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  The marriage soon foundered, however. Nehru, a widower, wanted his daughter to live with him as his official hostess and political aide. Feroze, a fiercely independent Congress MP and anticorruption crusader, felt politically and personally stifled, and moved out of the prime minister’s residence. Indira chose her father over her husband, or, as she saw it, her duty to the nation over her loyalty to her marriage. She became Congress president for a year in 1959; Feroze suffered a heart attack at the wheel of his car and died young in 1960.

  Indira served in Shastri’s cabinet in the minor portfolio of Minister for Information and Broadcasting, but her principal political asset remained her pedigree. One member of the Syndicate that made her prime minister thought she would be a goongi gudiya, a “dumb doll,” the presentable face of boss rule. For a year this indeed seemed to be the case, as Indira, inarticulate and tentative, overly reliant on advisers of dubious competence, stumbled badly in office. The party paid the price in the elections of 1967, losing seats around the country, and seeing motley opposition governments come to power in several states. The veteran Congress politician Morarji Desai (1896-1995) even challenged Mrs. Gandhi’s right to continue as prime minister, and had to be accommodated as deputy prime minister. The dynasty’s days appeared to be numbered.

  At the brink of the abyss, Indira fought back. Many of the Syndicate had been defeated at the polls in the 1967 debacle; she now set about systematically reducing their influence in the party. Finding allies among socialists and ex-Communists, she engineered a split in the Congress in 1969 on “ideological” grounds (the two principal issues being the abolition of the subsidies paid to India’s erstwhile maharajahs, and the nationalization of banks, both of which the old guard opposed as unconstitutional). Having established a populist image and expelled the old bosses, she led her wing of the Congress to a resound ing victory in 1971, campaigning on the slogan Garibi Hatao: “Remove Poverty.” This was swiftly followed by the decisive defeat of Pakistan in the Bangladesh War that year. Her popularity soared; India’s leading modern painter, the Muslim M. F. Husain, depicted her as a Hindu Mother Goddess. The imagery was appropriate: indeed, at her peak, Indira Gandhi was both worshiped and maternalized.

  As Nehru’s daughter and political heir, Indira Gandhi had imbibed his vision whole. As a child she was the recipient of his memorable letters from British jails that spelled out Nehru’s convictions and taught her his view of world history. Perhaps unsurprisingly, she took great pride in the fact that she was born in the year of the Russian Revolution. “The birth and development of socialism in the Soviet Union has been a major factor in shaping the course of world history,” she told a Moscow audience in 1975. “To many of us in the developing countries engaged in the task of consolidating political and economic freedom, your experience and success have been a stimulus.” From her father she had learned to be skeptical of Western claims to stand for freedom and democracy when India’s historical experience of colonial oppression and exploitation appeared to bear out the opposite. Nehru’s conclusion was to see a moral equivalence between the two rival power blocs, a position that helped create nonalignment. Indira went further than her father: when I interviewed her in 1977 on the subject of her foreign policy, she argued that while the Soviets had helped liberation struggles from Angola to Bangladesh, the West was “not on the side of freedom. [They] were against the freedom struggle in all countries, so far as I know. . . . It’s only when they thought that Russian influence was coming, and that freedom would come anyway, that they jumped in.” These convictions fitted in with her domestic left-wing political strategy, her need for Soviet support on the subcontinent against a U.S.-backed Pakistan-China axis, and her dark suspicion, born more out of personal insecurity than of any hard evidence, that the CIA was out to destabilize her government as it had done Allende’s.

  Nonetheless, Indira Gandhi once memorably confessed to an American interviewer, “I don’t really have a political philosophy. I can’t say I believe in any ism. I wouldn’t say I’m interested in socialism as socialism. To me it’s just a tool.”

  But tools are used for well-defined purposes, and it was never clear that Indira Gandhi had any, beyond the political short term. The 1971 electoral and military triumphs — the first over a sclerotic and discredited political establishment at home, the second over a sclerotic and discredited martial-law establishment next door — saw the Nehru-Gandhi mystique at its pinnacle. But it was not to last. Mrs. Gandhi was skilled at the acquisition and maintenance of power, but hopeless at the wielding of it for larger purposes. She had no real vision or program beyond the expedient campaign slogans; “remove poverty” was a mantra without a method. Her genuine convictions, as one observer put it, were “somewhere to the left of self-interest.” Prices, unemployment, and corruption rose; her standing in the nation fell. Mounting protests, led by the saintly Gandhian Jayaprakash Narayan, brought down one Congress state government and threatened others. As anarchy loomed, a high court judge in Allahabad convicted the prime minister, on a technicality, of electoral malpractice in her crushing 1971 victory. Mrs. Gandhi, it seemed, would have to resign in disgrace.

  Instead, she struck back. Declaring a state of emergency, Indira Gandhi arrested opponents, censored the press, and postponed elections. As a compliant Supreme Court overturned her conviction, she proclaimed a “twenty-point program” for the uplift of the common man. (No one found it humorous enough to remark, as Clemenceau had done of Wilson’s Fourteen Points, that “even the good Lord only had Ten.”) Its provisions — which ranged from rural improvement schemes and the abolition of bonded labor to mass education and urban renewal — remained largely unimplemented. Meanwhile, her thuggish younger son, Sanjay (1946-1980), emphasizing two of the twenty points, ordered brutally insensitive campaigns of slum demolitions and forced sterilizations. The compact between the people and the dynasty was ruptured, even as a meretricious slogan spouted by a pliant Congress Party president proclaimed that “Indira is India and India is Indira.”

  * * *

  For many Indians of my generation, the Emergency was the seminal event of their political maturation. I went to the United States on a graduate fellowship soon after it was declared, and found myself traveling an even longer route to political awareness.

  At first, like most foreign students in the United States, I instinctively thought it my duty to explain and defend my country to my not-always-well-disposed hosts. Ironically, I had had a minor personal taste of the petty tyranny inaugurated by the Emergency; soon after it was imposed, the censors who had moved into newspaper offices spiked an innocuous short story of mine that had been accepted by a Calcutta youth magazine and was, as luck would have it, slated to appear the week after the Emergency was declared. It was a detective story with a trick ending, and it was called “The Political Murder”; but the very thought that anyone might be murdered for political reasons was anathema to the Emergency censors, who tended to make up in zeal what they lacked in judgment. A big red stamp was duly applied on the manuscript, banning its appearance.

  Soon afterward I left for the United States, where I had a scholarship to pursue graduate studies at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, the world’s oldest school of international affairs, administered by Tufts University in cooperation with Harvard. There I found myself being greeted, by liberals and conservatives alike, as if I had just arrived from Ceauşescu’s Romania or Pinochet’s Chile. A lot of their criticisms of the Emergency were excessively formalistic, or so it seemed to me at the time; they seemed much more concerned about what Mrs. Gandhi had done to the trappings of democracy — press, Parliament, judiciary— than about those whom democracy was meant to benefit, the common men and women of India. They assumed that as a newly banned writer breathing the air of American freedom, I would agree, but I found myself arguing (with the reflexive chauvinism that strikes most Indians when they first come abroad) that I was precisely the sort of Indian who was least entitled to object to the
Emergency: I belonged to the tiny minority that could write and publish and be banned, whereas the Emergency — however cynical Mrs. Gandhi’s reasons for imposing it — was working for the betterment of the vast, toiling multitudes for whom such rights meant little. Their bread was more important than my freedom.

  I nearly convinced myself with this argument for a while, but I soon came to realize how hollow it was. My roommate at Fletcher was a journalist, and he brought me daily the wire service copy about the latest atrocities — the slum demolitions, the bulldozings of homes and livelihoods, the compulsory sterilization schemes and the arbitrary quotas assigned to them, the arrests and beatings, the torture in jail of young student activists. Travelers from India brought me copies of underground newsletters, cyclostyled or badly printed on cheap paper, their ink smudged but their message clear, eloquent testimony both to the people’s despair and their defiance. (The very thought that India, famously overflowing with a free and irresponsible press, even produced “underground” literature shamed me utterly.) Most of the real victims of the Emergency were among the poorest classes of Indians — the ones who, I came to realize, most needed the protections of democracy. For all its chaos and confusion, our parliamentary system and its inefficient trappings were all that stood between them and the absolute power of the state — a state that could seize them in the bazaars or in the fields and cart them off to have their vas deferens cut off in a sterilization camp.

  Middle- and upper-class Indians, except for the handful who sought to resist, largely carried on as before; their newspapers may have been blander, and opinions usually expressed at the tops of their voices may have had to emerge in stage whispers, but little really changed in their daily lives. If anything, many saw improvements: the proverbial trains ran on time, prices held steady as hoarders and black marketeers lay low, there were fewer strikes, demonstrations, and other disturbances, and the habitual absenteeism in government offices fell so dramatically that the bureaucracy suffered a crippling shortage of chairs and desks to accommodate the number of personnel who unexpectedly reported for work. For most Indians of the middle and upper classes, the Emergency was by and large a Good Thing. For me, living and studying in America, the discovery that my country, which had so proudly described itself as the world’s largest democracy, was now descending into becoming the world’s second largest banana republic was more than I could bear. I read about the outspoken Indian student in Chicago whose passport the embassy refused to renew because of his anti-Emergency activities, and burned with shame that the regime I had been defending had sunk to this: I had associated my Indian passport with the right to express myself freely on any subject I chose to, and now it was a document denied to one who had exercised that basic right of every Indian.

  And so the Emergency became the defining experience of my political consciousness. By starting out defending it and then coming to realize why it was indefensible, I learned one more thing about what it was that I cherished about the country I had grown up in, and why I would never be able to accept that “Indira is India and India is Indira.”

  * * *

  Sadly, Nehru’s daughter betrayed her father’s legacy. But his instincts reasserted themselves in her first big error of judgment. Blinded by the mirrors of her sycophants, deafened by the silence of the intimidated press, Mrs. Gandhi called an election in March 1977, expecting vindication in electoral victory. Instead she was routed, losing her own seat and the reins of office to an opposition coalition, the Janata (People’s) Front, under her old nemesis Morarji Desai.

  But the fractious Janata government could not hold together. By their mistakes, ineptitude, and greed (cynically, if artfully, exploited by Mrs. Gandhi and Sanjay), they opened the way for her improbable comeback. In January 1980, Mrs. Gandhi, having split the Congress once more and unembarrassedly renamed her faction after herself (as Congress-Indira, or “Congress-I”), was prime minister of India again.

  The rest of the story is more familiar, and all tragic. Sanjay, recklessly flying a stunt plane in defiance of local regulations (and shortly after engineering the dismissal of the upright director general of civil aviation, retired air marshal Zahir, who had tried to curb his illegal joyrides), killed himself within months of returning to power. One editor wrote trenchantly that had he lived, Sanjay would have done to the country what he did to the plane. Mrs. Gandhi, having systematically alienated, excluded, or expelled any leader of standing in her own party who might have been a viable deputy (and thus a potential rival) to her, drafted the only person she could entirely trust — her self-effacing, nonpolitical, and deeply reluctant elder son Rajiv (1944-1991) — to fill the breach.

  Rajiv had barely begun to grow into the role when Mrs. Gandhi was assassinated by the forces of Sikh extremism, forces she had herself primed, along with Sanjay, for narrow partisan purposes. In 1977 the Congress Party had been ousted in Punjab by the Sikh Akali Dal Party, an ally of Janata; Mrs. Gandhi typically decided to undermine them from the quarter they least expected, by opponents even more Sikh than the Akalis. So she encouraged (and reportedly even initially financed) the extremist fanaticism of a Sikh fundamentalist preacher, Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale. Bhindranwale soon tired of assassinating cleanshaven Sikhs for their apostasy and instead took up the cause of an independent Sikh state, Khalistan. As the murders mounted, Mrs. Gandhi had little choice but to destroy the monster she had herself spawned, and she finally violated a basic tenet of the Indian state by sending armed troops into a place of worship, the historic Golden Temple in Amritsar, to flush out the terrorists holed up there. Bhindranwale and his immediate cohort of gunmen were killed in “Operation Bluestar,” but so were a number of unarmed civilians trapped in what was, after all, the Sikhs’ most important place of worship; great damage, not all of it repairable, was done to the temple itself. By the time she acted, Mrs. Gandhi probably had no choice (though many wished she could have starved the killers into submission rather than assaulting their sanctified stronghold), but her real fault lay in having created the problem in the first place and in letting it mount to the point where the destructive force of “Operation Bluestar” seemed the only solution.

  The assault on the Golden Temple deeply alienated many Sikhs whose patriotism was unquestionable; the Gandhi family’s staunchest ally in the independent press, the Sikh editor Khushwant Singh, returned his national honors to the government, and a battalion of Sikhs, the backbone of the army, mutinied. Two years earlier, when a Sikh deputy inspector general of police, A. S. Atwal, was murdered in the Golden Temple — shot in the back as he came out of the sanctum sanctorum after saying his prayers with his eight-year-old son by his side — the outrage within the Sikh community against Bhindranwale’s thugs was so great (and the extent of his defenses in the temple so much more limited) that an appeal to Sikh soldiers and police to volunteer to cleanse their own shrine of these killers might have been enough to make a later Bluestar unnecessary. But Mrs. Gandhi, as ever tentative in wielding the power she was so skilled at acquiring, hesitated to respond to the Atwal killing, and the moment passed.

  Mrs. Gandhi never understood the extent to which so many Sikhs saw Bluestar as a betrayal. She refused to draw the conclusions her security advisers did, and to her credit turned down their recommendations to remove Sikhs from her personal guard detail. Two of them, men sworn to protect her with their lives, turned their guns upon her instead. It was a cool Delhi morning in October 1984, when the sun had just begun to warm the crisp autumnal air, but her killing flamed hot in the streets of Delhi, in the horror of the anti-Sikh riots that followed it, which saw whole families burned alive for the sin of sharing the religion of her assassins.

  Mrs. Gandhi’s death reverberated through the country like an earthquake; but her martyrdom came at the end of an inglorious second term of office, at a time when the prospects of reelection looked remote. Yet her death, in these terrible circumstances, preserved her dynasty. Her son Rajiv was sworn in as prime minister within hour
s of her killing, to the dismay of those Indians who, like me, thought the nation could find someone more qualified than a forty-year-old airline pilot with no experience of government to rule us.

  But the Congress, atrophied under Indira, had no one better. Certainly no other name could match the vote-catching potential of Rajiv Gandhi’s. And the choice was ratified by the electorate in a sweeping sympathy vote that gave Rajiv a greater parliamentary majority than any Indian prime minister had ever had.

  Then our dismay briefly turned to hope, as Rajiv proceeded to overturn all the drift and expedient cynicism that had marked his mother’s era. For a year or so the winds of change blew across the country like a tropical cyclone. Rajiv was India’s first purely technocratic politician. He led a generation that had hardly been aware of the British colonial presence in India but had become familiar with the West on its own terms. Education, language, and cultural affinities turned such Indians naturally westward; they admired Western technology, economic advancement, and political freedom, and had correspondingly fewer illusions about the Soviet system. (One should not overstate the importance of education, though: Rajiv dropped out of his engineering course at Cambridge; Sonia, the inheritor of his legacy, was in Cambridge to study English as a second language, not political philosophy.) Rajiv’s initial enthusiasm for change and reform of India’s bureaucratized statism foundered not on ideological grounds but as the result of a series of political compromises with the entrenched establishment.