Indira did not address their condolences and merely told Chandra Shekhar, “I have for some time been wanting to speak to you about Assam. The situation is very grim.” CS told her that they can discuss it later, but she said, “No, no. This matter is very important.”

Sanjay had left behind Maneka, who was now widowed at the age of 23, and their three-month-old son, Varun.

Rajiv, Indira’s eldest son, was working as a pilot with Indian Airlines. He was being pressurised by his friends to join politics. His wife, Sonia, was dead against it and even threatened to leave him if he did. But slowly, he did begin to get involved in the party and politics.

Indira started leaning more on rituals and astrologers. Apparently, a Gujarati newspaper had predicted Sanjay’s death down to the actual date. When Pupul brought this up during dinner and how astrologers were predicting more dangers to the family in the coming days, instead of dismissing them as nonsense, Indira said, ‘It is because we did nothing and ignored what they said, that this happened to Sanjay. They had foretold the actual date.’

Her relationship with her daughter-in-law, Maneka, had never been great to begin with, but after Sanjay’s death, it started to get worse. She sold off Surya, a political gossip magazine which was edited by her and owned by her mother, to an RSS sympathiser without Indira’s knowledge. Then, later, some MLAs from UP rebelled against Indira Gandhi. But instead of letting her take care of the situation, Maneka said that she would go and meet with them, as they were still loyal to Sanjay, and they might listen to her. Indira Gandhi, probably did not want to make it more public by engaging with them or something, we don’t know, but she forbade Maneka from going and meeting with them.

But she did end up going anyway, and when she returned, Indira went wild on her. According to Pupul, she was “like one possessed and lost control of herself”.

Arguments and confrontation ensued, and later Indira wrote a very unwise letter to her ordering her to leave the house and accusing her of rudeness and impertinence from the time she was married to Sanjay. She also referenced their difference in family backgrounds.

Maneka, in turn, wrote a very public letter accusing Indira of torturing her, keeping her son Varun from her, abusing her all for just going to the meeting in Lucknow where she was invited asa guest, and where she claimed she spoke in favour of Indira.

Now it couldn’t have been just that one small incident, but I couldn’t really figure out why she went off on her like this. Maybe it was her underlying grief and anger that she wasn’t able to protect Sanjay, and she took out her anger with herself on Maneka. Or maybe because Maneka wasn’t really as timid and caring a daughter-in-law as Sonia, she had this pent up anger. But we don’t know for sure. Anyway, the feud was public, and Maneka cut off ties with her.

Besides troubles in her personal life, the country was beset with its own troubles. Whatever Indira did, no matter how much harder she worked, it did not seem to be enough. She was losing a battle on multiple fronts. Her instinct for right action seemed to be waning. She described that she felt like Sisyphus. Constantly working, but the work not resulting in making the country’s situation better.

In Andhra Pradesh, ahead of state elections, she had dismissed the rising actor-turned-politician NT Rama Rao and his Telugu Desam Party. But they ended up decimating the Congress Party in Andhra Pradesh. Indira had decided to entrust the elections to Rajiv and the younger members of the party who had no knowledge of the ground realities in Andhra and Karnataka, where the Congress also lost, albeit by a narrow margin.

There was violence spreading in Assam as well between the native peasants, tribals, and Bangladeshi refugees. She went to Assam to meet with the victims and order immediate relief work.

Civil War broke out in Sri Lanka in July of 1983, after a premeditated pogrom against Tamils, which claimed several lives and left thousands homeless.

In her native state of Kashmir, insurgency and violence were gaining strength, and the CM, Farooq Abdullah, although a warm, generous person, was ineffective in containing the insurgency. She had no option but to dismiss the government. Her relative, BK Nehru, who was the Governor of J and K he refused to dismiss the elected government, despite the known dangers. So she transferred him to Gujarat and installed Jagmohan Malhotra as the Governor. He met with dissident MLAs from the J and K Assembly and dismissed Farooq Abdullah’s government, and invited his brother-in-law, GM Shah, to form a new government in July 1984.

Operation Blue Star

The only major opponent of the Congress party in Punjab was the Akali Dal. In order to divide the Akali’s votes, Sanjay and Giani Zail Singh, then the Home Minister, started supporting Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale, who was at the time a pretty insignificant preacher who went about preaching in villages and asking the youth to give up alcohol and drugs and become more religious. It was understood between them that Bhindranwale, in exchange for their support, would sway votes in favor of the Congress among his followers. But they underestimated Bhindranwale, and he tried to play off the Akali Dal and the Congress off each other, while raising himself and building up a loyal following.

His main goal was a separate Sikh country, even though his official demands from the government were special concessions for Punjab, such as greater autonomy, Chandigarh as capital for only Punjab and not Haryana as well, more water for the state and others. To achieve that end, he started killing off Hindu journalists in Punjab who wrote against him. Funds flowed in from NRIs in Canada and the UK, and Bhindranwale built up a small militia. Bomb blasts, murders and looting of Hindus and Sikhs in retaliation became a daily occurrence starting April 1983.

Indira Gandhi, who was capable of swift action, seemed unsure this time. She sought the help of Opposition members and academics to negotiate with him, but nothing worked out. In December 1983, Bhindranwale and his associates took up residence in the Akal Takht inside the Golden Temple, assuming that the government wouldn’t dare to attack them inside the holy place.

Indira knew that giving into any of the demands of Bhindranwale would empower more rebels in the country, who might feel empowered. And it wouldn’t help the present situation as well, as she knew his demands would only keep increasing. She knew she had to act fast, and her action should be total.

Attacking the terrorists holed up in the Shri Harmandir Sahib, the Golden Temple, would mean that there would be some collateral damage to the temple, and it would greatly offend Sikhs both in India and around the world. But there was no other way.

On 1st June 1984, the Indian Army entered the Golden Temple Complex and engaged the terrorists. On 6th June, Bhindranwale was killed, but the Operation continued till June 10, when finally all the terrorists were eliminated and the complex secured.

After Operation Blue Star, her advisors suggested that she remove Sikh personnel from her bodyguard for obvious fears that some of them might be um, compromised. But she refused, saying that it would only add to the feelings of humiliation and isolation among Sikhs.

On 30th October 1984, she was in Bhubaneshwar, Odisha, speaking to a crowd, when, as part of her speech, she uttered the prophetic words, “I am here today; I may not be here tomorrow.” She went on to add, “I do not care whether I live or die.  I have lived a long life and I am proud that I spent the whole of my life in the service of my people. I am only proud of this and nothing else.  I shall continue to serve until my last breath, and when I die, I can say that every drop of my blood will invigorate India and strengthen it.”

When she returned to the place where she was staying in Bhubaneswar, she was told that the vehicle carrying her grandchildren, Rahul and Priyanka, had met with a minor accident, but they weren’t hurt. With all the rumors of conspiracy against the family, she was scared and rushed to Delhi the same day.

On the morning of 31st October, she made her way from her residence to her office on the opposite side of the road for an interview that was scheduled.

As Indira approached the gate, Beant Singh, her bodyguard for over 9 years, shot a bullet at her from his revolver. Then a constable, Satwant Singh, opened fire and shot her 25 times. She was taken to AIMS, but the doctors could not save her.

Lessons

Now let’s look at the takeaways from the life of Indira Gandhi.

First, I think, would be going under the radar, letting your enemies feel a false sense of security, and then striking unexpectedly. Whether it was letting her own party members believe that she would be a pliant Prime Minister before becoming PM for the first time, or when there was a growing rift between them, or letting the Janata Party think that they had destroyed her completely and she was no longer a threat to them.

It takes courage and the ability to accept temporary defeat or humiliation when all you want to do is hit back.

Another lesson, part of this one, is using silence. To quote MacDonald, former British High Commissioner to India, “Indira Gandhi’s greatest weapon was her silence.” There is something that unnerves people when being given the silent treatment, when all they want you to do is to react, even negatively.

She did this with her political opponents at home, with Richard Nixon, and even with her father, Jawaharlal Nehru.

The second thing we can learn from her is looking inwards. Introspecting. Many great men, such as Napoleon and Alexander, were known for swift action. No doubt they thought about their actions a great deal before executing them, but what I’m talking about is not thinking about external matters, but looking into oneself.

I don’t think if she wasn’t introspective she would have ended the Emergency when she did, and might have prolonged it. I think lack of introspection, taking stock, and facing things as they are, is a major reason for the downfall of many great men and why dictators, once they get power, don’t stop.

But, but, but, this has to be very limited. Not thinking too much about internal matters is equally important. And she could do both, thanks to her father, Jawaharlal. Whenever she would brood and overthink as a teenager, her father would chide her, saying that she was not some unique snowflake. Stop brooding. Perform action.

And that greatly helped her both as a teenager and through multiple setbacks she faced in life. Through the crushing defeat after the Emergency, losing her Parliament seat after winning the by-elections, losing Sanjay, and splits in her party… she could have just wallowed in self-pity, but she did not. Many times, it is necessary to turn off the part of your mind that thinks about internal matters and just do stuff.

I think she thought about the words of Beethoven that her father sent her was something she remembered and acted on during the lows in her life. Beethoven, for whom his life was music, was beginning to go deaf. That’s like a painter going blind. But instead, he said, “I shall seize fate by the throat. It shall never wholly overcome me.”

Another lesson, this is more of a hack, really, so Pupul once asked her how she planned her strategies. She was silent for a while, then said: “I listen to what people say, I observe events. Then at night, I let my mind wander, let it roam freely into the future, however dark. Thought has very little to do with it. At rare moment,s things fall into place.”

So the hack is, absorb as much information as you can, then simply let your mind wander. Don’t actively think about anything, maybe. Follow one thought to the next, no matter how dark, and then light would appear.