"Indira" by Katherine Frank

Gandhi followed up those victories with electoral landslides in which her markedly socialist policies helped rally the poor -- her natural constituency -- to the polls in large numbers. But trouble loomed on the horizon in the form of what today might be called a vast right-wing conspiracy against her. Capitalizing on some minor elections infractions she committed, Gandhi's political and judicial enemies nearly succeeded in wresting power from her.

But they might as well have tried to part a lit pipe from an armed crack whore. The picture that emerges most vividly of Gandhi at this juncture, and for the rest of her political life, is one of an addict yearning for the more serene life that awaits her if she can only quit her drug but frantic -- and ruthless -- the moment its withdrawal is threatened.

Alternatively, and more kindly, you could view her as a classic tragic hero out of Shakespeare or Sophocles. Proud, paranoid and perpetually wounded (like her nemesis Richard Nixon), Gandhi clung to power so tenaciously and with so few scruples that she laid the groundwork for her most precipitous falls -- including her final one into the murderous hands of her own bodyguards.

Her favored son, Sanjay, plotted out the Machiavellian schemes executed in her name. Gandhi's closest and most corrupt advisor, he plays a composite of Goneril, Iago and Lady Macbeth to Gandhi's increasingly myopic and manipulated crypto-monarch. (As one participant in the events reflected, his death in a 1980 plane crash was as lucky for India as it was unlucky for Indira.) But even setting aside Sanjay's criminal associations and tactics, his fraudulent business enterprises and dictatorial leanings, his mother's political character emerges as one increasingly hostile to the democratic values that inspired the men and women who brought her, and an independent India, into the world.

Consider the dismal two years of Gandhi's Emergency, her end-run around the enemies who nearly ousted her on the elections charges: Hundreds of thousands were jailed for dissent, with nearly two dozen deaths from desperate conditions in overcrowded prisons. Some were tortured. As many as 23 million Indian men were sterilized under Sanjay's coercive population-control scheme, and many thousands were rendered homeless by his "beautification" program of bulldozing slums. Meanwhile the domestic press was muzzled, the foreign press was expelled, the world's largest democracy went without elections and the courts and the constitution were all but disemboweled.

Or consider her cynical practice, late in her life as her paranoia intensified, of playing her enemies off one another for her own political advantage -- even at the cost of letting bloody religious conflicts, including the one that inspired her assassination, play out until they had spiraled out of control.

With friends like Gandhi, India's democratic institutions, its impoverished masses and victims of religious intolerance hardly needed enemies.

Without delving too deeply in the shadowy realm of psychobiography, Katherine Frank identifies formative experiences and childhood wounds that help explain the paranoia and near-megalomania that would characterize Gandhi at crucial junctures in her career.

But she is too forgiving by half in analyzing Gandhi's thirst for power. Gandhi's problem, Frank writes, is that the Indian prime minister believed that only she was capable of leading her nation. That is a charitable view, suggesting that Gandhi had a high opinion of her own capabilities and a low one of her opponents'.

A more illuminating analysis of Gandhi's relationship to power might suggest that her proximity to it gradually stripped her of everything else in her life. She devoted everything to her father and his career, and he only grew away from her. With her parents' deaths, her husband's abandonment and death, her son's death, a creeping alienation from her few close friends and finally a permanent estrangement from her daughter-in-law and grandson, Gandhi (her left eye twitching furiously) ultimately wound up with one fix, one rush, one companion. She didn't even drink. All that was left to her was power -- that, and the adulation of multitudes, the greatest multitude a democratically elected leader had ever served.

Even as she ached for the normality and peace of private life, the woman dubbed Empress Indira by admirers and critics alike could not bear to be parted from her crown. India suffered for it no less than did Indira. To the extent that Gandhi failed to produce lasting solutions to India's chronic woes -- religious tensions and the now-nuclear-charged conflict with Pakistan over Kashmir -- and to the degree that she sought to preserve her own power by playing politics with those incendiary situations, India, along with the rest of us, is still suffering for her shortcomings.

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