It takes a minute or so to work out why the advertisements issued by the government on Friday to mark the 25th anniversary of Indira Gandhi’s passing have the ‘r’ in Indira in white and the rest of the letters in green. The answer lies in what Indira loyalist, Assamese Congress leader D.K. Barooah had famously said. He pronounced Indira with a silent r, in the ’70s. “Indira was India and India was Indira”, he declared. Sychophancy of this sort paved the way for the spectacular result that laid the road for India’s first non-Congress government in 1977, but perhaps there was a semblance of something (if not the truth) in what the faithful Barooah had said, as India could barely wait for three years for its next round of the Indira premiership.

Looking back at the Indira years and what she has meant to the party, which went as Congress (I or Indira) for several years before reverting to INC or Indian National Congress, makes it hard to identify one legacy, one programme or the one thing that she stood for.

A feisty, single woman, India’s first woman PM who made Ram Manohar Lohia regret his loose remark of her being a “dumb doll”, or a paranoid leader when she went onto declare a state of internal emergency? Aligning herself with her husband Feroze Gandhi’s ginger group, the Congress Socialist Forum, yet instrumental in ensuring the dismissal of the first elected Communist government in Kerala, then again, carved a pro-poor, Left idea about India, nationalising banks, abolishing the privy purses.

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