Indira by Katherine Frank

Author:Katherine Frank [Frank, Katherine]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-00-737250-8
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2001-11-13T05:00:00+00:00

In America, five days after Indira was sworn in, she appeared on the cover of Time magazine in full colour, complete with red rose and white-streaked hair, under the banner ‘Troubled India in a Woman’s Hands’. Betty Friedan, the best-selling author of The Feminine Mystique, packed her bags to fly to India to write a long profile article on how ‘Mrs Gandhi Shattered the Feminine Mystique’ for the American Ladies Home Journal. In London John Grigg wrote in the Guardian: ‘Probably no woman in history has assumed a heavier burden of responsibility and certainly no country of India’s importance has ever before entrusted so much power to a woman under democratic conditions … If she makes a success of the job she will deal what may be a knockout blow to lingering notions of male superiority.’15

Indira’s emergence as Prime Minister coincided with the burgeoning women’s movement in the West, and though she denied being a feminist and was always impatient with questions about her role as a female politician, the women’s movement intensified public interest in her. Feminists like Friedan hoped that Indira’s powerful position as a woman leader might become the norm rather than remain an anomaly. And despite the fact that Indira continued to disassociate herself from feminism, she was particularly forthcoming and revealing with women writers like Friedan and the Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci, as well as her early biographer Uma Vasudev and the American academic Mary Carras.

Within India, however, Indira was not viewed as a harbinger of the women’s movement. Instead, reflecting the Syndicate’s motive for installing her as Prime Minister, her gender was generally seen only as a liability. Shortly after Indira was elected by the Congress parliamentary party, the Bombay Economic and Political Weekly remarked with considerable prescience that a woman ruler is under a social handicap until she has been able to consolidate her position. In the beginning every group leader wants to advise and control her and so faction fights start among them. Either the ruler is able to satisfy everyone that she is not too close to anyone in particular, as Queen Elizabeth I did, and enjoy a long tenure of office, or fails to survive the initial period of uncertainty.’16

In the early months of Indira’s prime ministership, the idea took hold that there must be male power behind the throne. Dinesh Singh, the handsome and urbane former Raja of Kalakankar, in particular, cultivated this role. He was made a minister of state in Indira’s first cabinet and from the early months of her term as Prime Minister, she relied on him heavily. Singh’s influence did not go unnoticed. A presidential order was issued to the effect that the Prime Minister assigned to him ‘such functions as she may’, and in February 1966, just a month after Indira became Prime Minister, she was accused in Parliament of making Dinesh Singh ‘a virtual de facto Prime Minister’.17 When the historian V. N. Datta told Krishna Menon that he had presented a copy

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