Congress cannot clear Indira's name

If all the sponsored publicity arranged by the Congress-ruled central and state governments could efface the stigma attached to Indira Gandhi, it would have happened long ago. It makes no sense, 25 years after her death, for the exercise to be repeated all over again, with tens of millions of rupees going down the drain. The effort failed because there was no introspection, no regret.

Gandhi's cardinal sin was not the imposition of a state of emergency but the elimination of morality from politics. She rubbed out the thin line that differentiates right from wrong, moral from immoral. She did this so thoroughly that the line remains blurred, even today.

In the first 19 years after independence, Jawaharlal Nehru and his successor, Lal Bahadur Shastri, saved the nation from falling prey to power politics. They used their office to serve the nation. Never did pettiness or vindictiveness cross their minds. But Gandhi was different. She had no qualms about making power an end in itself. She should have resigned on moral grounds when she was disqualified by the Allahabad High Court for a poll offence. But how could she follow the rule of law when she was a law unto herself?

Instead of resigning, she imposed a state of emergency to overturn the entire system and save her skin. She had parliament pass legislation to overturn her disqualification and did not think it appropriate to consult even the Cabinet, which was summoned in the morning to endorse the proclamation which the president had "signed" the night before.

Gandhi was never happy with the press; her first order was to gag it. The media have still not regained their equilibrium, even after 34 years. They now seek to stay on the right side of whichever party is in power. That is why newspaper articles on the 25th anniversary of her death hardly mentioned her misdeeds.

Return of fear

Mahatma Gandhi taught the nation to shed fear. Indira Gandhi recreated fear in the minds of people. Whether it was the press, the judiciary or the bureaucracy, they compromised because of fear. The nation was at first in a state of shock over her actions. When she split the Congress party in 1969, giving a sense of unity to the country, people did not realise the full implications of her actions. By the time the nation woke up to the import of her desperate policies, the virus had spread into the body politic and freedom was lost.

She decimated what had been an impartial bureaucracy. It caved in under pressure. Desire for self-preservation became the sole motivation for government servants' actions and behaviour. The fear generated by the mere threat made them pliable. They carried out her orders without questioning them. Ethical considerations or traditional values became beyond the mental grasp of bureaucrats. They became a tool of tyranny in her hands.

Gandhi used the word "commitment", long before the state of emergency, to assess the loyalty of bureaucrats towards her. Some of them said that their commitment was to the Constitution of India. But they were either ignored at the time of promotion or put in an unimportant position.

The poison she injected continues to run in the veins of bureaucrats who administer the system at the whim of those who come to power. They change their loyalty and colour when a new regime takes over.

The judiciary also felt the pressure as she superseded three Supreme Court judges to appoint her own Chief Justice of India. He came in handy when the case of the imposition of a state of emergency was before him. The Supreme Court judgment was 11 to 1. The lone dissenter, the most senior judge, was passed over for promotion.

The biggest damage she did in her 18-year-rule was to the institutions which her father, Nehru, had put in place. She manipulated even the parliament when she lost the majority in the Lok Sabha in the wake of the party's split. She weakened the Congress and its ideological stance to such an extent that the Bharatiya Janata Party came to power.

Gandhi certainly began her political life with a remarkable mix of talents: a capacity to listen, to comprehend at different levels, to communicate with the common man. But these qualities diminished as time went by.

Later, another problem arose as Indira Gandhi's son, Sanjay Gandhi, became the extra-Constitutional authority. He opened the door to lumpen youth. One can see his legacy in Indian governance even today.

Indira Gandhi used all methods at her disposal to break those who opposed her. I wonder if she deserves even a footnote in history. If she does get a mention, it would be because of Operation Blue Star against the Sikhs' Golden Temple.

She paid a heavy price for this, as her Sikh bodyguards killed her to avenge the attack on the Golden Temple. The government's retaliation was criminal, as it stood by for three days while 3,000 Sikhs were butchered at Delhi in broad daylight. So the Sikhs also had something to commemorate this week — the 25th anniversary of the massacre.

Kuldip Nayar is a former Indian High Commissioner to the United Kingdom and a former Rajya Sabha member.