The Nehru-Gandhi Family’s Tryst With Destiny
India cast off the monarchy in 1950, but the Nehru-Gandhi family have become republican royalty. How did one dynasty take centre stage in the world’s largest democracy?
For 40 of the first 60 years since Independence, a member of the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty has ruled as prime minister in India. The family came to personify the struggles and triumphs of the entire nation – an identification they did everything to promote. The story of how the family intertwined its fate with that of the nation starts with its fiercely ambitious founder, Motilal Nehru (1861–1931), who rose from poverty to become a leading lawyer and member of the Indian National Congress, and set out to make his son, Jawaharlal Nehru (1889–1964) the greatest man in the world.
By the time Jawaharlal was born, his father’s wealth was legendary and his home at Allahabad, Anand Bhavan (Abode of Joy), a byword for luxury. The child grew up with tennis courts, a swimming pool, lawns with sparkling fountains, rich furnishings and a retinue of liveried servants. It was the first house in Allahabad to have electricity and water laid on; it soon had flush toilets and hot and cold running water. The Nehru family were Brahmins, the highest caste of Indian society, traditionally destined as priests or scholars. Every birthday Jawaharlal was weighed in public in a huge balance against grain and other goods that were then distributed to the poor – an early example of the relationship between his physical being and that of the people of India, a theme that was developed throughout his life.
Jawaharlal was sent to England for his education at Harrow, Trinity College, Cambridge and the Inner Temple. Spending so many of his formative years away from his country he became, he later wrote, ‘a queer mixture of East and West, out of place everywhere, at home nowhere.’ Back in India he served in the High Court at Allahabad; and became involved in the independence movement, a cause in which he met Mohandas Gandhi in 1916. When some peasants came to his house looking for Gandhi, hoping to share their tales of oppression with him, Jawaharlal, at a loose end, went home with them and this experience was his first revelation of living India. As he described it:
They looked on us with loving and hopeful eyes, as if we were the bearers of good tidings, the guides who would lead us to the promised land. Looking at them and their misery and overflowing gratitude, I was filled with shame and sorrow, shame at my own easy-going and comfortable life and our petty politics of the city which ignored this vast multitude of semi-naked sons and daughters of India, sorrow at the degradation and overwhelming poverty of India.
As he travelled around India, his sister Krishna, and sometimes his wife Kamala, would accompany him. ‘Slowly,’ Krishna recalled, ‘he grasped the psychology of the masses and began to feel a thrill at being able to influence vast crowds.’ His act of taking family members on these rigorous trips was (consciously or not) building the Nehru legend that the family in some mystical way had a unique relationship with India.
A former moderate in nationalist politics, Motilal Nehru was voted president of the Indian National Congress in the wake of the Amritsar massacre in 1919, and again at the key session in Calcutta in 1920 when he dramatically backed Gandhi’s call for withdrawal from British-run courts, elections, legislatures, schools and colleges, and for the boycott of official functions and foreign goods. The reason for Motilal’s about-turn was not policy, but family: he knew Jawaharlal would go with Gandhi; Motilal voted to be on the same side as his son when the battle started.
Out went the Western kitchen, crystal, china and wine cellar in Allahabad, along with the horses and carriages; the staff was drastically reduced and the Western clothes sacrificed on a giant bonfire. The stories of the Nehrus’ wealth were often wildly exaggerated, as were the tales of how low they now abased themselves (they still lived very comfortably by Indian standards) so that the mythic element of the renunciation could shine through. This destiny was not thrust upon the Nehrus; they fashioned it themselves.
In 1928 Motilal Nehru presented a draft constitution for a future India under dominion status within the British Empire. Embracing universal adult franchise and equal rights for women, the Nehru report was the basis of the constitution India would adopt 20 years later – an example of the way Nehru skills helped define the nation. When Gandhi put his name forward for the presidency of the 1929 Congress at Lahore, Jawaharlal was embarrassed and tried to refuse the honour, but Motilal was overjoyed and hymned the occasion with a Persian adage, ‘What the father is unable to accomplish, the son achieves.’ Indira, Jawaharlal’s twelve-year-old daughter, was present to see power pass from father to son.
Motilal renamed his house Swaraj Bhavan (Abode of Freedom), and donated it to the nation in April 1930, a year before his death. It attracted crowds of devotees anxious to catch a glimpse of the family. ‘The verandas of the house were full of these visitors of ours,’ wrote Jawaharlal, ‘Each door and window had a collection of prying eyes.’ Among pictures of the gods and Indian heroes, the bazaars sold pictures of Jawaharlal and his wife Kamala with the inscription ‘adarsha jori’ (‘the ideal couple’) – rather ironically, considering their less than ideal married life.
The family, and Jahawarlal especially, spent long spells in jail for their anti-British activities. On a famous occasion Indira was obliged to tell a visitor to the house, ‘I’m sorry but my grandfather, father and mummy are all in prison.’ Jawaharlal wrote regularly to Indira during his absences – and in 1929 published the correspondence as Letters From A Father to His Daughter. His lengthy account of Indian history from the Indus Valley civilization through British rule and the independence struggle, The Discovery of India, written while he was in prison for the last time, even included events from his own life, such as the death of his wife Kamala. The family’s activities, their relationships, and literally their world-view, were being made public property. Jawaharlal was writing them into history.
The 1935 Government of India Act gave self-government to the Indian provinces. During the first elections in 1936–37, Jawaharlal went on a national campaign on behalf of Congress, travelling 50,000 miles by plane, train, car, bicycle, cart, steamer, paddle boat, canoe, horse, elephant, camel and on foot. One time the crowd waiting to see him was so packed that when he arrived he had to walk on their shoulders to get to the front to address them. He is said to have addressed ten million people and been seen by many more.
When Indira Nehru married a nationalist activist, Feroze Gandhi, in 1942, the Labour MP Stafford Cripps, an old family friend, was a guest at the wedding. A cabinet minister in Churchill’s coalition government, he was in India to broker a deal to end independence agitation – a deal Congress turned down. Indira’s cousin Nayantara said, ‘It was quite usual in our family for a very personal, private event to be somehow involved with matters that were happening in the world and in the country. So we took it for granted that the Cripps Mission should be somehow mixed up with Indira’s wedding.’ Feroze was no relation to ‘Mahatma’ Gandhi, but many Indians and not a few foreigners believed he was, an association that would do Indira no harm at all.
Indira and Feroze spent little time together once their sons Rajiv and Sanjay had been born in 1944 and 1946. When Jawaharlal, a widower, became prime minister in 1947 in newly independent India, he needed a consort and Indira – with Rajiv and Sanjay – moved in to the prime minister’s residence, learning diplomacy at home and on foreign visits. It was here that Indira acquired the imperious attitude that the Nehrus were the ruling family.
When Indira became minister of information in the government formed by Lal Bahadur Shastri after her father’s death in 1964, it was her first experience of government, though she was referred to as ‘the only man in the cabinet’ after she took decisive action during the war with Pakistan in 1965. Less than two years later Shastri died suddenly, and Indira Gandhi was called upon to take over as the only person who could hold the Congress Party together and unite the nation. In the election that followed, Indira declared that she would pursue policies in the interests of the country: ‘the Congress is big, but India is bigger.’ It was the true message of her campaign: to rely on her own popularity with the people, going over the heads of the party chiefs. It was during this election in 1967 that she was addressed as ‘Mother Indira’ for the first time.
Indira's imperious rule earned her enemies who finally caught up with her when she was taken to court on a charge of minor electoral irregularities in 1975. The court invalidated her election of 1971 and disbarred her from office for six years. Announcing that 'the security of India is threatened by internal disturbances', she therefore declared a state of emergency. Opposition leaders were arrested, the press controlled, and strikes banned. The state of emergency was not forced on Indira; insulated from reality by her hand-picked advisers and sycophants, she had projected her own fears and insecurities onto the nation. India was not 'in peril from both internal and external enemies', as she protested; but Indirà herself was menaced by her enemies, and she so closely identified her fate with that of the nation that she was unable to distinguish that a threat to one was not necessarily a threat to both.
Meanwhile, Indira was grooming her younger son, Sanjay, to succeed her, but he was piling up enemies even in Nehru loyalist heartlands by a brutal policy of forced sterilizations to achieve lower population growth. When Indira finally permitted elections in 1977 (using the slogan ‘Indira is India’) she lost decisively and was expelled from parliament. For the first time since independence, the Congress Party was not in power.
Indira fought back, a branch of Congress loyal to her alone. In the election of 1980, as if trying to out-perform her father, she travelled 40,000 miles, addressing twenty-two meetings a day with a combined audience of one hundred million. After she was returned to power a journalist asked her how it felt to be India’s leader again. Indira responded ferociously, ‘I have always been India’s leader.’
Six months after the election Sanjay Gandhi was killed while performing aerobatic stunts in a private plane. Indira was devastated but publicly remarked ‘People come and go but the nation continues to live’ – as usual, placing a family event in a national context. Sanjay’s widow Maneka was ready to step into Sanjay’s shoes, but Indira refused to endorse her and, in a public falling-out with her daughter-in-law, threw her out of the family home. Maneka, the only member of the younger generation who was a natural politician, subsequently became an MP and was a minister in four governments, all in opposition to Congress. Indira’s elder son Rajiv, a quiet man who had a job he loved as an airline pilot, was conscripted to take over his brother’s constituency and was made nominal head of Indira’s Congress Party. He ingenuously confessed to reporters that he had entered politics ‘to help mummy’.
On October 31st, 1984 Indira was assassinated by her Sikh bodyguards, enraged by her having ordered an attack on the Golden Temple in Amritsar, which Sikh terrorists had been using as a stronghold. Congress loyalists, thrown into confusion and lacking a procedure for selecting anyone but a Nehru to rule, reached for the next member of the dynasty. The official announcement of Indira’s death was made at 6 pm, nearly nine hours after she had been shot, and long after the BBC World Service had announced the news. At 6.20 Rajiv was sworn in. After only three years in parliament, with no cabinet, or even junior ministerial experience, Rajiv Gandhi became prime minister of the world’s largest democracy. Two months later his Congress Party won 415 of 543 parliamentary seats, the largest electoral landslide in Indian history.
The inexperienced and reluctant politician lost the next election, in 1989, and became leader of the opposition, an unusual situation for a Nehru-Gandhi. When, during an election campaign in May 1991 Rajiv was blown to pieces by a Tamil suicide bomber, the tragedy of his death was compounded by the political turmoil caused by the absence of an obvious successor. In a gesture of exceptional bad taste, within four days of Rajiv’s death Congress unanimously elected his Italian-born widow Sonia president. She declined the honour, and also refused to stand in an election later that year.
Throughout the early 1990s a barely competent minority Congress administration that felt it needed the Nehru magic continued to woo Sonia and her two children, Priyanka and Rahul. Sonia’s position was impossible: she hated politics for having taken her beloved husband from her even before it had killed him. She had no political skill and did not speak any of the languages of India, except English. But only involvement in politics would guarantee her children the level of protection they needed if they were to escape the fate of their father and grandmother. Slowly, Sonia edged closer to the political centre, joining the party in 1997, becoming its president in 1999, and successfully standing for election in 1999. She then took office as leader of the opposition.
After the election of May 2004, won by Congress and its allies, Sonia was set to become the fourth prime minister of the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty, unanimously supported by the other parties in the coalition. Her enemies counted up the strikes against her: she was a Roman Catholic, Indian by neither birth nor blood, and with a poor command of Hindi. After a tense few days, Sonia judiciously listened to her ‘inner voice’ and recommended the respected economist Manmohan Singh as prime minister. She retained the post of chair of the Congress parliamentary party.
Rahul Gandhi successfully contested his father’s former constituency in 2004. His sister Priyanka, considered the more charismatic of the younger Nehru-Gandhis, acted as a campaign manager and did constituency work but resolutely refused a formal political role. Supporters have established a site of martyrdom at the former family home in Delhi, now the Indira Gandhi Memorial Museum, where a path of shining, underlit crystal glass in the grounds shows the last walk Indira took to the spot where she was killed. Relics of the exalted ones are shown as if they were a holy family: the blood-stained sari Indira wore when she was gunned down; the shredded clothes in which Rajiv was dressed when he was blown up. With the fourth generation of Nehru-Gandhis in charge of Indian politics, and a fifth preparing for the future, the family’s tryst with destiny seems to have many more years to run.
