Centrepiece
UnIndian Indira
Colin Welch
Her voice in polite discourse was soft and low, an excellent thing in woman. It enunciated in a musical monotone the progressive clichés, abstractions and pieties appropriate to Hampstead, to gatherings of well-disposed international
intellectuals, celebrities, Galbraiths, Foots, politicians and journalists. It con- veyed to Labour MP Laurie Pavitt an impression of 'inner calm and peace'. He had presumably never heard (nor have I) the other voice which reportedly, in private or in the ill-repressed ructions of dynastic life, rose like that of fishwife or Red Queen, shrill, vindictive, imperious, vengeful. The soft voice conveyed to Michael Foot an impression of 'her deep, loving knowledge of the history of India'. It conveyed to me an impression of a lady who knew nothing whatever about India, its problems or even its history, beyond what could be subsumed in those progres- sive clichés — as much an alien as myself. Dhiren Bhagat's brilliant article last week did much to explain this impression, little to dispel it.
'Hold on,' you cry — 'how dare you talk like this, who may not have spent as many days in India as she spent years?' May I qualify and explain? Mrs Gandhi spoke not only English, French and a bit of German, but Hindi, Gujerati, Bengali and a bit of Tamil. These languages may have imposed upon her an earthier and more concrete style. Had I been able to follow her into them, my impression might have been different. Furthermore, it is a bit absurd, I concede, to say that a lady who wielded power in India for longer than anyone else since independence knew nothing about the country. Let's put it another way: she normally knew enough to look after herself but not nearly enough to look after India. And when, at the 1977 election, her instinct for self-preservation for once utter- ly failed her, this was surely because of a massive and culpable ignorance about how the poor in India live.
This had caused her, during the so-called Emergency, to put into effect fashionable but dubious Western notions about population control by means brutally Indi- an, producing the acute resentment which, I think, swept her for a time away. Count- less innocent poor men were rounded up for vasectomies, some performed by force with rusty instruments on dirty railway waiting-room tables. They were thus deprived of the posterity which, in a land without public pensions (or incidentally any public provision for the disabled and insane — a fact to be borne in mind when mammoth spending on vain and showy industrial projects is extolled) offers the only hope of a bearable old age. Some of them were compensated with wireless sets!
My own ignorance of India must, I further concede, be more massive than hers could have been. Yet it is tempered by a few precious insights into areas of Indian reality which seemed barred to Mrs Gan- dhi by her upbringing (at the age of four, she reported, she 'used to stand on a table making thunderous speeches to the ser- vants': think of that!), her vision blinkered by exotic progressive prejudices, her solip- sistic preoccupations. These insights were not my own, but vouchsafed by reading and talking to thoughtful Indians whose wisdom and knowledge of the land seemed to me infinitely greater than hers, let alone mine, who differed from her on nearly every point and had often suffered grievously from this great democrat for doing so. I think paricularly of the late Professor B. R. Shenoy, who combined a profound mastery of Western classical eco- nomics with a modest and saintly charac- ter, a great love and sympathy for the Indian poor with a sharp and shrewd awareness of what it was that impoverished them, cool head with warm heart. From this great man alone you could learn more about India in an hour (though longer were better) than in weeks with the cronies and sycophants who surrounded Mrs Gandhi in her self-imposed isolation In recent years', so the Economist puts it, though I never remember her without them.
Some of the fulsome tributes recently paid to Mrs Gandhi brought back to me unbidden memories of old De Valera putting on his top hat to offer condolences to the German ambassador on the death of the Fiihrer. No, of course I don't liken her to Hitler. Of course she did good as well as bad. Of course some of the bad was well-meant, and none of it as bad as she could have done or as others in our dire century, as in Indian history, actually have done. Was she OK by Indian standards? How can one say so, without insulting all those Indians who live by standards higher than hers or ours, and would hotly dis- agree? Was she then, perhaps, `not the worst'?
On her credit side we must enter the fact that India is still in one piece, though the unity seems less of that calm, natural and easy order which good government strives to foster than of so many fighting, strug- gling and squawking cats tied up insecurely in a ragged sack. For the fragility and uneasiness of this union, which may yet prove fatal, Mrs Gandhi cannot escape censure. She has been portrayed as a tireless fighter against caste, racial and religious discrimination Yes but she
fought these supposed evils with weapons themselves drawn from discrimination, which tend thus to perpetuate and exacer- bate it. According to Dr Subroto Roy and authorities quoted by him (in Pricing, Planning and Politics — A study of econo- mic distortions in India, Institute of Econo- mic Affairs, L1.80), a high proportion of public jobs (private industry is `encour- aged' to follow suit) is reserved for sche- duled castes, `tribes' and local ethnic and linguistic groups. The labour market is thus highly politicised. Sectional groups strug- gle, not always peacefully, for reserved status, for wider definitions, for more recognition, privileges and jobs. I don't know what economic hopes, fears and grievances lay behind the recent Sikh disorders or other savage riots in Assam, Bombay, Hyderabad, Gujerat, Indore and Bengal. I would be astonished if there were none, or if Mrs Gandhi's discirminatory dirigisme had in no way raised them. Many tributes have been paid to Mrs Gandhi's zeal for democracy. It is certainlY an odd form of parliamentary democracy over which she presided and which, if operating here, might have conferred on to such remarkable Prime Ministers as Ishbel MacDonald and Oliver Baldwin, Ran- dolph Churchill, Martin Attlee (a sound Tory, I have heard) and Giles Wilson, and might in time elevate young Mark. It was an odder form of democracy still over which Mrs Gandhi presided during the Emergency. Opponents, including many distinguished Indians of irreproach- able character, were thrown without trial into noisome jails. It could have been said at the time, as of Soviet Russia, that the prisons contained the cream of the nation. The courts were rigged, the newspapers tightly gagged. It is an odd democrat Whn would do all this for so little reason er none. One can only assume that such a mode of ruling came naturally to Mrs Gandhi, that she felt more at ease when freed from all constitutional constraints. Her assassination, incidentally, has been slyly used by Michael Foot and others, te endow the Emergency with a retrospective justification. This is quite absurd. J. P. Narayan and others she imprisoned were not plotting her death; the articles she prevented Professor Shenoy from Pub- lishing were not incitements to violence: Much has been made of the election which followed the Emergency. It was surely a democrat who humbly sought the people's verdict and bowed to it when delivered. Another interpretation is posar ble: that she cared not a fig for the people s opinion; that she thought she had the election fixed, by fair means and foul, in the bag; that she hoped it would confer 0.11 her tyranny a spurious democratic legit timacy; that the result came as a Inds' frightful surprise and shock to her; that she
.
bowed to it with rage. It certainly taugh! her a sharp lesson. It turned her, if not int°, a democrat, into a more cautious an' dev.
Previous page
