Since she looms very large in modern Indian history — some believe her to be the “best prime minister the country has had” — most Indians do not realise or remember how uncertain, tentative, and shaky was her debut in the ‘room at the top’ even though there was an element of inevitability about her choice as Lal Bahadur Shastri’s successor after his sudden death at Tashkent. During the succession race, she had displayed unsuspected political skill by remaining silent in the face of Morarji Desai’s strident claim to the top job. He strongly felt that he had been “cheated” of it, after Jawaharlal Nehru’s passing, by the caucus of powerful party bosses, headed by the then Congress president, K. Kamaraj, and collectively nicknamed “The Syndicate”.

It was the same Syndicate that had masterminded, well in advance, Shastri’s succession to the towering first Prime Minister of independent India. The Syndicate had also seen to it that Shastri stepped into Nehru’s oversized shoes through consensus, not as a result of a divisive contest within the Congress Parliamentary Party. No one had imagined that the Shastri era would be so short-lived; therefore no one had given any thought to the second succession. Within the Syndicate there was agreement only on keeping Morarji Desai out for the same reasons that had dictated this strategy the last time. Who should succeed Shastri was still an open question although Kamaraj did say that Indira Gandhi was the Congress’ “best bet”.

Indeed, the Bombay Congress boss, S K Patil, implored Kamaraj to take over the “onerous responsibility and concomitant honour”. The solid strong man from the South replied: “No Hindi, no English. How?” Eventually, the Syndicate decided in favour of Indira Gandhi. But it withheld the announcement for some time in the hope of building a consensus. This was mission impossible because Desai was adamant on the parliamentary party’s vote. On January 19, 1966, in the first and, so far, only contest for the leadership of the CPP, Indira Gandhi won by a comfortable margin of 355 votes against 169 for Desai. Five days later she was sworn in as Prime Minister. The first news she got on that day was tragic: Homi Bhaba, the legendary nuclear scientist and the first chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, had died in a plane crash at Mont Blanc in Switzerland.

... contd.