Nayantara Sahgal on the Emergency and her rift with cousin Indira Gandhi that never quite healed

Indian Express

15 hours ago

IN HER study-and-TV room in Dehradun, the hills behind forming a lush screen, Nayantara Sahgal sits far away from the heat and dust of Delhi's politics. The rain has washed and given a fresh coat of green to the valley's shrubs and trees and slanted its way to her verandah, soaking the clothes left out to dry. But Sahgal wasn't always at such a distance from the rough and tumble of politics. Daughter of Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit, freedom fighter, politician, diplomat and Jawaharlal Nehru's sister, she grew up in a household infused with nationalist fervour and went on to chronicle it, capturing a nation's tumultuous journey. She never joined politics, choosing instead to write and comment on it, which brought her in conflict with her cousin Indira Gandhi.
In the years leading up to the proclamation of the Emergency on June 25, 1975, Sahgal spared neither the Congress nor Indira. 'The Emergency was a new moment in India's history. We had not had any authoritarian movement or anything like it till that time. I made my protest known by writing about it,' says Sahgal, author of over 20 works of fiction and nonfiction and a number of short stories and columns.
Sahgal was at the Indian YMCA in London with her mother, on her way from her son's wedding in Italy, when someone told them an Emergency had been declared in India. She and her mother decided to return home. The Emergency didn't exactly catch her by surprise though. 'I had seen authoritarianism coming because of the various signs that time,' says Sahgal, who turned 98 this May. After she became Prime Minister in 1966, Indira's tenure was marked with factionalism and a crisis within the Congress. The party split in 1969, resulting in all power resting in her and the stifling of all voices of opposition.
Sahgal's columns in The Sunday Standard, the Sunday section of The Indian Express in those days, signalled the gathering dark clouds. In a column titled 'A democratic revolution' (January 5, 1969), she wrote, 'There is the continually shocking fact that the party, which was in its great days dedicated to austerity and symbolised a crusade, has come down to horsetrading and all the tinsel paraphernalia of self-aggrandisement.'
Sahgal, who was perhaps the first woman political columnist in English in India, also sounded a warning against Indira's cult of personality. 'The mass rallies arranged daily at her residence are more characteristic of the unwholesome propaganda to project a Hitler or a Mussolini than an elected leader of a representative government. A popular leader has no need of such contrivances' (September 7, 1969).
The resultant breach with Indira, with whom she grew up at Anand Bhawan in Allahabad, was difficult. 'It was terrible. We were close cousins. I dearly loved her and I was her favourite cousin, so it was very difficult. But I couldn't keep my mouth shut when I saw wrongdoings, which I could clearly see was happening at that time,' says Sahgal, author of Indira Gandhi: Her Road to Power (1983).
Giving an honest opinion was a habit formed early. Her daughters — Nonika, who is visiting from Delhi, and Gita Sahgal, who lives with her — interject with a story. Sahgal was all of four when Mahatma Gandhi came to their home and her mother asked her to present him flowers. 'But he's so ugly,' she had blurted out. 'I was just a little girl. The point of the story is when I told my mother, isn't he ugly, he said to her, 'I hope she will always tell the truth'. Remarkable man, Gandhiji,' recounts Sahgal.
Growing up in a family of freedom fighters with her mother, father Ranjit Sitaram Pandit and uncle Nehru, going in and out of prison, Sahgal changed schools often, studying at St Mary's in Allahabad, Woodstock In Mussoorie and finishing at a Hindi-medium school. 'It was a lot of chop and change,' she smiles. And in a move unusual for those times, she and her sister were sent off to America to study at Wellesley College. Those were heady days where they brushed shoulders with the likes of writer Pearl S Buck, artist Frida Kahlo and singer Paul Robeson. Coming back to India, Sahgal married young and took to writing with zeal and discipline. Her first book Prison and Chocolate Cake (1954) weaves the personal and the political, recounting her growing up years and India's struggle for Independence. 'If my earlier books were about the making of India, the latter ones were about the unmaking of India,' says Sahgal whose Rich Like Us (1985) remains her best-known Emergency novel, for which she received the Sahitya Akademi Award.
After she lost her father, Nehru became another parent to her. 'If you ask me who was the noblest man that I have ever known, it was him — our beloved mamu,' says Sahgal, her voice thick with emotion. Black-and-white photographs of Nehru dot the house among other portraits of herself and her family, keeping alive a legacy that's both of a nation and a family.
It was against what she saw Indira's dismantling of Nehru's and the Congress's legacy that she consistently spoke out. 'I remember when I was opposing Indira, I think for the nationalisation of banks, a man said to me, 'but she is your cousin, she is your elder sister, how can you do this'? I said, if my elder sister does something wrong, it's my duty to write against that,' says Sahgal. She continued speaking out in the decades that followed, even returning her Sahitya Akademi Award in 2015 to protest what she saw as a growing climate of intolerance and shrinking space for dissent in the country.
In the years leading up to the Emergency, as the students' movement led by Jayaprakash Narayan (JP) gathered momentum, Sahgal, too, became associated with it, travelling through Bihar and writing on it. It was the only period in her life that she became a political activist. 'I was always doing things which would keep me out of power and which no one seemed to be doing,' says Sahgal. Later, when JP was in jail and his health was deteriorating, on his family's request, she even drafted a letter to be sent to Indira on his condition.
In her family though, she was the only to express her dissent publicly for the Emergency. Her mother, though disturbed by it, didn't speak out till much later and her two sisters, both wives of diplomats, stayed quiet too. But her mother never cautioned her against speaking out. 'She knew I had to do what I had to do and with which she completely sympathised,' says Sahgal. She was equally understanding of her personal life too — her divorce from Gautam Sahgal and her subsequent relationship with EN Mangat Rai, a civil servant, whom she married in 1979.
But those difficult days left their mark. 'Professionally, it affected me badly. People were afraid of me. I became a non-person. No one would publish you,' she says, of the days of press censorship. But Sahgal continued writing for The Indian Express and The Statesman, two papers that stood up to the Emergency. She would also send information abroad to journalists, for instance, about the population control drive helmed by Sanjay Gandhi that forced people into sterilisation camps. A Situation in New Delhi that she wrote during that period found no publishers but was later serialised in The London Magazine and finally published in 1977.
Her dissent left a shadow on her personal life as well. Her association with him was one of the reasons that led to a falling out between Mangat Rai and the government. 'But that was just one of the reasons. The other reason was because he was a man of integrity who didn't become a 'committed' officer the way the government wanted,' says daughter Gita, a writer and a journalist.
And the relationship with Indira remained fractured. 'We were one family. I had a relationship with both Rajiv and Sanjay, with Rajiv it continued,' says Sahgal. She didn't see Indira after the Emergency but wrote to her when Sanjay died. 'I am in touch with Sonia.'
Much as she had seen the Emergency coming, Sahgal also anticipated that it wouldn't last long. 'They wanted to keep themselves popular with the West and an Emergency is the wrong thing to do in those circumstances,' says Sahgal. After the Emergency was over, she was part of the Varghese Commission, which was formed to review the autonomy of All India Radio (AIR) and Doordarshan (DD) in 1977-78. To Sahgal, a founding member of the People's Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL), the imposition of the Emergency was an assault on the idea of India, a betrayal of her legacy.
'To people like us, India was an idea. I once called it a glittering idea in our imagination. It was something special, unlike the dictatorships we saw around us. So to have that tarnished in any way was very hurtful in a very personal way because that was not our India. Such things didn't happen in our India,' she says.