A Self-Styled Joan of Arc

There is considerable irony in the fact that Prime Minister Indira Gandhi temporarily suspended civil liberties to forestall an opposition campaign of civil disobedience. Although unrelated to Mohandas K. Gandhi, the secular saint of India who preached passive resistance as political strategy, Mrs. Gandhi is the only daughter of the Mahatma's colleague and political heir, Jawaharlal Nehru. She was only four years old when, in 1921, her father went to prison for the first time to protest British rule over the subcontinent, and she spent an intense, unhappy childhood prematurely immersed in the politics of rebellion. "I have no recollection of games, children's parties or playing with other children," she once said. "All my games were political ones--I was, like Joan of Arc, perpetually being burned at the stake."

Both the hyperbole and the hypersensitivity of that statement are typical of Mrs. Gandhi, who came to power in 1966 after the sudden death of her father's successor as Prime Minister, Lai Bahadur Shastri. In choosing Mrs. Gandhi, who had served briefly as Minister of Information and Broadcasting under Shastri, the ruling bosses of the Congress Party apparently hoped to acquire a politically popular but compliant Prime Minister.

Demonstrating that she was "not merely [Nehru's] daughter but a person in her own right," Mrs. Gandhi introduced her own sweeping ten-point program for transforming India into a socialist democracy. After she nationalized 14 private banks, angry Congress Party elders expelled her. Mrs. Gandhi promptly formed her own New Congress Party and in September, 1970 she reduced, then eliminated the privileges and privy purses of maharajas--a relic of British Empire days that was then costing the government about $6 million a year.

In 1971, a year ahead of schedule, she called for a general election, then campaigned on the populist Hindi slogan Garibi hatao ("Abolish poverty"). The result: the New Congress Party won two-thirds of the seats in the Lok Sabha, or lower house of the Parliament.

Shy and intense, Mrs. Gandhi is no spellbinder as a public speaker, but she nonetheless sways audiences. As Prime Minister, she has carried on her father's custom of holding frequent darshans--in Hindi, literally, "showing oneself--at which she appears on the lawn of her official home in New Delhi to accept petitions and listen to the problems of ordinary people. Like Father Jawaharlal, Mrs. Gandhi was educated in England. Like him also, she has little interest in small talk, suffers fools poorly, and governs imperiously--although she tends to delegate more business than he did. About the only time she really relaxes is when she is alone with her family. It consists of two sons--Rajiv, 30, an Indian Airlines commander who is married to an Italian and has two children, and Sanjay, 28, also married and an industrialist who has designed and produced an Indian compact car named "Maruti" (Tempest). Both Rajiv and Sanjay are products of Indira's marriage to Parsi Lawyer Feroze Gandni>, who died in 1960.

"All my life has been at the service of our people," Mrs. Gandhi said last week. That proud claim is partly correct. Moreover, the Prime Minister can rightfully claim that it was during her tenure that India became the indisputable superpower of the subcontinent (and a nuclear one to boot). By now Mrs. Gandhi has come to seem the embodiment of Mother India, to the point that many of her fellow citizens may find it hard to imagine anyone else in the exalted post she has held for nearly a decade. As last week's extraordinary events indicated, Mrs. Gandhi also finds it difficult to imagine anyone else serving as India's Prime Minister.

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