Narendra Modi and his top ministers had their political baptism by fire during the Emergency. The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and the Bharatiya Jana Sangh were in the crosshairs of the Indira Gandhi government, and their top leaders like Atal Bihari Vajpayee, L.K. Advani, Murli Manohar Joshi and Bhairon Singh Shekhawat were sent to jail.
While Modi went into hiding disguised as a sadhu or Sikh, student leader Arun Jaitley was under preventive detention for 19 months. Sushma Swaraj was active in legal teams that fought cases of Emergency detenues. The trio, along with present-day senior leaders like Rajnath Singh and Ravi Shankar Prasad, have intense Congress-phobia, which has its roots in their opposition to the politics and style of functioning of Indira Gandhi. They were actively involved in the Janata experiment, which dislodged Indira from power.
Yet, three and a half years of the Modi government has seen Indira become less of a target for criticism than other leaders of the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty. Admittedly, her death anniversary on October 31 was a low-key affair, as the government laid more emphasis on the birth anniversary of Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, India’s Iron Man, which is on the same day. But, otherwise, India’s only woman prime minister, who ruled for 16 years, has not been targeted the way her father, Jawaharlal Nehru, her son Rajiv, and her grandson Rahul has been.
There has been an intense effort to question the legacy of Nehru, who ruled for 17 years. The BJP has criticised his decisions on Kashmir, China, secularism and socialism. After the government gleefully took over the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library in Delhi, a steady deconstruction of the Nehru legacy is happening.
Illustration: Bhaskaran
But Modi’s muscular nationalism precludes similar criticism of Indira, who was vigorously opposed by the earlier generation of BJP leaders. Even the 1971 Shimla agreement, whereby she gave up territory in Pakistan under the control of the Indian Army, is not fodder for criticism, as the war saw the liberation of Bangladesh and the elimination of the Pak threat in the east. She also cocked a snook at the Chinese (who gave sleepless nights to Nehru and, later, to Modi) by annexing Sikkim.
Modi admires her tough style of functioning, and has brought out his own version of garibi hatao, the big vote catcher for Indira in 1971. He is also rough with his cabinet and allies, like Indira was known to have been. Even 33 years after her assassination, her image as a strong leader lingers. Attacking it does not provide the BJP the kind of political capital it accrues from its tirades against Nehru, Rajiv, Sonia Gandhi and Rahul, who are all ‘softies’ in the saffron lexicon.
sachi@theweek.in
