Gilding Mrs Gandhi’s image

Press, Volume CXV, Issue 33941, 6 September 1975, Page 10

Gilding Mrs Gandhi’s image

India. The Speeches and Reminiscences of Indira Gandhi. Hodder and Stoughton. 221 pp. Index. N.Z. price $9.40. The publication of a selection of Mrs Gandhi’s writings might have been timely if it had been edited with anything other than adulation in view. As it is. the blurb on the dust-jacket of this collection emphasises Mrs Gandhi’s status (as defined by a Gallup Poll) as the most admired woman in the world, and the selection consists almost entirely of diplomatic speeches on official occasions. As with any such collection, the result is of little interest either for those interested in politics or for students of the psychology of leadership. It would be easy to compile a series of easy ironies from this collection; there are frequent statements of respect for democracy and the law However, these speeches to give some clues to the nature of the woman. This is most evident in Mrs Gandhi’s automatic assumptions about the nature of her authority, which is dynastic. It is not just that most speeches refer to Mahatma Gandhi and to Nehru (it is interesting on a number of counts that in a volume of political speeches, the biggest index entries go to these two men) but that most emphasise her connection with them from girlhood. “There was no time when my home, since I w 7 as born, was

not the centre of all the major political movements, decisions, and the meetings that took place, and the whole of modem Indian history was being made there." Mrs Gandhi was groomed for power, and the childhood, reminiscences included here recollect her wearing of homespun khadi, the destruction of her foreign toys. and. revealingly, her gathering the servants, standing on a table, and lecturing them, “repeating disjointed phrases that 1 had picked up from grown-up talk.” Of the expensive education in Geneva and Oxford there is no mention. Throughout. Mrs Gandhi insists on the fundamental unity of India, on the immensity of its problems; she was always realist enough not to underplav rhe problems. She fairly emphasisethe difficulty of effective democracy in a largeriv illiterate, largely rura country. She never doubted that it was working, however, except in the only two speeches here which speak with any real urgency or sense of persona! involvement. They were delivered >n the one earlier occasion when her authority was threatened, by the split in the Congress Party in 1969. Then, “the interest of the people” wa< claimed to be greater than that, of the partv, just as now the interest of the people is claimed to be greater than that of Parliament and the judicial process.