When Indira Gandhi became prime minister of India in early 1966 she had nowhere to go but up. Her first spell in power was unremarkable; but she was protected by the theory of low expectations.

The Congress, as an institution, which it still was, also cushioned the inexperience of the prime minister, surrounding her with a heavyweight cabinet in which she was less than an equal and even heavier weight chief ministers and regional satraps who commanded Delhi to listen to them rather than the other way around. They all made a fatal mistake, symbolised by the contemptuous phrase used by the acerbic socialist leader Ram Manohar Lohia, when they dismissed her as a "gungee guriya" -- literally, a dumb doll.

Her first general election was a disaster. The Congress managed a weak majority in the Lok Sabha and was defeated in every state between Punjab and Bengal. Defeat, characteristically, brought out the best in her. She understood quickly that the voter had tired of the Congress promise because the party had not delivered on either poverty or peace. The mid-'60s were characterised by a famine of pre-1947 proportions; communal riots had lit up the sky in city after northern city; naxalites had launched their prairie fire across the nation; and north and south had clashed in a bitter language war. Every doomsayer's book was being reprinted.

Mrs Gandhi belonged to what might be called the second generation of those who had fought for freedom: the children of men and women who had challenged the British over salt and demanded that the foreigner quit India. She knew that the Congress had already lost her own generation; and the only way forward was to resurrect the hope that had died. This was the easy part.

Her genius lay not in diagnosis but in the prescription. She knew that the Congress had to be reinvented if it were to survive. The story of that reinvention has been told too often to bear repetition; suffice it to say that warriors of the ilk of Kamaraj, S.K. Patil, Atulya Ghosh et al, would not have been demolished if they had not underestimated her. In the end she proved to be clever, and they too clever by half. The establishment she had defeated -- a sort of India's Delhi beltway -- simply could not believe that the Young Turks she had energised would demolish the Pashas running the empire.

The venerable Frank Moraes, covering the 1971 elections, prophesied her political end in a series of articles titled Myth and Reality. Like so many others, he confused the two. Perhaps, after 1971, she had nowhere to go but down.

1971 was her finest hour: triumph in a general election and an astounding feat of diplomatic-military skill by which Bangladesh became liberated. Atal Bihari Vajpayee described her as Durga, yet another instance in his career when he said the right thing at the right time.

The extraordinary thing is how quickly it all began to go wrong. The oldest adage in the business was proven right: power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. As long as she was in the dispensable mould, she was superb; the moment she became indispensable in her own eyes, mistakes tumbled over one another until they forced an unprecedented and unbelievable Emergency upon the nation.

There were traces of paranoia in the economic management of the country, as for instance when D.P. Dhar proposed a takeover of the wheat trade. Taxes on a class that could have become the creative dynamo of the economy, the professionals, became punitive while political corruption escalated and the non-productive sectors were fattened in the name of socialism. Propaganda became more important than reality, and Mrs Gandhi finally became a victim to her own propaganda. It was sinister political ailment, not least because the 1971 class of lean and hungry advisers gave way to men who were fat with self-importance and fed her every lie, rumour and mirage in the name of loyalty. In 1977 the people brought the Empress back to street level.

Mrs Gandhi's greatest benefactors were her opponents. Her opponents in Congress wore blinkers made of the cotton pillows on which they sat during party meetings.

Her enemies outside were even worse. They were so corrupt and stupid during their first opportunity in power, in the state governments of the north from Punjab to Bengal that they scarred our language permanently with terms like Aya Ram and Gaya Ram.

They repeated the exercise, in silliness if not always in corruption, when the Janata Party formed the government in Delhi in 1977. It is a government remembered today by Morarji Desai's urine. Little wonder that the voter literally begged Mrs Gandhi to return in the winter of 1980-81.

This time, she had nowhere to go but to her family. Sanjay Gandhi marked the arrival of inexperience into the highest levels of decision-making. That was the real tragedy. His youth could have proved useful for both Mrs Gandhi and her party if it had been directed purely into an appropriate level; but Sanjay was making, and soon unmaking, chief ministers. His death seemed to still her. Her only real answer was personal. She persuaded her older son Rajiv to become her successor. Party democracy as a concept was over.

Mrs Gandhi had in 1971 cloaked the fragility of the Congress; 10 years later, not only had the party's institutions withered but the systems of decision-making, which had controlled the sensitive balance of our nation, had started getting dismantled. The imperial prime ministership, formally launched in 1975, continued, albeit without censorship or arrests. The fields of Punjab turned red with blood; the skies went up in flames. A hope that had arisen in India beside a red rose was, alas, brutally snuffed out by its own guardians.

If Mrs Gandhi had been less than the genius she was, she would also have been mourned less. History tends to have little time for death. But generations have a lot of time for regret. Those who lived through the era of Indira Gandhi know what she achieved; they also know what she might have achieved but for the flaw that makes heroes into themes of tragic poetry.

Mrs Gandhi started as Joan of Arc, and ended as King Lear. But in those 18 years of politics and power she not only changed India, she even changed Pakistan.

M.J. Akbar is editor in chief, The Asian Age, and author of four books, The Siege Within: Challenges to a Nation's Unity; Nehru: The Making of India; Riot After Riot and Kashmir: Behind the Vale.