"Indira" by Katherine Frank

Indira Gandhi led the most populous democracy in the world, but finally, ruthless and paranoid, she couldn't resist the temptation of tyranny.

By Paul Festa

Mar 26, 2002 | Just before assuming the highest office of the world's most populous democracy, Indira Gandhi entertained a fantasy of escaping public service by moving to London and becoming an anonymous landlady. After reading Katherine Frank's new biography of Gandhi, "Indira: The Life of Indira Nehru Gandhi," one rather wishes that she had, despite the hardship this would have imposed on Bloomsbury renters.

Gandhi assumed power reluctantly at first, rebuffing those who sought to draft her into various public roles in favor of serving quietly in the shadow of her father, the prime minister. But like the teetotaler who, once alcohol passes his lips for the first time, never draws another sober breath, Gandhi fought to retain power once she had it -- and with enough zeal and ruthlessness to reduce the Indian constitution to a pile of saffron-dyed confetti.

It may help to explain her later antipathy to democratic institutions that she was born in the cradle of Indian democracy, because Gandhi had to compete with it for her parents' time and attention. For the most part, she lost.

She was born in 1917, the only child of Jawaharlal Nehru, the revolutionary agitator who would become India's first democratically elected leader when the country gained its independence from Britain in 1947, and his consumptive but politically active wife, Kamala. (Indira Gandhi was no relation to Mohandas, a close friend and mentor of the Nehru family.)

Life in the Nehru household ran on an erratic schedule, with Jawaharlal being carted off to jail every so often by the British authorities for his pro-independence activities, and Kamala (in addition to serving a politically valuable jail stint of her own) trekking off to quack healers and European health spas in her protracted march toward death from tuberculosis at the age of 37.

Indira Nehru, despite being a tubercular basket case herself (she's seriously ill or monumentally depressed about once every 20 pages for the first third of the book, until the TB cure reaches New Delhi in the late 1950s), married one of her mother's acolytes, Feroze Gandhi. In terms of both personal and political comity, their marriage compared with other historically significant events in Indian history, including three wars with Pakistan and any number of domestic Hindu-Sikh conflagrations.

After years of infidelity, illness and intranuptial political discord, the charismatic husband and his ambitious wife were for the most part estranged. However, before Feroze's death from a heart attack at the age of 47, they managed to produce two sons: Rajiv (who would follow in his mother's footsteps to serve as India's prime minister, from her assassination in 1984 until his own in 1991) and Sanjay.

It was Nehru's death in 1964 that knocked Gandhi from the sidelines of power to its pinnacle. She had yet to be popularly elected to any post, but she had become a force to be reckoned with. She was president of the Indian National Congress (a political party) and, as a result of traveling frequently with her father, had become a world-famous personality on a first-name basis with monarchs, presidents and prime ministers around the globe. Following the brief and undistinguished interregnum of Lal Bahadur Shastri -- whom Indira repeatedly upstaged from the vantage point of his cabinet and her newly appointed seat in the upper house of the Indian legislature, potentially contributing to his death by heart failure not two years into his term -- Gandhi was the clear choice to assume power.

The vile, crushing marriage of Gandhi and Indian democracy had a decent enough honeymoon. In 1971 she led the military victory over U.S.-backed Pakistan that resulted in the independence of the wracked nation of Bangladesh. Emerging from this triumph, Gandhi found herself virtually deified by the Indian people and became, according to a Gallup poll, the world's most admired person. Considering its geopolitical consequences on the Indian subcontinent today, her detonation three years later of India's first nuclear device may or may not qualify to Western readers as a highlight of her 18 years in office, but the underground explosion certainly played well in the Punjab.

Next Page: Gandhi's one companion, one fix, one rush

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