She had worked closely with her father during his premiership, but there is no sign that Nehru ever intended her to inherit his position: the idea of a ruling dynasty would have sat awkwardly with his democratic, anti-feudal sentiments. And he may not have considered Indira a plausible candidate: certainly she possessed very different attributes from her conspicuously — perhaps even squeamishly — cerebral father. She failed to complete, for instance, her degree at Oxford. The political speeches she gave were pragmatic and slogan-filled, and displayed none of her father’s preoccupation with big ideas. And indeed her long period of influence — which lasted until her assassination in 1984 — turned Indian politics into so naked and brutal a struggle for power that post-Independence utopianism was entirely driven out. For most observers it has been difficult to believe, since her time, in any reason for political action that does not arise from the simple lust for power and money. Of any set of possible explanations for an event, in fact, the most craven will attract the widest belief.
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The newly appointed Indira Gandhi responded to India’s currency crisis by falling in line with World Bank and International Monetary Fund demands for the devaluation of the rupee. Hitherto pegged at 4.76 to the dollar, the rupee was, in March 1966, devalued by nearly 60 per cent to 7.5 to the dollar.
Such deference to capitalist imperialism was an offence to many, particularly those on the far left. It seemed to align the prime minister with the voice of free markets and free enterprise. This voice was increasingly articulate at that time: an emerging party, the Swatantra Party, had been set up to promote a free-market reaction to Nehruvian controls in 1959, while the Congress Party itself was moving further in this direction under the influence of the Syndicate, which was close — notoriously so — to big business.
It became clear in the 1967 elections that the free-market impulse carried little appeal with voters. The young and poor, who were particularly disenchanted with the ruling party, turned to the left (the communist and socialist parties) and towards parties of regional preferment (such as the Akali Dal in Punjab). Congress suffered terrible defeats.
After these elections, her prime ministership intact but fragile, Indira Gandhi suddenly took a startling and radical turn leftwards. She determined to crush the right-wing, business-oriented wing of the party — which included not only the Syndicate but also her rival for party leadership, Morarji Desai — and to make a new populist appeal to the electorate. Having built up her own power base, she fired Desai from his post as finance minister, nationalised the banks, banned contributions to political parties — a direct assault on the Syndicate, which drew income from corporate donations — and introduced even greater restrictions on big business and foreign capital.
In speech after speech, Indira Gandhi vowed to root out the insidious few who exploited the hapless many. Her rhetoric was populist, and though it was, in the light of her actions, only that — rhetoric — it was dazzlingly effective. She developed an extraordinary gift for communicating with crowds, and she channelled that peculiar power that is disdained only by those who have never seen a demagogue in action. She revolutionised the structure of Indian political relations by cutting out the business owners, trade union leaders and feudal landowners who had previously interfaced between politicians and the masses: in her campaign for the 1971 elections, under the banner of “Garibi Hatao!” (“Put an end to poverty!”) she spoke to those masses directly. Her image acquired the aura of something primordial and awe-inspiring, and her victory in the 1971 elections was overwhelming.
She followed this up with a well-judged, and wildly popular, military intervention in the war between the two wings of Pakistan, East and West. This had begun as a secessionist campaign by the eastern wing, or ‘Bangladesh’, which had resulted in terrible retribution by forces from West Pakistan — an episode of terrifying genocide and hundreds of thousands of rapes that displayed again what wild energies circulated between these cut-off siblings of South Asia. After months of military escalation on both sides of the India — Pakistan borders, Pakistan bombed north India and a war began on both northern and eastern fronts.
Great international interests were at stake. The USSR provided support to India while the US, afraid that an Indian victory might spread Soviet influence further across the region, supported Pakistan. But the war was over in a few days. It was a decisive and powerfully symbolic victory for India, which took from Pakistan some 90,000 prisoners of war.
Indira Gandhi rode high, and her style became cultish. Her image was everywhere, and, like the goddess she appeared to be, she brought forth twin eruptions of creation and destruction which gave great symbolic charge to the imagination of India in those years. One was the Green Revolution, which had begun under her predecessor but which began to have a real impact on food production levels only in the early 1970s. Based on new fertilisers and high-yield crops, the Green Revolution transformed the wheat production, and indeed the entire economy, of the Delhi hinterland of Punjab and Haryana. The other achievement was a successful nuclear test explosion in 1974, which brought to its culmination the line of research initiated by Nehru back in the 1940s, and established India as the only nation to possess this technology outside of the original five nuclear nations — though it would not be until the 1990s that a nuclear missile became a military reality.
They were uncanny days, when giant symbols floated gaily above a sclerotic reality. When people speak dismissively today of the state controls and strangled energies of ‘Nehruvian’ India, it is often not the Nehru period but that of his daughter that they remember. Under Indira Gandhi, business was in a stranglehold, and corruption, already rife after twenty years of one-party rule, became an epidemic. With ‘official’ corruption now banned — that is to say, corporate donations to political parties, which was the normal mode for business to buy influence under Nehru — businesses resorted to buying off individuals, thus giving rise to the era of ‘briefcase politics’. Politics became a business; bureaucracy provided the structure for a particularly intense and original kind of entrepreneurialism.
Ironically but predictably, it was at this moment when Delhi was most ideologically opposed to big business that big business began to gravitate towards Delhi, thus preparing the way for the capital’s emergence as a commercial hub in the early twenty-first century. Under Nehru, Delhi had been an administrative town, as it had been under the British: business was afforded little place, entrepreneurs remained small in scale and big companies stayed away. Under Mrs Gandhi, however, it became impossible for big business to avoid Delhi. Approvals were required for absolutely everything and — since Indira co-opted great slabs of authority from the states in order to weaken her rivals and concentrate all power in herself — those who were far from Delhi started to feel cut off. Several British-era business houses from Calcutta moved to Delhi at that time, fleeing the strikes and commercial lockdown of West Bengal, which the Congress had lost in 1967 to a coalition of socialists and communists. Many companies from other north Indian states moved to Delhi in order to make political connections and so reach the next stage of their growth. Several companies which have today acquired global proportions started up in Delhi during Indira Gandhi’s time. Even businessmen who remained in other centres began to keep houses and apartments in the capital (which contributed, later, to the incredible overvaluation of Delhi property). Delhi public life was infiltrated by a new fervour of networking and soliciting.