Customer Reviews

Indira: The Life of Indira Nehru Gandhi

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This is an exceptional and insightful historical biography. The origin's of Indira's fragile psyche are documented and explain her erratic and unpredictable tenure as India's leader. Yet figures as disparate as Margaret Thatcher and Khuswant Singh were admirers of Indira, revealing the power of her persona and charisma. If I were to recommend one book for a Western audience on post-colonial India, this book would be it.

A fantastic piece of journalism!! A very well written account of one of India's greatest leaders. I have not lived long enough to testify to the truth of everything that is written (my parents could!!) but from what I know of Indian history, and from what I have seen around me, a very accurate potrayal of perhaps India's most charismatic prime minister. The book really charts her rise, fall and re-emergence on the political scene, delves into the feelings behind her every action. I had always wanted more about Indira Gandhi than what was available in the papers and magazines and this book tells me all that I wanted to know. Perhaps the only place where it is lacking is that Ms.Frank deals with the last 2 yrs of her life in very few pages. Perhaps more detail was warranted there, but her early life, her relationships with her husband, Feroze Gandhi, and her father, Nehru, are vividly potrayed and it is these parts, and the story of her rise to power, which makes this book a masterpiece. In my opinion, every Indian, and anyone who is interested in Indian history, should read this book. Better still, buy it!!

I have read only a few sections so far and I am mesmerized. I feel as if I am back in Indira's time and place.

The research and the annotations make it a very authoritative biography. It contains a must-read account of the ups and downs of her relationship with her husband Feroze (not available anywhere else) and with her father and mother.

Indira emerges as a very lonely, tragic figure.

I feel energized as I read the progressive views of Nehru. The passages where he describes his expectations for Indira - to work in public life yet also be financially independent are empowering. The great thinkers of that day were more forward-thinking and openminded than most people are even today!

This biograhy is long overdue and is comparable in stature to that of John Adams by David McCullough.

This is one of the best biographies on Indira Gandhi. Most of the other books on indira authored by Indian journalists tend to focus primarily on her political activities with a brief summary of her childhood and adult years. This is by far the most comprehensive attempt at combining the various threads and presenting the story of a normal human being. Katherine's description of Indira's years at Anand Bhawan, Europe, marriage to Feroze read like a best seller fiction. Meticulous research, analysis and an objective attempt to understand the influences in Indira's life prior to her prime ministership is the hallmark.

Missing is the analysis in understanding why a shy, reserved person longing for anonymity suddenly craves for power, and seeks power with scant regard for the institutions set-up by her father, leaders she grew up with. Going by Indira's example,I am disappointed that despite having the best role models (Gandhi, Nehru), best education ( shantiniketan, finishing schools, oxford), global exposure, immense wealth, Indira in her latter years behaved very much like an average middle class Mother, the book unfortunately fails to provide a rationale for this abnormal behavior.

Still a great attempt from a non-indian to understand and piece together the life of the most charismatic and powerful Indian leader in the last 30 years.

This is a very good account of Indira Gandhi's life. I felt very sad after reading it. I knew already about her life and politics as being an Indian. But this book gave me a very comprehensive account of her life, except her last couple of years, which I think were
hurried. I think that spicy tidbits of alleged affairs about her, Nehru and her husband should have been avoided as they distract from the larger point and have given her worshippers an excuse to discount the book. Description of India's early life before she became the Prime Minister is very engaging. You can see how the seeds of her later-day paranoia and siege mentality were sown during her unhappy childhood and her estrangement with her husband. You feel sad that in the end that privileged upbringing, lots of potential, education at the best schools and colleges and tutoring by her father in democratic traditions did not amount to much. She achieved little and destroyed much.

It is amazing that in a vibrant democracy, she was able to undermine every political institution, which is essential for a democracy. How she instigated conflicts in Assam, Kashmir and Punjab. How she shamelessly went around dismissing democratically elected state govts and playing one group against another. How she let loose her son, Sanjay as an extra-constitutional authority to subvert judiciary and beaurocracy. She surrounded herself with sycophants and boot-lickers. In her own words, she herself admits, "men who may not be very bright but on whom I can rely"? Only bright spot in her career was the liberation Bangladesh. She used every weapon available to stay in the power. In the end, the forces she helped unleashed consumed her. Even her son Rajiv who became Prime Minister after her violent death was killed Srilankan Tamil Tigers whom she nourished. It might seem like a poetic justice in the end but India was/is the big loser having lost so much and still fighting those forces.

History will not be kind to her and I hope that Indian people would not let another Indira immerge on the political scene.

Indira Ghandi was the prime minister of India from the 1960s and 1980s. She is the daughter of India's first PM, Nehru, and was raised in part by Mahatma Gandhi. Confusingly, however, she married a completely unrelated Feroze Gandhi who granted her that famous last name. This is a monster of a book at over 500 pages, copiously annotated and extremely detailed.

The most striking thing I found reading the book was how weak and non-existent Indira seems in her youth and early adulthood. She is unendingly ill with pulmonary diseases, painfully thin, does poorly at school, and floats around Europe and India with her family (she attended the world's first international school, l'Ecole Internationale, in Switzerland for League of Nations brats). She has no normal childhood or youth as the whole Nehru family is deeply involved in the Indian independence movement. They all periodically have to face jail time (a veritable rite-of-passage) for their activities, which the British government calls seditious.

She marries an ambitious, hot-headed and energetic Feroze Gandhi in 1942 despite the misgivings of her father Nehru. Though they were sincerely in love and they produced two sons, the marriage proved a miserable one. Indira was more committed to her father's political work (who becomes PM of independent India) than her husband (who quickly begins having a number of a more-or-less open affairs). I was struck by how Indira lives for others, she has no independent personality, not until in 1959, at age *fourty-two*, she deems that she has repaid her debt to her family and must live her own life. Tragically good timing, because both her husband Feroze and her father Nehru would die within the next few years.

Then Indira comes into her own, she drifts into the prime ministership in 1966 as the previous once dies. She quickly personalises politics massively: she avoids the party organization her father had created and appeals directly to the people with populist programs such as bank nationalizations and removal of aristocratic privileges. She is massively re-elected in 1967 despite a vast coalition against her running on the motto "Remove Indira". She skillfully responded with the motto "Remove Poverty". As the situation in Bangladesh (then a part of Pakistan, though 1,200 km away) degenerated into genocide as the the West Pakistani military elite reasserted its rule in the country in 1971, Indira acted decisively to attract international attention. She eventually fought a brief 2 week war, short and successful, to liberate the country. She became massively popular earning the title "Empress of India".

Though she governed over other successes, the investments of the "Green Revolution" to make India's food supply self-sufficient were finally paying off and India exploded its first atom bomb ("Smiling Buddha"), she did not fulfill her promises on poverty. By the mid-70s inflation was rising, strikes were paralyzing the economy and an anti-Indira coalition was making strong headway calling for her extra-constitutional overthrow. Indira had already eroded much of India's democracy, weakening the constitution, politicizing the judiciary and bureaucracy, and circumventing political parties. In response she declared "the Emergency", effectively making herself dictator, censuring the press, imprisoning thousands of opponents and postponing elections... but trains ran on time and inflation fell. Indira grew increasingly isolated, relying on her corrupt and ambitious son Sanjay whose political influence grew. She eventually relented, holding elections in 1977 and losing badly.

Indira, her son Sanjay and their cronies then had to face 3 years of vengeful and badly organized trials on their misdeeds during the Emergency. They emerged basically unscathed, the very unpopular Sanjay died in 1980 just before the elections in an airplane crash which, though it devastated Indira, placed her in a perfect position to win those elections (the sympathy vote counts). Indira seems pretty aimless during her final term, unable to handle the communal violence affecting Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs and Harijans (also called Dalits or Untouchables, the lowest of Hindu castes), especially in Kashmir and the Sikh-populated Punjab.

In 1984 as a Sikh terrorist group had been rampaging across Punjab from their base in the Golden Temple (the holiest of Sikh holy places), she launched a military operation to retake the temple and kill the terrorists. She succeeded, with massive civilian casualties and the temple heavily desecrated. Sikhs around the country were enraged and, a month later, two of her own Sikh bodyguards shot some 30 bullets into her body at point blank range. Her other son, Ranjiv, became the new prime minister. Over the 3 days after Indira's death, some 3,000 Sikhs were killed, tens of thousands more expelled from their neighborhoods, in anti-Sikh pogroms throughout India.

Overall Indira comes across as a fairly unimpressive leader. She seems to have been very lucky to have been Nehru's daughter, not had terribly coherent ideas politically and been very dangerous to India's democratic politics. However, she had the ability to really connect with the common Indian and like de Gaulle, another leader with extra-constitutional and authoritarian tendencies, ultimately favored a return to democracy and could not govern without the approval of "the nation".

In the book, Indira and her family appear very flawed but touchingly human, especially as a youth: they have petty disputes and feuds, she reads voraciously, complains of at the size of her nose and the darkness of her skin, she has few friends and her life is distinctly unordered. One word of warning she spoke to a son I thought particularly poignant: "There are millions of people in the world but most of them just drift along, afraid of death, and even more afraid of life."

This biography is strong on the first part of Indira's life -- her disjointed childhood and dedication to her father, Nehru, and his democratic ideals. When she becomes prime minister, however, the book becomes a series of facts about her sudden about-face in creating an anti-democratic, power-grabbing, corrupt regime. There is a lot of information but not much interpretation, or at times enough explanation of factions and conflicts that have divided India. Nevertheless, for someone who knows little about the country, this provided an introduction.

Result of an obviously (too) meticulous study, the book reveals a very objective account of one of the leading female figures of the world... The emphasis is not limited to her political life and therefore you understand almost all underlying motives in her most absurd decisions. Throughout the book, you both love and hate Indira Nehru Gandhi but most of the time, you pity her for the life she, afterall, did not really wanted to have but couldn't refuse either... There is struggle, war, peace, politics, Byzantine games, democracy, dictatorship but happiness in this life....

An interesting and quite detailed story of Indira's life, and the Nehru's in particular.
Katerine Frank narrates facts and hearsay with impartiality, leaving the readers to come to their own conclusion.
The most interesting part is the gradual introduction of Indira into Indian politics and her ascent up through the coteries of the congress party, which she ruled with an iron hand at the end of the struggle.
By reading this book, One would be able to better admire indira's strong handling of foreign affairs, and the aggressive strength she showed in making india have a say on the world political map. In particular, her role in the formation of bangladesh, and the transformation of india into a nuclear power.
Leaders such as these are nowhere to be seen in india today.This book is a fitting tribute to this great personality.

It may very well be that Sonia cared for Maneka's child during the day, and Indira slept with him by night, but before painting this uncaring picture of Maneka, did Katherine attempt to get the other side of the story?

Even if she had been refused an interview, perhaps she should have attempted to give her readers a third-party (her own?) view of what was probably transpiring in the Nehru-Gandhi household (as she does in numerous other places), rather than passing along what is probably Sonia Gandhi's view of the situation.

Or perhaps Katherine didn't really care whether she maligned Maneka, the not-so-powerful politician?