May You Be the Mother of a Hundred Sons: A Journey Among the Women of India by Elisabeth Bumiller

Author:Elisabeth Bumiller [Bumiller, Elizabeth]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Fiction, Literary, Psychological, Sagas
ISBN: 9780307803436
Publisher: Ballantine Books
Published: 2011-08-24T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 7

“INDIRA IS INDIA, AND INDIA IS INDIRA”

Mrs. Gandhi and Her Legacy for Indian Women in Politics

ONE OF THE GREAT PARADOXES OF MODERN INDIA WAS THE RISE AND tumultuous rule of Indira Gandhi, one of the most powerful women in the world, in a country where most other women were among the most impoverished and neglected on earth. How did Indira Gandhi win election as prime minister four times, and dominate the subcontinent for almost two decades, while the majority of women in her country remained unaware of the basic rights that Jawaharlal Nehru, Indira Gandhi’s father and the nation’s first prime minister, had insisted be written into India’s Constitution for them? Why did Indira Gandhi, in many ways a surprisingly feminine woman, largely ignore those of her own gender?

Loved, feared, admired and despised, Indira Gandhi was a woman whose sensibilities were shaped by one of the most extraordinary dramas of the twentieth century. The story of her life was no less than the story of the traumatic, inspirational birth of India, in which one of the poorest nations in the world, moved by the ideals of democracy, secularism and nonviolent disobedience, wrested its independence from one of the greatest empires in history. Indira Gandhi was part of a family that not only drove the course of events but also left her convinced that her destiny was to have her own place in history as well.

She was born in 1917 during the last days of the British Raj, into the aristocratic Nehru household, which became a headquarters for the civil disobedience campaign. As a child she never knew when her parents might be sent off to jail. After an erratic education in India and Europe, she struggled in an unhappy marriage and served as her father’s reluctant hostess at Teen Murti House, the prime minister’s residence. By 1966, less than two decades later, the shy, tag-along daughter had become prime minister herself. She emerged as a shrewd, forceful politician, one who silenced her critics and increasingly took on the role of dictator after she suspended civil liberties and declared a state of “Emergency” in June 1975. Two years later, Indian voters turned her out of office in a massive political defeat, but in 1980, in the most astonishing political turnaround in modern India, the same voters returned her to power. Her death four years later seemed a tragic commentary on an almost mythic life. Indira Gandhi, the leader whose consuming interest had been keeping India together at a time when people thought it was splitting apart, was finally assassinated by two men linked to the nation’s most threatening separatist movement.

Even before her death, Indira Gandhi’s life had taken on the status of myth. In 1971, when she led India into its most successful war against Pakistan, the swift military victory seemed to place her in the tradition of powerful Indian goddesses, an image that persisted throughout her subsequent years of political victories and defeats. In the minds of many Indians,

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