Nehru and the Gandhis - Implosion: India's Tryst with Reality - page 156

Most damagingly, she also opened the doors to widespread corruption, which has eaten
devastatingly into politics, business and everyday life. This began the undermining of in-
stitutions such as the civil service and the judiciary, leading to the politicization of the
civil service and crony capitalism. She also mishandled the Sikhs' Khalistan independ-
ence movement in the Punjab, allowing it to escalate until she ordered the army into the
Golden Temple, the Sikhs' holiest shrine in Amritsar. In foreign relations, she understand-
ably saw the old Soviet Union as a friend that had never let the country down. She prac-
tised damaging hegemony in South Asia, though she won massive popularity with the 1971
Bangladesh war.
Strangely, Indira is seen more favourably abroad as a great though flawed leader who did
her best to manage a massive poverty-stricken and fractured country. But there was more
to her than that. She tried more than any government before or since to protect India's en-
vironment that has been progressively plundered since independence in 1947. 33 She is also
remembered for strengthening the confidence of Indian women, and for her ability to reach
out to people and to care. Rescuing a disastrous and corrupt business escapade in vehicle
manufacturing that had been started by Sanjay Gandhi, she initiated Maruti Udyog, 34 which
became a successful small car joint venture with Suzuki of Japan and triggered a gradual
modernization of India's engineering industry.
Rajiv Gandhi tried to modernize a highly resistant country and curb corruption. Fascin-
ated by technology, he encouraged developments in electronics and telecommunications,
and began to computerize government departments and election campaigns. He inspired In-
dia's youth with a vision of a modern India. For eighteen months, he could do virtually no
wrong. J.R.D. Tata, the veteran head of Tata, praised him by comparing his methods with
those of his mother: 'You paid money to the Congress and you were in. You got everything
you wanted - (industrial) licences, growth, the support of the party. That was the policy.
Now Rajiv Gandhi has changed all that,' Tata said in a magazine interview. 35 Gandhi was
even praised after his first year by Atal Bihari Vajpayee, the BJP's president and later prime
minister, who told me, somewhat mischievously: 'He has made a good beginning. India is
moving. As opposed to Mrs Gandhi, he is good.' 36
But India was not ready for Rajiv's vision of the future, and he was quickly dragged
down by vested interests that preferred things as they were and blocked his reforms. Ini-
tially he tried to clean up the government and disbanded some of the networks of his moth-
er's regime, dismissing Pranab Mukherjee, who had been Indira's finance and commerce
minister, and R.K. Dhawan, who had wielded immense power running her office. (Both
later worked their way back to the centre of Congress politics. Mukherjee became a minis-
ter in the 2004 and 2009 governments and president of India in 2012.) But Gandhi was hit
by the debilitating Bofors corruption scandal in 1987, which wounded him politically and
continued to haunt the Gandhis. In April 2012, the Swedish police chief who had been in