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COVER STORY: EXCLUSIVE OPINION POLL
MOOD OF THE NATION
MISSING A LEADER
Who is the best Prime Minister that India has ever
had?
By Swapan Dasgupta
In a country as
diverse and treacherously complex as India, leadership has many different
attributes and follows different idioms. Writing some four decades or
so ago, one India hand from Britain identified three clear patterns-the
modern, the traditional and the saintly.
With his arrogant impatience for the old and
fanatical devotion to what he perceived was both rational and aesthetic,
Jawaharlal Nehru epitomised India's modern, cosmopolitan quest. Charan
Singh-the proud Jat from Uttar Pradesh-was the archetypal traditionalist.
Rooted in kinship, he imparted clout to rural populism. After the Mahatma,
Jayaprakash Narayan came to symbolise saintliness. He made a deep impression
when politics became a real encounter between the forces of good and evil
and then faded into the sunset-revered and well forgotten.
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INDIRA GANDHI 41
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JAWAHARLAL NEHRU 13
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A.B. VAJPAYEE 11
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LAL BAHADUR SHASTRI 9
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OTHERS 16; REST: DON'T KNOW/CAN'T SAY
All figures in per cent |
Yet, there was another idiom of leadership that
India looked up to, an idiom that never passed the test of squeamish respectability.
It offended every canon of the country's projected self-image. It was
amoral, unflinching, imperious and made a virtue of expediency. It was
the idiom of ruthlessness that was personified by Indira Gandhi.
Nearly 28 years after her death, the memory
of Indira is intact in the popular imagination. Nehru may have ruled for
17 years and created the institutions of democratic India, but when it
comes to choosing the best prime minister India has ever had, the finding
of the India Today-ORG-MARG opinion poll is unambiguous: Indira Gandhi.
The choice doesn't stem from longevity of tenure
alone. History isn't assessed either in a vacuum or on the strength of
moral absolutes. It is entirely a function of the present. If India deifies
the leadership of Indira today, it is less on account of her tangible
achievements and more on the strength of what she symbolised-a ruthless
and defiant exercise of power.
Indira wasn't about ideology. Her socialism that
had the fellow travellers crawling as cheer-leaders was only peripherally
grounded in a vision. It was entirely an instrument of control. From the
treasury to the judiciary and from cm to dm she stood for personalised
autarchy. Autonomy, today's buzzword, didn't exist in her lexicon. She
didn't care to "manage" contradictions, only manipulate them
when expedient and suppress them when timely. She had no permanent allies,
only a heightened sense of self-interest.
One day she would court Bal Thackeray and pulverise
him the next day. She would use Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale to outflank
the Akalis and trigger Operation Bluestar when he got out of hand. If
she was uncompromisingly secular in 1972, she was unabashedly Hindu a
decade later. She had the ability to keep friends and foes alike in a
state of permanent anticipation.
Indira belonged to an age of absolute majorities,
an age when the Constitution was a negotiable instrument and an age of
regulated information. She would have been dangerously out of place in
today's fractured polity and media intrusiveness. Perhaps that is why
her real elevation to the status of Durga is entirely posthumous.
In the imagined Indira, the people of India
identify resolve, strength and patriotic ruthlessness. At a time when
terrorists call the shots in Jammu, provincial chieftains bargain for
ministerial berths and a Pakistani ruler can get away with insulting India
on Indian soil, Indira has come to be perceived as the likely avenger.
She wouldn't have stomached the insults, digested the assaults on nationhood
and capitulated to the blackmailers and hijackers. Her nuclear India would
have brooked no nonsense.
The worship of Indira is the cry of frustration
of an India demanding the restoration of national dignity from an effete
leadership that had promised to be different.
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