THE red sandstone bulk of the In dian Parliament loomed above lawns and bright, feathery trees. The avenues beyond it seemed to lead lengthily to some unforeseen horizon. The Delhi winter had brought a new purity and clarity to the air, and a cool pale sun squinted down from the blue arch of the sky. The ugly, sprawling capital city, in this weather, assumed an unfaltering beauty: Every day could be sipped and turned on the palate, like a very light, slightly fizzy wine. But today was different from other days. Par liament was to open today for its winter session. Streams of cars and people were flowing down the end less arrowlike avenues towards the red sandstone amphitheater.
Inside the Lok Sabha, the Indian “House of Commons,” the view was much less pleasing. The galleries that held the spectators, filled to capacity today, formed a huge circle high above the politicians. It gave one the feeling of peering down into a bear pit, which the Lok Sabha not infrequently resembles. At the mo ment the House was, for once, silent and attentive. At the head of the Government front bench, Prime Min ister Indira Gandhi was speaking.
A slight, pale figure in a sari, she addressed herself to the microphone in the clear and careful tones of a child at elocution class. What she was saying was not particularly bril liant. She was, in fact, reading a message of condolence to the Egyp tian Government on the death of President Nasser. But her careful, in expressive voice, and even her man ner, had a curiously authentic touch. It was the touch of invested au thority.
She finished reading, and slipped quietly down into her seat. The leaders of the main Opposition par ties now started, one by one, to rise if not to shine. Each expressed his not excessively informed views on Nasser, and deplored the Egyptian leader's death. Some were largely inaudible, some, because of the qual ity of their English, largely incom prehensible. While they spoke, Mrs. Gandhi appeared, understandably, to lose all interest in the proceedings. She bent her dapper head over sequence of yellow files, flicking over the leaves with small, delicate hands. From time to time the right hand made a note on a file, but the intent head seldom lifted.
Beside her on the front bench were a number of senior Ministers. Like Caesar, Mrs. Gandhi seems to prefer to be surrounded with men who are fat. Most of these were not so much fat as obese, and they were far from pretty. Mrs. Gandhi, hemmed in by them, had the appear ance of a gazelle which has acci dentally strayed into an assembly of gorillas.
On the Opposition front bench, arms sardonically folded, sat the Cassius of the act, the lean and hungry Mora* Desai. In 1969, Mrs. Gandhi and he were colleagues in the united Congress party. But, once more like Caesar, and with equal reason, Mrs. Gandhi had said the equivalent of “He thinks too much; such men are dangerous.” After certain amount of internecine strife, the party had split into two unequal parts. The larger, which included the young and liberal element, stayed with Mrs. Gandhi under the name of the Ruling Congress, or Con gress (R). The smaller crossed over to the Opposition benches with De sai, and are now called the Oppo sition Congress, or Congress (0). More familiarly, the followers of Desai are known as the Syndicate, and Mrs. Gandhi's followers as the Indicate.
The condolences were over. Mrs. Gandhi rose unobtrusively and van ished down a side aisle, followed by a train of peons carrying files. Ques tion time started. Within minutes the bear‐pit quality of the House was fully in evidence. The male members leaped about, waved their arms, and yelled simultaneously. The female members shrilled like fishwives, while the Speaker, a turbaned, bearded Sikh, clattered an ineffectual bell for order. In a far corner of the chamber, amidst the yells and the clatter of the bell, a few members from remote rural areas, heads pil lowed peacefully on their arms, slept the sleep of the innocent and un informed.
India is coming up to an election with more voters than anywhere else ever before. And the one party with the experience and pres tige to hold the country together is badly split.
INDIRA PRIYADARSHINI (the sec ond name means “Dearly Beloved”) is the only child of Pandit Jawa harlal Nehru and his wife, Kamala. She was born on Nov. 19, 1917, in the large, sprawling family house named Anand Bhavan (i.e., the House of Happiness) in Allahabad in north ern India. The house had been built by her grandfather, Motilal Nehru, a brilliant, Westernized lawyer, who at the time of Indira's birth was somewhat more famous than his son Jawaharlal. He had thrown up a very lucrative practice to ally himself with Mahatma Gandhi and the Con gress party in the freedom move ment. He was not, however, a fol lower of all Gandhi's precepts. He didn't, for example, wander around in loincloths which he had woven himself. Indeed, legend has it that he not only had his shirts made in London, but sent them back to Lon don to be washed. But then legends have always collected, like clumps of exotic flowers, around the Nehru name.
One of them has it that when Indira was born an ancient family retainer was dying of cancer. His last wish was to see Jawaharlal's child. When he saw it, according to the story, he prophesied that this son of Jawaharlal's would bring further luster to the family name. It may have been age, disease, sheer wishful thinking, or the future Mrs. Gandhi's swad dling clothes which somewhat fogged his judgment of her sex, but he was right in way. As a famous Indian wri ter put it when she first came to power, “Indira is the only man in a Cabinet of old women.”
She grew up in an atmos phere of revolution. That is to say, she was accustomed to the frequent absences of her closer relatives in prison. Prison, from the viewpoint of the Indian freedom leaders, was rather like a rest camp. Her father, in his cell, found time to write her a series of letters which formed the sound and liberal basis of her education. He later collected and published them in book form, under the title “Glimpses of World History,” which is not a very brilliant title, but exactly describes what they were.
At 16, Indira was sent to Shantiniketan (“The Abode of Peace”), a kind of school founded by the poet Rabin dranath Tagore; after that, to schools in Switzerland, so that she could be with her mother, who was dying of tuberculosis; finally to Ox ford. It was about the time of Oxford that the widow of the German poet Ernst Toiler wrote to Nehru from Eng land: “I only want to tell you how delighted I was to have met her. Not only that she is so beautiful but so pure, which makes one feel very happy. She seemed to me like a little flower which the wind might blow away so easily. But I think she is not afraid of the wind.”
This rather sentimental de scription may have been true of Indira then; certainly the last sentence is true of her now. She has a tough, ob stinate and ruthlessly direct quality, an opposition to the wind, which few people seemed to notice in her ado lescence. Her shyness con cealed it, as did her fragile physical presence. But it was there, dormant and cloaked, and manifested itself as early as 1941, when she returned to India by way of South Af rica. The Indian community of Durban decided to hold a public reception in honor of Nehru's daughter, and asked if she would address it. She was too shy and refused. But before the reception she drove through the city, and was so appalled by what she saw there that she decided to make a speech after all.
What she then proceeded to say paralyzed her hosts with horror. They were, after all, mostly respectable merchants, and anxious to keep in with the authorities. Indira con demned the authorities. She compared their attitude to ward the blacks to Hitler's toward the Jews. She prophe sied that the day would come when Africans ruled Africa, and assailed the unfortunate and dumfounded merchants because they shunned the blacks and toadied to the whites. Her audience, con fronted by this youthful Cas sandra, vanished, and no further invitations were is sued to Nehru's daughter.
Part of the shock for the merchants, as for others who have since crossed Mrs. Gandhi's path, must have been the effect of such bluntness emanating from so delicate a source, as though a nightin gale had suddenly started to roar. Eve Curie, who met In dira later that year in India, wrote of her: “[She] was beau tiful in a more fragile way ... slender and pale with a pen sive, classical face. She could well have been born in Greece.” Young men had the same impression, in particular Feroze Gandhi, a childhood friend from her home town of Allahabad. He was a Parsi lawyer, not related to the Mahatma, had seen a lot of Indira in London, and, in fact, accompanied her on the voy age back to India.
They were married in Alla habad in March, 1942, the bride clad in a pink sari made of cloth woven by her father. Feroze, like his new wife, was an ardent nationalist, with the result that they were both in prison by September. Indira was released in May, 1943, and over the next four years she looked after her husband and father, during the inter vals between their prison sen tences, and produced two sons, Rajiv and Sanjay.
Then, in August, 1947, in dependence came to India. Nehru became the first Prime Minister. As a widower, he had nobody to keep house for him, or to act as hostess, and he asked his daughter if she would do so. She agreed, and moved into the Prime Minis ter's house with her husband and children. They stayed there for some time before Feroze decided to stand for Parliament, as an independent. He was elected, and moved to his official quarters. Indira and the children, however, remained with Nehru. The couple drifted apart. Not un naturally, perhaps, Feroze Gandhi later became one of the harshest critics Nehru had in Parliament.
Mrs. Gandhi, during these years, met and entertained most of the statesmen of the world in her father's house. Those whom she didn't meet in India, she encountered when she accompanied Nehru on foreign tours. She acquired a considerable knowledge of the way politics works behind the scenes. She was an at tractive presence in Nehru's life. She (occasionally) per suaded him to rest, she fea him, she organized him, and above all, in his scanty hours of leisure, she listened to him as he talked of politics and the world. There have been many worse trainings for Prime Minister.
She was also the only per son who could calm her father down when he was in one of his notorious tempers. An in stance often cited is the occa sion when Nehru asked his secretary for a secret file. The secretary couldn't find it. Nehru flew into a fury, the Prime Minister's office col lapsed into a terrified chaos, and someone called Mrs. Gandhi. She solved the prob lem instantly, and very prac tically, by pointing out that her father was at that mo ment sitting on the file.
IN 1958, she emerged into politics. She was voted to the Congress Working Committee. Then, in 1959, she was elected president of the party, which at that time was in a rather difficult position. For the first time in its long and distin guished history, it was under heavy criticism. The reasons for this were not far to seek. The Congress had held unchal lenged sway over the states and the central Government since 1947. But the Congress men voted to power in 1947 had mostly already been old, and not all of them, alas, had proved to be wholly honest. Age had slowed the party down, and corruption and the Congress were synonymous in some states. The remark Mrs. Gandhi made at her first press conference in 1959 already re flected the attitude of mind which, 10 years later, caused her to stand fast till the party broke in two. “The nation is in a hurry,” she said, “and we can't afford to waste time. My complaint against Con gress is that it isn't going as fast as the people are ad vancing.
It was a courageous thing to say, and revealing in that she had obviously not been too overshadowed by her father to be able to think hard and clearly for herself. She revealed this even more when she introduced some badly needed new blood into the Working Committee. Among the older party mem bers she dropped from it to make room for the newcom ers was Jawaharlal Nehru.
In the midst of all this, in 1960, Feroze Gandhi died of a heart attack. Indira had been separated from him for some years, but they were not estranged, and they saw each other fairly often. It was more of a blow to her than many people had imagined, but an other terrible blow was soon to come. On May 26, 1964, shortly before midnight, Neh ru cleared his desk of papers, said quietly, “I think I have finished everything,” and went up to bed. Early next day he had a stroke, subsided later, died. Apart from her sons, Mrs. Gandhi was, for the first time ever, alone.
The successor to Nehru was Lal Bahadur Shastri, but he died 18 months later. Two people then contended for the vacant leadership. One was Mrs. Gandhi, who had been Information Minister under Shastri, and the other was Morarji Desai.
For the Congress, it was a choice between opposites. Mrs. Gandhi was agnostic, liberal aid young. Desai was a Hindu, a ferocious puritan and elder ly. The drawback for Desai lay in a number of allegations made against his son, who was said to have capitalized on his father's name in a num ber of private business deals. The drawback for Mrs. Gandhi lay in the simple fact that she was a woman. Indian wo men are accepted by the mass of Indian men as mothers, sisters, wives, or mistresses, but in 1966 they were cer tainly not accepted as Prime Ministers.
The Congeress, jowever, had other considerrations to take into account. There was to be an alection in 1967, and the party, its popularity on the wane, badly needed a leader who would attract votes. Desai had a long record of service, but he could scarcely be con sidered a personality who was widely loved. As Chief Min ister of Bombay in the nine teen‐fifties, he had enforced total prohibition, and unwit tingly become the patron saint of a new industry in illicit liquor. But the bootleggers of Bombay, in a country of 550 million people, were clearly not numerous enough to vote his party to power. Mrs. Gandhi, however, carried with her the charisma of her father. The hereditary principle of rule, endemic in India for cen turies, was in her favor.
On Jan. 19, 1966, in the Central Hall of Parliament, the members of the Congress parliamentary party cast their votes for party leader; since the Congress was in power, they were in effect voting in a new Prime Minister. Mrs. Gandhi won in a canter. Her biographer, K. A. Abbas, an Indian writer, described the scene outside when the results were announced: “A crowd of 10,000 roared aloud their ap probation and their joy; but strangely enough they did not hail the winner by her name, but by some unerring collec tive instinct they shouted, “Jawaharlal Nehru hi jai!” They felt, they hoped, they knew, that he had returned.”
ON February 8, 1967, Mrs. Gandhi was campaigning in the eastern state of Orissa. The fourth general election in the history of free India, and the first since the death of Nehru, was a week away. She was addressing a crowd in the town of Bhubaneswar, fa mous for a thousand‐year‐old sun temple whose carved face stares across a blue lake, when somebody hurled a stone at her. It hit her in the face, causing minor bruises but she continued to speak, and thereby probably won her party a few thousand more votes.
But the stone was a symbol. Nobody would have dared throw stones at Nehru. The fact that people now threw them at his daughter proved how much the aura of awe around the Congress had fad ed. On Feb. 15, the Indian people—250 million voters— went to the polls. The results shook the Congress hierarchy. The party was returned to power, but it quavered into Parliament like a ship with most of its sail shot away. In the 1962 elections, the Con gress had in the Lok Sabha. This time it won only 281 seats out of 521. Moreover, it lost control of several states.
The party obviously needed to be streamlined and updated if it was to continue to wield power—and it was important for the country that it should do so, for no other party had the experience ar the admin istrative machinery to hold India together. Mrs. Gandhi promptly announced a 10‐ point program to bring about, as rapidly as possible, a so cialist state with a stable economy. One of the points was that the commercial banks should be nationalized, so that peasants and small industrialists would find it easier to obtain loans. In June, 1967, the All India Congress Committee (A.I.C.C.) met in New Delhi and accepted the program.
Two distinct camps now formed within the Congress. Desai, embittered by his fail ure to attain the leadership, and by what he considered to be Mrs. Gandhi's unduly radi cal policies, drew a Praetorian Guard of aging and conserva tive Congressmen around him. The younger and more liberal elements in the party rallied around Mrs. Gandhi. They in cluded a noisy body of slight ly elderly young men who clamored for bank nation alization. These were popu larly known as the Young Turks. The adherence of Y. B. Chavan, once Chief Minister of Maharashtra and then the Home Minister of India, a tough, able man who has been tipped as a future Prime Minister, and a few other party elders, balanced the somewhat embarrassing allegiance of the militants.
For the next two years, the quarrel over bank nationaliza tion raged within the party. Though the Congress is avow edly socialist, it had floated for many years on money do nated by capitalists; annexa tion of the banks would clear ly alienate these benefactors. Desai proposed a compromise —“social control of banks.” That is, Government commit tees would advise banks to advance loans to peasants and would check tax evasion, al ways through a policy of sweet reason. Mrs. Gandhi at first advocated “a fair trial for social control,” then about faced and called for immedi ate nationalization. She got it in July, 1969, when the acting President of India, V. V. Gill, issued an ordinance where by the Government took control of 14 leading banks with assets of some 500 million rupees (about $66.6‐ million). Desai resigned from the Council of Ministers, and Mrs. Gandhi endorsed Giri, who was running for a full term as President, against the official Congress candi date, N. Sanjiva Reddy, a right‐winger from southern In dia. Parliament went on to pass a bill elaborating the the bank ordinance, and Giri won his election. Mrs. Gandhi had broken a whole bushel of eggs, but she must have been highly satisfied by the resultant omelet.
SHE now had a number of enemies within her own party. Desai, like Achilles, was sulk ing in his tent, in his case a large and well‐appointed house on Dupleix Road, New Delhi. But he was surrounded, also like Achilles, with sym pathizers begging him to come out and fight. One of them was the Congress party pres ident, S. Nijalingappa. On Nov. 12, 1969, he expelled Mrs. Gandhi from the Congress. The split crystallized. Con gress (O) and Congress (R) were established. Congress (0), with only 65 seats in the Lok Sabha, allied itself with the rightist parties in the Opposition, such as the fer vidly Hindu Jan Sangh, and the rich man's party, Swatan tra. Congress (R), which had 228 seats, allied itself with leftist parties, including the orthodox—i.e., Russian‐orient ed—Communist party of India and with this help Mrs. Gandhi retained a precarious hold on power.
Criticism now volleyed and thundered around her. She was attacked as a dictator, riding roughshod over all dem ocratic process; as a megalo maniac, interested only in re maining Prime Minister; as a woman, changeable and un predictable (the normal Indian view of women is some dec ades out of date); as a Com munist, selling out her country to Russia. Mrs. Gandhi, how ever, did not wait for the fire to burn itself to cold ash. In stead, with what seemed al most deliberate relish, she pro ceeded to kindle another.
India for hundreds of years was divided into small states, each with its own ruler. The British, when they came, were anxious to enlist princely sup port, and they allowed the rulers to retain much of their power, though under careful and discreet control. When India became independent, the first necessity for unity was that the princes should sur render their territory, and most of their privileges, such as the power to collect taxes from their people. Not unnat urally, many were unwilling to do so: Eventually, however, after a mixture of sweet per suasion, subtle pressure and outright bullying, the princes caved in. They signed away their lands and some of their privileges, and the Govern ment left them a few polite sops: They didn't have to pay customs duty on their imports; they didn't have to have driv ing licenses (many other drivers, not to mention pedes trians, afterwards regretted this); they couldn't be taken to court, and they were still entitled to a salute of cannon (the most important princes were 64‐gun men) on public occasions. Most vital of all, they were entitled to a yearly privy purse, to be paid to each prince, and, on a de clining scale, to his heirs in perpetuity, by the Govern ment. The agreement signed by the princes was made part of the Indian Constitution.
There are 278 of these princes, though their pay scale varies considerably. The amounts of the privy purses were assessed on the basis of each individual ruler's income before 1947. Some of these incomes rather belied the Western image of a ma haraja as a bediamonded Belshazzar. The Talukdar of Katodia, for example, was entitled to no more than $25 a year. The Maharaja of Mysore, however, drew a yearly $350,000, tax‐free. It all added up, and constituted a yearly drain of some $6‐ million on the resources of the country — more, since the royal families of India seem prone to internal squab bles, so that further allow ances had to be paid to dis inherited sons and mothers without maintenance.
Quite apart from the fi nancial aspect, Mrs. Gandhi may have been irked by the fact that a number of the leading princes had started to become involved in poli tics. The average Indian prince is no shining example of intellect, and the political ly interested rulers had main ly embroiled themselves with the more reactionary parties. The Maharani of Jaipur sup ported Swatantra. The young Maharaia of Gualior and his mother were backing the Jan Sangh. In any case, one of the 10 points in the 1967 A. I. C. C. program had been the abolition of the privy purses, and early last Septem ber Mrs. Gandhi introduced a bill abolishing all princely privileges. The Lok Sabha passed it, 339 to 154. It now had to be confirmed by the upper house, the Rajya Sabha. There, 224 members voted, 149 for the bill, 75 against. But, for Mrs. Gandhi, it was a defeat. For a bill to be passed by the Rajya Sabha, two‐thirds of the members present have to vote for it. Two thirds of 224, unfortu nately for Mrs. Gandhi, is 149 1/3. The bill was de feated, therefore, by one‐third of a vote.
The Cabinet held a special conference deep into the night, and next day the obliging President Giri issued an ordinance stripping the princes of their privileges and their titles. Another uproar followed. The Prime Minister's opponents redoubled their verbal volleys. The Congress (0) compared her to Stalin, Hitler and others of the less desirable characters of his tory. Some of the princes threatened to support, with their remaining (and in some cases considerable) influence and assets, an alliance of rightist parties, including Congress (O). Before that, however, they intended to take their case to the Supreme Court of India, though one prince mournfully remarked to me, “With Indira in control of everything, we expect a biased decision.” Meanwhile the Naxalites ran riot in Cal cutta, and the government of Uttar Pradesh, a Congress (R) stronghold, was rocked by internal crisis. Mrs. Gandhi sat out the storm in Delhi, small, cool and apparently unworried.
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MRS. TARKESHWARI SINHA is a leading Congress (O) M. P. whose na tural volubility nowadays largely concentrates itself on attacking the Prime Minister, both in and out of Parliament. She is known as the glamour girl of the Lok Sabha, though, considering the appearance of most Indian M.P.'s, this is not a very difficult distinction to achieve. However, she is a handsome woman. She has short, curly hair, framing a rather heavily pixyish face, and is what Indians coyly call, with reference to women, “well built.” When we met her, she was lying in bed in her Delhi house. She wore a maroon blouse called a kurta and a white petticoat, and looked none too well. “You must excuse me,” she said. “But I am suffering from den gue fever. It is going all round Delhi these days, you know. I don't know how I picked it up, but it is highly infectious.”
After I had moved my chair a little further from the bed, I asked her how long she had known Mrs. Gandhi. “I have known her personally since ‘52,” she replied, “when I first came to Parliament. She was an introvert, shy, and she did not play any significant politi cal role. She never gave me the impression that she was the type to develop political ambitions. She seemed modest and satisfied to do social work. But,” added Mrs. Sinha grimly, “even then she was never a very open person. And she was full of deter mination. Nobody could thwart her wishes, not even her father.
“Panditji didn't want her to marry Feroze Gandhi, but she insisted. When she be came official hostess it was very embarrassing for Feroze, to be a kind of guest‐in‐resi dence of the Prime Minister. But she insisted that they should stay there, and she had her way. Her marriage broke up. You know,” said Mrs. Sinha rather petulantly, “in 1968 Feroze developed a liking for some of us. But in India for any woman to talk to any man leads to all sorts of gos sip. People tell me that once Indira saw Feroze talking to me, and she developed her feeling against me then. But we used to worship the whole family. There was a lot of af fection for her, because she was Panditji's only child, and a lot of compassion.”
Mrs. Sinha, however, had her criticisms to make of Nehru, too. “Of course,” she said, twining her arms around her pillow and turning over on her tummy, in a pose suit able to a Hollywood Cleopat ra, “her father was very anxious for her to be politi cally active. He was very proud of his family, his stock. He thought his family was superior to others, a superior species of mankind. At his dinner table, if a guest talked a little below his standard even in describing a fruit, a flower, a tree — he would suddenly flare up. If a guest showed knowledge superior to his, he would flare up.” She paused for breath, but not for long.
“He used to say, when In dira was Congress president, that he respected her as his daughter, his colleague, and the party leader. He said that he did not know what Indira had inherited from him, but that she had the best of her mother in her. It was he him self who organized the Con gress presidency for her. Once she became Congress president, she developed an ambition to become Prime Minister.”
Mrs. Sinha didn't approve at all of Indira as a Prime Minister. “After the fight for the leadership in 1966, we thought, after she won, that she would try to carry every one with her and wipe out party differences. But she started off as a leader of a group within the party, play ing different people off against each other.
“She doesn't consult her colleagues. She wanted to split the Congress. The Young Turks helped her by creating a situation where she could do it easily. The advisers she listens to are all Communists. Temperamentally she's an in triguer. She wants to be as great, as powerful as her father. But Panditji had honesty, loyalty; he was not vindictive. She is not magnan imous like him; she has no scruples. She is not able to inspire trust. People are afraid of her, but they don't respect her. It's nothing to do with her being a woman. She is very masculine in some ways — bold [this is a very deni gratory word in Mrs. Sinha's vocabulary; she applies the adjective in the sense of the phrase “bold hussy”] and ruthless. She is very much on the move toward being anoth er Nkrumah. She is like Hit ler, with a radical program supported by capitalists. But she is not great enough to have as much impact on the world as Hitler.” I thought the last sentence was rather complimentary to Mrs. Gan dhi, though Mrs. Sinha didn't entend it to be.
“There is no basic honesty,” continued Mrs. Sinha, “in her dealings with people. She uses one man to demolish another, then demolishes him. She has taken over all the intelligence bureaus. In this way she is in a position of power: She has dossiers on many people; she can bully them, bribe them, blackmail them. Nothing moves in this country without her knowl edge. The others in the Cabi net are simply a pack of cards for her to shuffle as she pleases. Nothing seems to be done in the interests of the people, only in the interests of the Prime Minister.”
The image of Mrs. Gandhi as a kind of malevolent lady vampire did not convince me. It was too intense and its colors were too bold, though not in Mrs. Sinha's sense of the word. What interested me, however, was that for the past two hours Mrs. Sinha had been operiting as a kind of political mout. One had little sense of her as a per son. Mr. Sinha was not in evidence in the household, and apparently he very sel dom is, preferring to dwell among the untrodden ways of his native state of Bihar. But Mrs. Sinha has four chil dren, and I asked her about them.
“The eldest is 15,” she said, “and the youngest 5. Two of them are in boarding school, because they have no company in this house. I am so seldom here. . . . Every career woman has the same problem. But I often have a feeling of being lost. Perhaps I would have made a more fruitful contribution if I had dedicated myself to my fami ly, but I am 44 and there Is no way out for me now. I must continue. This feeling that I have, this lost feeling, I make it go away.”
The problems of all career women, as Mrs. Sinha said, are basically the same. I thought it not unlikely that Mrs. Gandhi sometimes has a lost feeling too.
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MRS. NANDINI SAT PATHY is by designa tion Minister of State and Deputy Minister attached to the Prime Minister. “I rep resent her in different places.” she explained rather vaguely. She is a precise little person, with none of Mrs. Sinha's siren quality, but with a neat feminine look and a beautiful heart‐shaped face that dim ples whenever she smiles, which is frequently. She was born in the state of Orissa in 1932. She is, incidentally, one of those Mrs. Sinha named as Mrs. Gandhi's Communist ad visers.
“My father's younger brpth er was the secretary of the Orissa Communist party dur ing the freedom movement. was an adolescent, spirited, very much a Gandhi‐ite. I used to argue with him. Then he was imprisoned for quite some time, and died in prison when he was 32. We were told he was poisoned by the British. I believed it. I don't know if he was poisoned, but I know he was ill and didn't receive any treatment. It was a great shock to me. Out of revolt, I became associated with the Communist party.
“I left the party in 1950. I didn't leave it for another party — simply because, by then, I didn't agree with their views. The Communists were quite angry with me. I ap peared for my degree, then had my children. In 1958, joined the Congress as an or dinary worker, no money, no position, nothing.”
She had first met Mrs. Gandhi that year. “Even when I didn't see her, I always had a sort of admiration for her. I don't think it was for any thing in particular, but I felt she was the sort of person who could achieve something, even at that time. There's been a tremendous change in her since then, of course. In the personality itself: She's become more decisive and courageous, clearer in her ideas. She's clear about her plans, and also she has be come quite bold.” This trouble some word appeared to be employed by Mrs. Satpathy in a literal sense. “She's sim ply wonderful to work with,” she added, dimpling. “She loses her temper quickly, like her father, but she has tremendous consideration for her colleagues.”
I asked about the rumors that Mrs. Gandhi ignored and despised her Ministers. “But,” said Mrs. Satpathy rather ex asperatedly, “she's not like that at all! She consults all her senior colleagues, all of them. But she got the oppor tunity to be in touch with the people much more than Nehru. She was in the background all the time, so she used to know them, in and out, in de tail. She knew the people more than Panditji, even.” Mrs. Satpathy's hands, deli cate as leaves, were folded composedly on her massive desk. Suddenly the fingers of one hand tapped out an im patient little tattoo, and she spoke of Mrs. Sinha.
“She was angry because Mrs. Gandhi didn't take her into the Cabinet. That was very petty, but it started the trouble. She was attached to Morarji Desai, who held strong economic and political views. Nehru disagreed with them; so does Mrs. Gandhi. Mrs. Sinha sees Communists everywhere. She's very frus trated, and because she's frustrated she follows Morarji and beats his drum. After the split, the Communists were forced to support us for their own survival, and when they offered support, we were in no position to refuse.”
* * *
MORARJI DESAI sat in a small study off the entrance hall of his Dupleix Road house. He is a tallish man, and dresses always in the handwoven white clothes which are the traditional uni form of Congress leaders. He has a Roman head, closely shaved, with arrogant, Cal vinistic eyes, a powerfully ridged nose and thin lips. There is a monkish quality about his face, but not that of an ordinary monk: the ab bot, rather, of some Trappist monastery. He sat utterly im mobile, staring at us. On a small table at his elbow stood a loom, on which he presuma bly spins the material for his clothes. “One must be truth ful,” he said, “and what have to say about Mrs. Gand hi would not be complimen tary. Therefore I would not like to say it. Why should publicize my views in a for eign newspaper? I am con troversial enough in this country as it is.”
I asked him how long he had known the Prime Minis ter. “Of course,” he said, “I have known her for many, many years, but,” he reiter ated, “if I say anything about her it will not be complimen tary, for I must be truthful. This is my principle in life, always to speak the truth.” I was not here, I assured him, to collect compliments for Mrs. Gandhi. I would like to know exactly how he felt about her. His thin lips twitched in what I took to be a smile, but he remained silent. I decided to try some thing else.
At the mention of the Con gress split, his immobile body shifted a little in the chair. “There is only one Congress,” he said dryly. “These people have no right to use the name of the party. They have been expelled from the true Con gress. Let these people call themselves the Ruling party or [with a very dyspeptic smile indeed] the Prime Minis ter's party.” He relapsed into silence, whereupon I, asked him if he thought the often‐ made allegation that Nehru wanted his daughter to be the Prime Minister was true.
“Of course he had this in mind,” Desai said. “That is why he refused to take me as Deputy Prime Minister.”
At this point, for some reason that still remains ob scure to me, he broke off to ask us not to take notes. Then he continued. “I have never,” he said, “had any political or other ambitions. All that has mattered to me is to live a truthful life. When I left col lege I had no ambitions. But my professor filled in an ap plication form for a post In the Bombay government, and made me sign it. I served the British for 12 years. But felt, during the last two years of my service, like a traitor to my country. So I resigned and joined the Congress. I have served my country ever since.”
To my very great surprise, he then remarked, out of the blue: “Mrs. Gandhi is not truthful. She is after power for herself. She is deceitful and ruthless.”
His secretary came in to remind him of another ap pointment. He rose and folded his hands in the Indian fare well. “I believe in truth,” he said. “I would like to expound my philosophy to you when have more time to spare. I would like to spend an hour or more talking to you on this topic.”
* * *
yB. CHAVAN is the Minister of Finance, one of the inner council of Congress (R). He is a ccrpu lent man, dressed in spotless white, and his heavy face is masked with the expression less smile of the professional politician. He sat, awaiting questions, in a palatial draw ing room, with Persian car pets and furniture upholstered in yellow satin.
We talked about the Con gress split, and whether Mrs. Gandhi had caused it. “I wouldn't think so,” he said. “It was a sad and sorry busi ness, but it was inevitable. Circumstances were leading that way. She was very close to events, and she was not prepared to compromise on srecific issues. The moment of split came when the resolu tion to expel her was passed. But it was very difficult to think of splitting a party which was a century old. She told me to try to patch things up. She even helped me draft a unity resolution. That's positive proof that she did not cause the split.”
But now that Congress (0) was in opposition, I asked, wouldn't the right‐wing bloc of parties be considerably more powerful? Chavan pushed his lower lip out a little, like Nero Wolfe, and ceased to smile. “The reac tionaries will put up a fight,” he said. “It could be very serious. But they are ulti mately bound to lose. The elections will be a very complex battle.” He returned to the split. “The main cause was that most of us were anxious to implement the economic program, and oth ers were not. But bank na tionalization has been a step forward. A new opening has been made for credit facilities to small farmers and small industrialists.”
But, I said, it wasn't only the economic policies that had raised the storm, was it? There was also the matter of the Presidential candidate. Chavan, who had resumed his smile, let it slip heavily to the floor. “As to that,” he said, “I myself campaigned for Mr. Reddy. But,” he added glumly, “I would rather not discuss the matter.”
* * *
MRS. GANDHI's office is in a squat build ing in the south block of the Secretariat, not far from Par liament. We climbed a spiral flight of red‐carpeted stairs to meet the official who had ar ranged the interview. He warned me that the Prime Minister didn't want to be asked questions on current af fairs, and led us down a corri dor, through guarded mahog any doors, into a silent antechamber. Another mahog any door, leading to the Prime Minister's study, loomed at my elbow, waiting to be opened.
It wasn't opened, at least not at once. So I had leisure to collect my thoughts. My first interview with Mrs. Gandhi had been in 1968, be fore any of the present trouble had really started. She had struck me then as controlled, composed, dedicated and lonely. She had said that if she hadn't been a politician she would have wanted to be a writer. The curious point about this was that, 10 years before, Nehru had told me the same thing, in nearly the same words. But when I asked her how much influence her father had had upon her, she had become slightly irritable. “People are always asking me that,” she said. “Politically, he had no influence upon me whatever.”
She had been much more easy to talk to than Nehru ever was. He was given to a slow and rambling style of conversation, at least when ever I met him, punctuated by long silences during which he seemed withdrawn into a dream, his eyes hooded and opaque. Mrs. Gandhi had the same beautiful eyes, and the same classic face with the same slightly petulant and tired look, but she listened carefully to whatever one said—no doubt, the result of years of practice with her father—and she answered well, keeping to her point, which was always a practical one. She resembled her father also in that one instinctively felt that there was a likable and sympathetic person be hind the mask of the Prime Minister.
In time, the door to her study opened. A man came out. We went in. It was a huge study, carpeted in red, the high windows sealed off with long red curtains. Mrs. Gandhi sat at an immense curved desk of pale and polished wood, writing. On the paneled wall facing her was a large portrait of Nehru. Everything in the room was large—and dead: the staid heavy sofas, the chairs, the pictures. But she was small, and, her delicate hand busy, the hooded eyes behind the spectacles following her pen, intensely alive.
She put down her pen, looked up, took her spectacles off, and smiled very prettily. I thanked her for agreeing to see me when she was so busy. “Oh, well,” she said, with an other smile and a quick look at her press officer, who was seated near her, preparing to take notes of the interview, “if it weren't you it would be someone else.”
I asked about the internal disturbances in India, partic ularly about the guerrilla activities of the Naxalites in Calcutta and other cities. “It's a law‐and‐order question,” she said, “and as yet it is con fined to definite areas, like West Bengal and Andhra. The whole thing started as a land movement, and it will exist in the rural areas of those states as long as the land reforms there aren't completed. But in Calcutta itself, the Naxalites are young intellectuals who are involved because of the problems peculiar to large cities. As long as there is un employment for graduates and other young people, there'll be this trouble.”
She paused, looking at me thoughtfully. She has an ex pressive face, but it is diffi cult to tell, as some of her opponents have discovered to their cost, what she is think ing or feeling at any specific time. Now she referred to the violent methods employed by the Naxalites. “It's what hap pens when people don't know what they want. But it's not exclusive to young people in India. It exists all over the world. The Naxalites want to destroy first of all, but they don't know what to build afterwards. I'm not against destroying existing systems, but only if you know what you are going to put in their place.”
Her eyes strayed to the pic ture of Nehru on the wall be hind me. I noticed that she often looked at it, in an abstracted, expressionless way. I reminded her that she had once told me her father had not influenced her politically. Had she changed her views about this? She said, enig matically, “One is always in fluenced by one's parents.” Then she turned from the top ic to answer a question as to whether she encountered much opposition because she was a woman. “It's an excuse which appeals to the reac tionary forces. It's like the people who attacked Kennedy because he was a Catholic..”
She went on: “We have to move faster; we can't afford not to, and certain people oppose this. But if we don't move faster, people aren't pre pared to wait for us. They'll try to take the solution into their own hands, resolve mat ters in their own way. The people of this country today are more and more conscious of what they need and want. You'd be surprised at the number of people—women in cluded—who vote now, and who never did before.
“Even my father met a lot of hostile criticism at the end of his life. The criticism he faced was often because he insisted on a rational, scien tific approach. This is difficult to achieve. For example, we know nowadays what causes a solar eclipse. But Hindus still have a ritual bath when it happens, even if they know why it happens. What we need now is the opposite of that—a truly rational ap proach.”
Her conversation moved outward from India. “We've made no official move to re sume friendly relations with China. But, of course, friend ship between countries, especially countries which are neighbors, is very important. My father always believed in that. Nothing is achieved by hate. Of course, it can't be friendship at all costs; it has to be in accordance with na tional self‐respect and dignity. But I think the Chinese realize that they have only made enemies so far by their tough stance.
“The Russians would like to see that there is no hostility between us and China. We are on good terms with the Rus sians. We have an excellent understanding with them. As for Pakistan, there are various problems which connect us. For instance, the Pakistanis have a water drainage prob lem and we have a water shortage problem. We could help each other; it would be to the advantage of us both if we were friends. We keep making overtures to them.” The press officer's pencil scratched, as she paused, on his pad, but no sound from the world outside entered the huge room.
“Do we want to stay in the Commonwealth?” Mrs. Gandhi murmured into the silence. “Why not? It isn't very im portant now, except that it acts as a forum. But a forum is always a good thing to have. As for the Third World, there isn't one. There's only one world. The Third World is only a tag for the countries which refuse to side with any of the big powers, and stick to being nonaligned. Those countries must help one an other. We've recently renewed a tripartite agreement among Yugoslavia, the U.A.R. and ourselves. We have to help one another in trade, and ex changes of all kinds. It's not only Africa and Western Asia that're involved. The countries of what people call the Third World range as far east as the Philippines.”
She darted a quick, birdlike look at the time. I decided to ask my last question, on what she thought lay ahead for India. “There's so much to be done,” she said tiredly. “We have to have a phased eco nomic program that will de centralize the monopolies. The monopolies did help start up industries in the country, but now we need to give a chance to small industrialists. We have to pursue an agricultural revolution and raise the liv ing standard of the people. It's a tremendous challenge. Many old standards simply don't apply any more, and we have to realize this. In the Bhagavad‐Gita, it was said that the larger the family the better. Now it's exactly the opposite. The family planning program has become abso lutely vital to us. Its success depends on the imagination of the officers who carry it out. But it has to be successful. The reactionary forces say we're opposed to religion, but we are not. We stand for the rational approach, the ap proach father stood for.”
She stopped, nodded at the press officer, and smiled at us. The interview was over. As we rose, she made the namaskar, her graying, hand some head bent over folded hands. Then she picked up her spectacles and adjusted them on her patrician nose. With delicate, almost noiseless, very feminine sigh, she turned back to the stacked files on her desk.
* * *
EVER since the Congress split, the Opposition had clamored for a midterm election. This Mrs. Gandhi had always steadfastly refused. The Opposition, accordingly, became accustomed to the idea that no election would take place until the scheduled one in 1972, and had made its preparations accordingly. Then, last Dec. 15, the Su preme Court, which for days had been wrapped in conclave over the privy purses, decreed that the Government abolition order was null and void, and restored all privileges to the princes. Mrs. Gandhi made no move until Dec. 27. Then, in a characteristically unex pected way, she called on President Giri to dissolve Parliament, and announced that there would be a midterm election in March, 1971. The Opposition, caught with its pants down, emitted a yell of protest, then commenced hasty preparations for the campaign ahead.
“Nehru was praised for selflessness; his daughter is criticized for selfishness. Perhaps it's because she's a woman.”
It is generally agreed, even by her enemies, that Mrs. Gandhi assesses the mood of the Indian public better than any other politician. She would probably have tried to evade the midterm election had she thought herself in serious danger of defeat. She sprang her surprise at the right moment, and it seems likely that she has another ace up her sleeve that will be produced before March. She evokes very positive reac tions: She is either hated or adored, and this applies not only to those who deal directly with her, but to the immense and vocal mass of the Indian population. What ever they feel about her, they are not indifferent. I would think that “Indira” (prefixed with an adjective which may be complimentary or not) is one of the most frequently employed words in conversa tion in India.
If Mrs. Gandhi were to lose, I personally would think it a tragedy. Nandini Satpathy, when I asked her if she thought the Prime Minister an effective leader, replied, “She herself looks at it like this: There was the period, before independence, when we needed a Gandhi. With independence, Nehru became the leader. He was necessary to the nation: He started to build it up from zero. Then he died. Mrs. Gandhi, in turn, feels that the world is changing fast. We can't afford a leader who doesn't keep pace with all this. Once, she told me a sort of parable. Suppose your parents send you on a trip. They know there's a forest ahead of you, and they teach you how to cross it. You come to the middle of the forest, and there is a river across the way. Your parents foresaw the forest, but they never foresaw the river. Unless, of your own accord, you learn how to swim then and there, you will have either to turn back or die.”
I would say that there is no adequate replacement for Mrs. Gandhi as Prime Minister of the largest free nation in the world. She is the only politician in India with a thoroughly modern mind. Democracy in the Western sense does not really work in India, and this is provable from the past: It is too large a land, with too many corrupt people in positions of power, and too many illiterate and uninformed people controlled by them. The ruthlessness, the autocracy, for which Mrs. Gandhi has been criticized seem to me, in the context of the country, essential to its Prime Minister. Without this ruthlessness, this autocratic touch, nothing would ever be done about anything in India.
Nehru, after all, was slightly autocratic, too. Like his daughter, he preferred to hold the reins of power in his hand. Like his daughter, he controlled numerous minis tries. He did so not becauge he was unwilling to delegate authority, but because he felt that he was best fitted to do so. Because of this he was praised for his selflessness; his daughter, who does the same, is criticized for her selfishness. Perhaps it's be cause she's a woman.
Next month, 278 million people will be eligible to vote, an increase of 28 million from the number in 1967. One per son in every seven of the world's population today is an Indian. The variety of languages, religions, and races in the country today is cal culated to turn any dream of unity into a nightmare. But there is a peculiar kind of re lationship among the 550 mil lion people who inhabit the subcontinent, a tenuous kind of relationship, yet one that has lasted for centuries. It is the kind of relationship that exists among isolated strands of wool, which could be woven into a carpet with a pattern, perhaps by small, delicate, feminine hands. ■