Growing Up with INDIRA GANDHI

Gandhi's principal legacy remains the systematic replacement of institutional governance with the vicious precedents of personalised rule

- Mukul Kesavan

THE death of Sitaram Yechury threw up a black-andwhite photo of him in 1977, reading an indictment of Indira Gandhi in her presence. In that photo, Yechury, the president of the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) Students' Union at the time, is asking that she resign as chancellor of the university because she had lost the post-Emergency general election, and she held that honorary office by virtue of being the prime minister of India. Yechury had been jailed during the Emergency and this blackand-white picture of a tousled student leader in an oversized kurta-pyjama, publicly holding a prime minister to account as she looks on, smiling, seems an image from another country...the safely distant past.

I was 20 when that photo was taken, five years younger than Yechury and much too prudent to have risked imprisonment through my second and third years as an undergraduate in Delhi University, but I remember the sense of release when All India Radio announced in an evening broadcast that the Congress (I) had lost the election, and Gandhi, her seat. I was living in Delhi University at the time, with my aunt, who was a lecturer there. When I relayed the news, she was still for a moment. Hai bechari (poor thing), she said, and went back to combing her hair.

For her and my parents' generation, Indira was still Panditji's daughter. Even as they were oppressed by her authoritarianism, she remained a living reminder of the early promise of the republic. I was nine years old when she became prime minister. My generation was defined by her time at the top, from 1966 when she succeeded Lal Bahadur Shastri when he died unexpectedly in Tashkent, to 1984 when she was assassinated. My cohort's understanding of the purpose of the Indian state and India's place in the world, our idea of India was either constituted by her government's rhetoric or shaped by our opposition to it.