Nehru and the Gandhis - Implosion: India's Tryst with Reality - page 155

Pakistan into independent Bangladesh. Rajiv was accepted as the leader after his moth-
er's death, though he faced extensive opposition on policies from within the party. Sonia
Gandhi played it more cannily and waited until 1998 when the party was desperate for her
to become its saviour.
There was, however, a party revolt against her as a foreigner a year later. This led to a
split and the creation of the breakaway Nationalist Congress Party in May 1999 by, among
others, Sharad Pawar, the powerful politician from Maharashtra who became its leader, and
P.A. Sangma, a politician from Meghalaya in the north-east of India, who was later speak-
er of the Lok Sabha and stood unsuccessfully as a candidate to be president of India. The
BJP had been playing up the foreigner angle in 1999 and Sonia had called a meeting of
the party's central working committee to plan a rebuttal. Sangma electrified the meeting
by saying the feeling was shared by some in the Congress. 'We know nothing about you
or your parents,' he said. 'How do we defend you?' 29 Pawar added that perhaps the party
should declare that only an Indian born on Indian soil could head the government. Sonia
faced down the revolt, but the event seems to have coloured her tactics since then.
From Nehru to Rajiv
Nehru's first contribution was leading India into independence with Mahatma Gandhi. He
celebrated the moment in 1947 with a memorable speech that still echoes today, marking
India's 'tryst with destiny' awakening 'to life and freedom' at 'the stroke of the midnight
hour'. Many of his foreign and domestic policies, however, now appear to have been un-
wise, even destructive, though some may have been appropriate for their time. His contro-
versial economic centralism and cooperative approach to China are now generally regarded
as well-meaning but misguided. One biographer has described Nehru, who died a broken
man in May 1964 just 18 months after the China defeat, as 'greater than his deeds'. 30 That
seems an apt epitaph. A different first prime minister might have had fewer dreams and
made fewer mistakes, but he might not have matched the strong secular and democratic
course that Nehru and his fellow leaders set for India in 1947.
Following that 'greater than his deeds' thought, Indira Gandhi was not as great as she
should have been, and her deeds were more damaging than she probably intended. 31 Her
mistakes are generally seen as the actions of an insecure woman, desperate to build power
and relying too much on her malevolent, power-hungry younger son, Sanjay, who encour-
aged her to declare and sustain the 1975-77 State of Emergency. She increased her father's
socialist economic controls, though she did begin to unravel them in the early 1980s. 32 This
paved the way for the beginnings of economic liberalization.