May You Be the Mother of a Hundred Sons (27 page)

Even before her death, Indira Gandhi’s life had taken on the status of myth. In 1971, when she led India into its most successful war against Pakistan, the swift military victory seemed to place her in the tradition of powerful Indian goddesses, an image that persisted throughout her subsequent years of political victories and defeats. In the minds of many Indians, Indira Gandhi was like Durga, the goddess of war, who had single-handedly vanquished hordes of demons and the forces of evil.

Yet I needed to move beyond the myth to understand Indira Gandhi the woman, and her relationship to the women of India. This was not easy. The conventional wisdom in political circles in New Delhi, especially among those who had been close to her, was that Indira Gandhi’s womanhood was largely irrelevant to her political life and that, much like Golda Meir and Margaret Thatcher, she transcended sexual categories, becoming, in the popular imagination, not man, not woman, but leader. As an adolescent, Indira Gandhi once recalled, she wanted to be a boy, and Rajiv Gandhi told me that in her adult years his mother never particularly thought of herself as a woman. “She thought of herself as a human being,” he said. “We were never brought
up thinking that men and women are different species.” Margaret Thatcher, the British prime minister and grocer’s daughter, once mentioned to Mrs. Gandhi that women generally had to work twice as hard as men, and added that in her own career she had encountered special obstacles as a woman. Indira Gandhi agreed, according to her press secretary, Sharada Prasad, that women had to work harder than men. But she said that she herself, the child of modern India’s greatest political family, had never felt particularly handicapped by her sex. It was an attitude that reflected her background of unusual privilege and thus made her something less than a role model for other women politicians in India. “She was typical of nothing,” one young woman member of Parliament said to me. If anything, Indira Gandhi was typical of the dynastic politics of South Asia, where women have risen to prominence as daughters or wives of powerful men, many of whom have been cut down by violence. Benazir Bhutto of Pakistan inherited the political mantle, organization and popular loyalty of her father, the late prime minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, who was overthrown in 1977 and executed two years later. In Sri Lanka, Sirimavo Bandaranaike was swept into power after the assassination of her husband, W.R.D. Bandaranaike, in 1959. In Bangladesh, the two most prominent opposition leaders are also the daughter and widow of assassinated former presidents.

Certainly, by most definitions, Indira Gandhi was never a feminist. Although she was more strong-willed and ruthless than most men, she insisted that motherhood was a woman’s greatest fulfillment and often held up the mythical Sita, the long-suffering wife of Rama, as the exemplary Indian woman. She counseled women not to rebel but to feed their children a balanced diet and to grow more vegetables in their gardens. And although she once wrote, “Since I was a little child, I have watched with growing pain and horror the maze of barbaric customs and superstitions which envelop the women of India so tightly as almost to smother them,” as prime minister she expressed the view that the problems of poor Indian women were fundamentally no different from those of poor Indian men. “She was not a suffragette,” Pupul Jayakar, one of Indira Gandhi’s closest friends, once explained to me. “Nor did she believe in the way the problem is being presented today—as gender. She thought the problem of women was the general problem of poverty and unemployment.”

I never met Indira Gandhi. She was murdered by two of her own Sikh bodyguards in the garden of her home in New Delhi on the
morning of October 31, 1984, and by the time I arrived in India nearly three months later, her memory had been upstaged by the attention focused on her eldest son, who had become prime minister upon her death. The early part of 1985 was a time of almost euphoric hopes for the young prime minister, a man who then impressed Indians with his conciliatory style and modest demeanor. In that atmosphere, I readily accepted the notion that Mrs. Gandhi’s gender neither affected her prime ministership nor allowed her a special relationship with other women in the country. There may have been amazement abroad when Indira Gandhi in 1966 became the first woman to serve as prime minister of India, but at home the press, reflecting the view of the educated elite, merely remarked that this was a sign of modernity and progress. Women, after all, had been involved in Indian politics since the civil disobedience campaigns of the 1930s. To Indians, it was not surprising that Jawaharlal Nehru’s only child should become prime minister.

But as my stay in India lengthened, I heard and read things about Indira Gandhi that altered my earlier view, or at least added new dimensions to the legend. Although Americans might remember Mrs. Gandhi, not incorrectly, as the fiery and disheveled political leader with unkempt hair who traveled by jeep through mud and dust to India’s villages, in New Delhi, I learned, she was seen as the epitome of style, an elegant, immaculately groomed woman whose silk saris were the envy of all the society matrons in town. The Nehru family’s “ugly duckling,” with her beak nose, hooded eyes and wiry build, had become a striking middle-aged woman with a dramatic streak of white in her hair. Imperious and aggressive in her public life, in private she pursued the traditional interests of a woman of her class. She once told a reporter, “If I had the time, what I really would love to do is design saris and jewelry.” When she traveled to Washington to meet with Ronald Reagan in 1982, one of her first requests of the State Department’s protocol office was to find her a good hairdresser. She loved arranging flowers and decorating the rooms of her Safdarjung Road home, a colonial-style white bungalow which became her sanctuary of understated sophistication: spare Western furniture, Indian sculpture, Tibetan religious paintings, a wall of books in her study. “The pattern of her life was that of an upper-class Indian society woman,” recalled Khushwant Singh, the journalist, novelist and historian who was for a time a friend of Mrs. Gandhi’s. In another life, he mused, “she might have married an army officer and become a social figure.”
Nor was her conversation confined to politics and affairs of state. Khushwant Singh said that Mrs. Gandhi “thoroughly enjoyed the scandals of other people’s private lives,” and Elizabeth Moynihan, the wife of Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the former American ambassador to India, remembered that Mrs. Gandhi once told her to ignore those in the Delhi diplomatic corps who complained that Mrs. Moynihan was not attending official parties like a proper ambassador’s wife. “Well, that was the first I’d heard of those complaints,” Elizabeth Moynihan said. “She knew all the gossip.” Mrs. Gandhi’s confidant and press secretary, Sharada Prasad, told me that the prime minister would work on the seating plans for important dinners during cabinet meetings, and her longtime social secretary, Usha Bhagat, recalled Mrs. Gandhi’s sensitivity to talk among other upper-class mothers in Delhi who clucked that she never spent enough time with her children.

From these stories it became apparent to me that Indira Gandhi the woman could not be separated from Indira Gandhi the prime minister. As she herself once told an interviewer, “I think that political life, personal life, or outdoor life, or life of any other kind, is all one and the same thing.” In a larger sense, it was impossible not to see that Indira Gandhi had left a legacy for other women in Indian politics. While it was true that she made no special effort to promote other women, her life in itself was a potent influence on the careers of others and on the consciousness of all Indians. Even Ela Bhatt, who was no fan of Mrs. Gandhi, told me once that her leadership in a subtle way made women more aware of their rights. “Consciously or unconsciously,” Ela Bhatt said, “every woman, I think, feels that if Indira Gandhi could be a prime minister of this country, then we all have opportunities.”

And so I came to realize that Indira Gandhi was inextricably linked with all of the other women who had succeeded in Indian politics. To understand her, I also had to understand them. Her assassination, after all, set off what Indian political analysts said was an emotional wave of sympathy for other women political candidates in the parliamentary elections just after Mrs. Gandhi’s death. Women won in unusually large numbers, and partly as a result, by 1988 women accounted for almost 10 percent of the membership of Parliament—the largest proportion since independence. As I met these women, I discovered that most of them, like Mrs. Gandhi, were from the upper class and were far better educated than many of the men in Parliament. They also shared some of the advantages and disadvantages that Mrs. Gandhi had
encountered along the way. Almost all of the seventy-four women members had come to power, like Mrs. Gandhi, because of their relationships to important men; most were widows, daughters, granddaughters or daughters-in-law of former members of Parliament and powerful state political figures. Parliament was filled with men who were also there because of famous fathers or families, but they were not seen as undeserving inheritors who had to struggle to prove themselves. The fact was that most of the women, like Mrs. Gandhi at the start of her political career, had little influence over substantive issues and party politics. Only one woman, Sheila Dixit, was considered a power broker on the level of the men, and only a handful of others, Margaret Alva and Mohsina Kidwai in particular, had authority because they were ministers as well as members of Parliament.

Not very many young professional women ran for Parliament, and the experience of one of the more impressive of them, Jayanti Natarajan, illustrates why this was the case. Natarajan was the thirty-four-year-old granddaughter of a former chief minister of Tamil Nadu. She had left a lucrative law practice in Madras to spend more than half of the year in Delhi, earning $160 a month as a member of Parliament and worrying about her young son back home. “Today I feel terribly guilty that my son’s alone,” she told me during a summer session of Parliament. She was an up-and-comer in the Congress party, striking and well connected. She was also the subject of rumors linking her to a male politician. She denied the stories but they took a toll. “I finally decided it was inevitable,” she said, “but it bothered me a lot. I was naïve to expect that my private life would remain private. If I wanted money or the good life, I would have continued in my profession.”

Despite the difficulties, gossip and torn families, there were enough women in Indian politics in the late 1980s to develop a certain solidarity, and to make the point that, as women, they brought special gifts to politics. Perhaps that was why statistics in recent years showed that women candidates, even the many token candidates put up for office by the political bosses, were as successful in elections as the men—or more so. In the state legislative assembly elections of 1983, for example, 18 percent of the women candidates won, compared with 17 percent of the men. “Women tend to be much more accessible to their electorates,” said Margaret Alva, the minister in charge of the government’s policy and programs for women. She explained to me that when a man was elected to Parliament, he usually moved his home and his wife to Delhi. But a woman member of Parliament traveled to Delhi only
during the sessions and most often kept her home in her constituency; it was unthinkable that the typical Indian husband should uproot himself because of his wife’s career. Consequently, the woman member of Parliament went home to her constituency most weekends and for important festivals. “So the people feel she’s more there than the men,” Alva said. “She wants to get things done in her constituency, like work with schools, hospitals, crèches, a lot of the social welfare kind of support. This has an impact on the community, much more than a big industrial project.”

Of course, none of these women, however successful, could ever be “Durga,” the woman who in 1975 inspired the Congress party refrain “Indira is India, and India is Indira.” The slogan was derided by Mrs. Gandhi’s critics as a symbol of her megalomania, but the words nonetheless tied her to the soul of the country as mother, as daughter, as woman. Her story, and in essence the story of all other women in politics in independent India, begins one November day in 1917 in the northern city of Allahabad along the Ganges River.

MOTILAL NEHRU, INDIRA GANDHI’S FLAMBOYANT, LARGER-THAN-LIFE
grandfather, was a prosperous lawyer and a grandee of Allahabad who lived in Anand Bhawan, or “Abode of Happiness,” a sprawling villa filled with Victorian furniture, Persian carpets and Venetian glass. Motilal, like most upper-class Indians of his time, admired things English, and for years his house was the site of lavish parties for British officials and Indian princes. In 1912, his son, Jawaharlal, returned from Trinity College in Cambridge to the grand family home in Allahabad, where he frequented the gentlemen’s clubs and took up the pursuit of law. Like his father, Jawaharlal Nehru had a warm regard for the British; he would later describe himself in those days as “a bit of a prig with little to commend me.” In 1916, Jawaharlal was married to Kamala, a shy, deeply religious young woman intimidated by the worldly Nehrus. The following year she produced the couple’s only child, Indira. At the infant’s birth, Indira’s grandmother was said to have exclaimed, “Oh, but it should have been a boy!” This prompted Motilal, a member of the liberal school of nineteenth-century reformers who believed in women’s emancipation, to snap at his wife, “For all you know [Jawaharlal’s baby daughter] may prove better than a thousand sons.”