What makes it even more challenging to understand a personality like Indira Gandhi even 25 years after her passing is the fact that you are not talking about one person, but three. Or, to put it more accurately, not one prime minister, but three. Indira Gandhi had two spells in power, but in fairness you have to break her first tenure (1966-77) also into two, with a changing of chapters at the end of the Bangladesh war in December 1971. This gives us three reigns of almost equal length, 1966-71, 1972-77 and 1980-end 1984. In each one, it was the same personality in office but a different prime minister. Mrs Gandhi was no doctrinaire figure, with all her wisdom or ideas inherited from her father. She changed and evolved, often for the better, sometimes not quite so. To that extent, she was an original among leaders who serve long tenures. Think of her, in fact, as a complete opposite of another titan of her times — and one she shared so much mutual fondness with — the unchanging Fidel Castro. Remember that wonderful picture of their joyous hug at the Non-Aligned Summit in New Delhi in 1983?

Unlike her son Rajiv, subsequently, Indira was not a reluctant politician. Even when Lal Bahadur Shastri stepped in after Nehru in 1964, many in the Congress saw her as a successor soon enough. She was already the minister for information and broadcasting, but, just like Rajiv, she was fated to be catapulted to prime ministership, unexpectedly with Shastri’s sudden death in Tashkent. Her first tenure, therefore, reflected some of that under-preparedness and diffidence. This is what persuaded Ram Manohar Lohia to use for her the description, “goongi gudiya” (dumb doll). She made the entire opposition pay for that over her “three” tenures in power. And how.

... contd.