Indira Gandhi

• 1. Introduction

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  On the 31st of October 1984, Indira Gandhi walked toward a wicket gate in the garden at 1 Safdarjung Road in New Delhi. Two of her own Sikh bodyguards stood waiting. She was on her way to be interviewed by the British filmmaker Peter Ustinov, who was making a documentary for Irish television. The men she trusted with her life drew their weapons. Beant Singh fired three times. Satwant Singh emptied 30 rounds. Then they dropped their guns and surrendered.

  This is how the only female prime minister of India died. She had held that office from 1966 to 1977, and again from 1980 until that morning. Her cumulative tenure of 15 years and 350 days is second only to her father, Jawaharlal Nehru, the first prime minister of India.

  The questions are how a woman dismissed as a puppet became a leader feared by her own party, why she suspended a democracy she had inherited, and what made her own guards turn on her. Critics called her authoritarian. To the poor she was Mother Indira. Both saw the same person.

• 2. The Dumb Doll

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  When Lal Bahadur Shastri died in January 1966, the Congress legislative party chose Indira Gandhi over her rival Morarji Desai. The veteran K. Kamaraj engineered her win for a calculated reason. He believed she was weak enough to control yet strong enough to beat Desai, thanks to the high regard for her father. A woman, the thinking went, would be an ideal tool for the party bosses known as the Syndicate.

  The socialist leader Ram Manohar Lohia is credited with first mocking her as the Goongi Goodiya, Hindi for a dumb doll. Other Congress politicians wary of her rise echoed the insult. She formed her first government as a Rajya Sabha member from Uttar Pradesh, the first Indian prime minister to come from the upper house.

  The doll moved fast. In 1966 she crushed the separatist Mizo National Front uprising in Mizoram. By 1969 she had fallen out with senior party leaders. She backed an independent candidate, V. V. Giri, for president over the official Congress choice, and announced bank nationalisation without consulting her finance minister, Morarji Desai. Party president S. Nijalingappa expelled her for indiscipline. She floated her own faction, kept most of the Congress MPs, and left only 65 with the rival Congress (O). The puppet had cut her strings.

• 3. Remove Poverty

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  Garibi Hatao, Remove Poverty, was the slogan that carried Gandhi into the 1971 election. It answered the opposition's two-word cry of Indira Hatao, Remove Indira. The programs gave the rural and urban poor political weight for the first time. They also handed the central leadership in New Delhi vast new patronage to disburse across the country.

  In 1971 her party won its first landslide since her father's sweep in 1962, built on the promise to attack poverty. The fourteen largest banks in India had been nationalised in 1969, and the Congress now proposed abolishing the Privy Purse paid to former rulers of the princely states. To the rural poor, Dalits, minorities and women she became Indira Amma, Mother Indira.

  Whether she believed any of it is still argued. The Times journalist Peter Hazelhurst quipped that her socialism sat slightly left of self-interest. Sunanda K. Datta-Ray called her a master of rhetoric, often more posture than policy. In an early interview she herself was evasive. She said you could call her a socialist, but the word came closest to what she wanted, which was to eradicate poverty, and she did not believe in words at all.

• 4. Goddess Durga

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  In December 1971 India won a decisive victory over Pakistan in the last two weeks of the Bangladesh Liberation War. The crisis had begun when repression by the Pakistani army drove 10 million refugees across the border into India. Pakistan launched Operation Searchlight, a campaign of genocide against Bengali Hindus, nationalists and intelligentsia.

  On the 3rd of December 1971, Pakistan's air force struck Indian airbases in a pre-emptive operation called Chengiz Khan. The attack failed to inflict major damage. Gandhi declared a state of emergency and addressed the nation on radio shortly after midnight. We must be prepared for a long period of hardship and sacrifice, she said. Then she ordered a full invasion of East Pakistan.

  Indian generals chose a lightning war toward Dhaka, the East Pakistani capital. On the 11th of December, 750 men of the Parachute Regiment landed at Tangail in the largest airborne operation since World War II. By the 16th, Lieutenant General Jagjit Singh Aurora of India and A.A.K. Niazi of Pakistan signed the Instrument of Surrender at 16:31 hours Indian time. Some 93,000 soldiers of the Pakistani forces surrendered, the largest such surrender since World War II. Crowds hailed Gandhi as the goddess Durga, opposition leaders among them.

• 5. The Emergency

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  On the 12th of June 1975, the Allahabad High Court declared Gandhi's 1971 election to the Lok Sabha void for electoral malpractice. Her opponent Raj Narain had filed the petition. The court found her guilty of using government machinery and officials for party purposes, stripped her of her seat, and banned her from office for six years. It rejected the more serious charge of bribery.

  She refused to resign. On her recommendation, President Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed declared a State of Emergency under Article 352(1) of the Constitution on the 25th of June 1975. Ahmed issued ordinances that needed no debate in Parliament, letting Gandhi rule by decree. Police could impose curfews and detain citizens indefinitely. Every publication faced censorship by the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting. More than 100,000 political opponents, journalists and dissenters were imprisoned.

  Her younger son Sanjay Gandhi entered politics during this period and held enormous power despite holding no government office. The writer Mark Tully said his inexperience did not stop him from using his mother's draconian powers to terrorise the administration, setting up what was in effect a police state. People joked that India was run from the Prime Minister House rather than the Prime Minister Office.

• 6. Defeat And Return

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  In 1977 Gandhi called elections, perhaps misled by the heavily censored press into believing she was still popular. The Janata alliance opposed her, framing the vote as the last chance to choose between democracy and dictatorship. The message landed. Congress fell to 153 seats, down from 350, with 92 of them in the South. Gandhi and Sanjay both lost their own seats. It was the first time in India's history that the Congress lost a national election.

  The Janata coalition was held together mainly by its hatred of Gandhi, whom some called that woman. With right-wing Hindu nationalists, socialists and former Congress members in one tent, the Morarji Desai government bogged down in infighting. In 1979 Desai resigned, Charan Singh briefly became prime minister, and President Reddy dissolved Parliament in August 1979.

  Gandhi had floated a new faction, Congress (I), the I standing for Indira. When the Janata home minister Charan Singh ordered her arrest, the strategy backfired and won her public sympathy. Her supporters even hijacked an Indian Airlines jet demanding her release. Before the January 1980 election she struck a ten-point agreement with the Shahi Imam Syed Abdullah Bukhari to secure Muslim votes. Congress (I) returned to power with a landslide, and she won the Medak constituency.

• 7. The Golden Temple

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  Gandhi's Congress Party had once helped raise the orthodox Sikh leader Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale to prominence, hoping to split the rival Akali Dal in Punjab. The plan curdled. Bhindranwale broke with Congress, joined the Akali Dal, and in July 1982 led the campaign for the Anandpur Resolution demanding greater autonomy for the Sikh-majority state.

  In 1982 Bhindranwale and roughly 200 armed followers moved into the Guru Nanak Niwas guest house near the Golden Temple. By 1983 the complex had become a fort, with light machine guns and semi-automatic rifles reported inside. On the 23rd of April 1983, the Punjab Police Deputy Inspector General A. S. Atwal was shot dead as he left the Temple compound. After negotiations failed, Gandhi in June 1984 ordered the army into the Golden Temple in Operation Blue Star.

  The army used heavy artillery, including tanks. The action damaged or destroyed parts of the complex, including the Akal Takht shrine and the Sikh library. Casualty estimates range from many hundreds to many thousands. Sikhs in India and abroad reacted with fury, and some Sikh soldiers mutinied. The historian Harjinder Singh Dilgeer charged that she attacked the temple to cast herself as a hero before elections planned for late 1984. Four months later, two Sikh bodyguards settled the account.

• 8. Mother Indira

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  Gandhi was cremated on the 3rd of November 1984 near Raj Ghat, at the site now called Shakti Sthal, meaning Place of Strength. A large monolithic rock of iron ore marks it, commemorating her as the Iron Lady of India. Her son Rajiv succeeded her as prime minister within hours of the murder. Then anti-Sikh riots erupted, killing more than 3,000 Sikhs in New Delhi and an estimated 8,000 across India.

  Her record outside India was just as forceful. She brought India closer to the Soviet Union with a 1971 friendship treaty, even while India led the Non-Aligned Movement. She initiated India's first successful nuclear weapon test in 1974 at Pokhran. In 1984 Operation Meghdoot expanded the territory India controlled in the disputed Kashmir region. President Richard Nixon, who privately called her a clever fox, later wrote that she had suckered America.

  The verdicts never settled. In 1999 a BBC online poll named her Woman of the Millennium. In 2020 Time magazine listed her among 100 women who defined the past century. The columnist Pankaj Vohra called her arguably the greatest mass leader of the last century. Her slogan Garibi Hatao still echoes through the party she remade, carried by the millions who knew her only as Mother Indira.