FIRST AMONG EQUALS
Among India’s strongest prime ministers, with Emergency being her weakest spot
Whatever the colour and ideological bent of governments that come to power, they will all go back to Indira Gandhi. She laid down the pillars of wisdom that must constitute the face of a ruling party, cooked as it was in the very crucible of her own survival instinct. India has progressed economically and its middle class has grown. But inequality of incomes has also grown and millions of people still live in abject poverty or very straitened circumstances. Which is why Indira’s recipe still holds sway and is embraced by such unlikely Congress-haters (the BJP’s official objective is ‘Congress-mukt Bharat’, a Congress-free India) as Narendra Modi and his government.
Perhaps it is time to tabulate what Indira’s prescription for the country amounts to. Under the rubric of abolishing poverty must feature measures that go towards alleviating the immediate needs of the poor. In a country heavily dependent on rains for farmers’ survival, one where too many live on too little land, a drought is literally a matter of life and death. The urgent need is to reach help quickly to starving families. The evolution of the rural employment guarantee scheme NREGA—the idea of using farmers’ labour to build useful infrastructure—under successive Congress governments was by trial and error.
Second, the political rhetoric must take into account the fact that many more Indians are poor than rich. Thus, even as steps are taken to push economic development by encouraging large-scale investment and manufacturing, the accent must remain on poverty alleviation. For Indira, the abolition of princes’ privy purses was a godsend because it highlighted her resolve to fight major battles for the poor by depriving the very rich and pampered of their privileges. This is balm for the less privileged, for it offers them a psychological high.
The third Indira precept is to demonstrate that the leader, with all the power at her or his command, leads a simple life. Indira, with all her elegance and fondness for demonstrating her proximity to intellectual company, did lead a simple life, happiest in the company of her family, particularly her grandchildren. Both Arvind Kejriwal and Modi are demonstrably creatures of simple living, the former by donning his trademark bush shirt and the latter by publicising his yoga-determined regime learned in the cradle of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS).