His little sister, Priyanka, is proud that she looks like Dadi and has recently taken to wearing her saris to establish continuity. She would do better to sit with her brother and try and analyse why India remained such a horribly poor country despite nearly forty years of being ruled by their immediate family.

As for you who complain daily about the collapse of democratic institutions and the need for judicial and administrative reform please remember that if there is a single individual who can be blamed that individual would be Indira Gandhi. The two decades in which her ‘towering personality’ loomed over the Indian political landscape were a time of wasted opportunities, corruption and cynicism. A time when Mrs Gandhi’s stenographers were more powerful than Cabinet ministers. She was a bad Leader. It was a bad time.