• Shekhar Gupta has drawn an objective portrait of Indira Gandhi’s complex persona with all her strengths and failings. To me, an ordinary citizen interested in India’s march towards all-round advancement, social justice and zero tolerance of corruption, Indira’s legacy, despite some pluses, looks rather sad. Political and bureaucratic immorality and non-accountability and the licence raj punctuated her tenures. The victory over Pakistan, resulting in Bangladesh, settled nothing; in fact, it spawned grave challenges of cross-border terrorism and demographic invasion. She gave away the gains in Shimla. She humiliated and jailed her political opponents during the Emergency. We are still to emerge out of the economic and political mess she left behind.

— M. Ratan

New Delhi

A giant, nevertheless

• Shekhar Gupta’s ‘The Idea of Indira’ should go down as a very factual and politically correct piece of history. His breaking up of Indira’s tenure into three compartments shows how a docile girl grew into the Iron Lady. Her reign had all the trappings of a Greek tragedy. She did what she did to establish that her authority was unquestionable. Her blunders, she did feel at some point of time, were wrong decisions. But for those too she took the responsibility. At least, history will record she had the courage to take her decisions to fruition even if they were the wrong ones. Today, we are left with non-decisive leaders who talk more than act.

— Roda D. Hakim

Baroda

Iron non-democrat?

... contd.