India File: The Return of Indira Gandhi
By Mani Shankar Aiyar
A file photo dated 24 January 1976 of Indira Gandhi, Prime Minister of India in 1974.
NEW DELHI, (UPI) -- Tuesday, Nov. 19, marked the 85th anniversary of Indira Gandhi's 85th birthday, yet she is back in popularity and fashion in the world's second most populous nation. A substantial majority of Indians were born after Jawarhalal Nehru's daughter first became Prime Minister in 1966, nearly four decades ago.
First-time voters in the recent elections in Jammu & Kashmir were not even born when she was killed in 1984. Yet she was chosen in a recent international poll as the most outstanding woman leader of the 20th century.
Gandhi was not the first woman to politically lead a modern nation. That honor went to Sirimavo Bandaranaike of Ceylon, now Sri Lanka in 1958. In fact, 10 Asian women have served as head of government in contemporary times. The others were Benazir Bhutto in Pakistan, Khaleda Zia and Sheikh Hasina in Bangladesh, Chandrika Kumaratunge in Sri Lanka, Golda Meir in Israel, Corey Aquino in the Philippines, Tansu Ciller in Turkey and Megawati Sukarnoputri, the current president of Indonesia.
After her assassination at the hands of her own security detail, Indira Gandhi's last testament was found among her papers. She wrote that she had never felt less like dying but she knew that death could come unexpectedly, as some were hoping and others were plotting. And then she wrote her last legacy, "I do not know how one can be an Indian and not be proud."
What is there in today's India of which we as Indians can be proud? China has overtaken us in economic growth and even tiny Singapore is way ahead. Many of our best and brightest find their destiny on Western shores, fleeing this country at the first opportunity. The institutions of our democracy have not done us proud.
In the world at large, as evidenced by a TV serial set in the Situation Room of the White House with real life characters as principal participants, our country is portrayed as the prime candidate for starting a nuclear Armageddon. Is, therefore, the hyperbole of a woman long dead of relevance 20 years on?
To go by the national celebration of her birth anniversary, the answer is, apparently, yes. India is still proud of Indira Gandhi. And many of its people miss her the way Britons miss Winston Churchill and Americans Ronald Reagan. Why?
I believe Indira Gandhi's continuing relevance to our national concerns lies in the priority she accorded to the poor. This has a background that needs to be recalled. Gandhi did not win the Prime Ministership on her own; she was anointed PM by a cabal of senior Congress party leaders who wanted to thwart the cantankerous front-runner, Morarji Desai. They picked on one they fondly imagined was a puppet, Indira Gandhi. She would reign; they would rule. It took but six months from her coronation for the cabal to discover that she was her own woman, not the goongi gudiya -- "dumb doll" - that her most prominent critic had described her. She decided to devalue the Indian rupee 57 per cent -- then considered an apostasy. The devaluation, said the old guard, had besmirched India's honor. How could she do this without consulting them?
The answer came from the people in the elections to Parliament and the state assemblies held a few months later, in early 1967. The entire cabal was roundly defeated. The nation rejected the puppeteers. But Gandhi was still the pretender. So, in mid-1969, she struck fast and hard.
The new prime minister nationalized the banks and put up her own candidate for the presidency. The cabal expelled her in fury from the party. She responded with even fiercer measures against the vested interests, big business and the feudal princes. In retaliation, most of the opposition forged an alliance against her, led by her own erstwhile colleagues and including the right-wing "cultural nationalists" who rule India today.
It was a formidable gathering of foes. And since what united them was their enmity to one woman, the slogan they coined was "Indira hatao" - rid us of Indira.
Gandhi hit back. "They say rid us of Indira; I say, rid us of poverty." The riposte electrified the nation. Brushing aside impossible odds, the poor of India voted her back to power in the elections of early 1972 with a massive two-thirds majority. Asked for her comment on those who had predicted her certain defeat, she resurrected Harry Truman's celebrated remark in 1948 on the media supporters of Thomas Dewey, "Let them eat crow".
Poverty levels did fall during the succeeding years of the Indira Gandhi era. But growth stagnated at an average of 3.5 percent per annum, evoking the sneer coined by a Chicago-educated Indian economist: "The Hindu rate of growth". Gandhi recognized the need to anchor the removal of poverty on accelerated growth in her last period of power from 1982 to 1984. Yet, it is with the socialist slogan of "garibi hatao" -- rid us of poverty -- that she continues to be most associated. And since the process of reforms is widely perceived as moving away from the path of her strident socialism, what is there in the remembering of Gandhi that resonates so strongly in 21st century India?
It is, I believe, the staggering of growth in the second half of the decade of reforms that has evoked the revived appreciation of Indira Gandhi. In the three years from 1994 to 1997, the Indian economy grew steadily at over 7 per cent per annum, provoking the belief that reforms were good for the economy. In the last five years, the average growth rate has declined to below the average growth rate of the '80s.
Also, the "second generation" of reforms favored by the domestic and international business community and Western donor nations, and espoused by economists from the World Bank-IMF to our local groves of academe, are going to target the most vulnerable. For it is the farmers, farm labor, factory labor and cottage industry who have benefited least from the reforms process.
In a right-wing dictatorship, like the People's Republic of China, such considerations matter little. In a democracy, life is rather more complicated. Reforms cannot succeed unless the people support them. And at the ballot-box, the poor of India are overwhelmingly preponderant. Which way will they vote?
The reforms process so far has concentrated on areas that impinge little on the people directly -- reforms in the industrial, financial and external sectors. But now that reforms are zeroing in on agricultural costs, prices and imports, on labor reform and food subsidies, the indifference of the poor is turning to hostility.
Unless the reformers remember Indira Gandhi and give priority to the poor -- to their empowerment, entitlements and enrichment, reforms for the rich will be drowned in the democratic cacophony of protests over their suffering. Hence, the centrality of garibi hatao - rid us of poverty.