Remembering Indira Gandhi, a feminist before her time

Indira Gandhi took over as Prime Minister in 1966, when the Indian democracy was less than 20 years old. (Illustration by Suneesh K.)

Through the decades of the 1970s and '80s, a trio of strong women lay down the marker for female power. Across three geographies, Golda Meir in Israel, Margaret Thatcher in the UK and Indira Gandhi in India, demolished the notion that women were too weak or too reluctant to handle the mantle of leadership. As democratically elected leaders of their countries, they ruled with an iron fist and a ruthlessness that would have put many a man to shame.

In such an illustrious list, the one name that stands out is that of Indira Priyadarshini Nehru Gandhi, who was born 106 years ago today and that’s because of the built-in hurdles she had to overcome to become leader of the world’s second most populated nation.

That’s not to take away from the achievements of the other two strong women. But Thatcher became PM of a country that was the world's oldest democracy which had elected its leaders since the first general elections in 1708 even if it couldn’t give that same right to its women till 1918. Meir, who led a country that was struggling to define its complex identity and tense nationhood in the face of redefined new boundaries, did come into power in a modern state. As a recent biopic on her, Golda, shows, while she navigated her struggles to negotiate with a cynical cabinet and a difficult Henry Kissinger in the US during the 19 days of the 1973 Yom Kippur war, she did not shy away from high stake decisions in this most pivotal moment of history.

The aristocratic Indira Gandhi, by contrast, took over as PM in 1966 of a country where democracy was less than 20 years old and which, for the large part, was poor and hugely patriarchal. Sure, her father had been a much-loved PM, and that conferred some advantages on her. But when Nehru passed away in 1964, she was hardly in the fray for leadership of her party, then as now ruled by a group of men. Like the rest of Indian society, the Congress reflected in full measure its male bias.

Charismatic, divisive, and iconic in her ability to take hard decisions, the only female premier of the Indian polity, she was once described as the only man in her cabinet for her soft but strong voice that carried firm into the world stage. She yielded her pride in India to none of the potentates of the developed world. Ironical because when the aging Congress leaders chose her as the toy prime minister thinking she could be manipulated to their desire, they gave her the moniker of goongi gudiya or the dumb doll who would acquiesce to their command. But she outwitted them all.

As a nationalist non-aligned leader in a Cold War-era who stood up to the US in a tough stance, Indira Gandhi commanded respect even as she bowed to a centralized command economy in India. The velvet fist strategy showed in her determination to snub Pakistan’s willfulness by taking on Bangladesh's war for freedom despite US determination to hinder by supplying arms to Pakistan and parking its fleet in Indian waters. She agreed to take on 10 million Bangladeshi refugees at a time when garibi hatao was the biggest slogan of her election campaigns, mired as the nation was in poverty and unemployment. Yet she was fashionably Fabian socialist a la Nehru and her economic policies slowly dragged the country’s GDP down under the weight of left of centre idealism. In fact, post her 1980 return, she realized that Keynesian welfare state policies were forcing her to apply to the IMF for a loan and she decided she would ride out the new Reagan-Thatcher doctrines of capitalism.

By grabbing power and then proceeding to secure her position, Mrs Gandhi (as she was often called) laid the way for women in India in a way that is difficult to imagine today when women still need the support of male MPs to reserve a place for them in Parliament. While there have been strong state-level women political leaders like Mamata Banerjee in Bengal and the late J. Jayalalithaa in Tamil Nadu, the fact that since Indira Gandhi’s death 39 years ago, no woman leader has even had a sniff at prime ministership shows how much she achieved.

Sadly, she went on to sully her reputation with the single most egregious act in free India’s political history, the Emergency, that even her good friend Margaret Thatcher condemned. But like Golda Meir she will be remembered as a believer in realpolitik without much care for the prevailing nous.