Most Indians do not remember where they were when they heard that Indira Gandhi was shot. Not because it wasn’t momentous; merely because they can’t. On that misty October morning 25 years ago, half of today’s India had not yet been born. Hundreds of millions more can only half-remember it, inheriting instead of memories myth and counter-myth.

You might think it would be difficult to explain to those of us with only dim recollections of Mrs Gandhi’s life what she stood for. But so many try anyway. “Inclusive growth” is merely “garibi hatao” updated, we are told. Never mind that one actually mentions growth and the other never provided it. There are even claims, either painfully ignorant or shockingly cynical, that bank nationalisation “saved” us from the recession. (Aren’t we clever! We demolished a city in 1969 — and so not a single house fell in that earthquake last year!)

But those silly stories aren’t quite the myths that the rest of us hear. We hear about how she is missed — because she was an iron-willed leader, wasn’t she? Untroubled by doubt in victory, unbowed even in defeat, and weren’t children named for her across the world? How many Croatian babies have been named Atal, or Kazakhs named Manmohan? And if she made mistakes, they were similarly monumental — but don’t really tarnish the idea of Indira.

So the strangling licence-permit raj which she nourished, and fed, and defended, and that she above all others was most responsible for, has its villains, but they don’t include her. Instead we hate the avaricious mid-level neta, the tyrannical petty bureaucrat.

... contd.