WHO are independent India's greatest leaders? Little doubt about two of them Mohandas Karamchand ('Mahatma') Gandhi, and Jawaharlal Nehru, the country's first prime minister. They both gave India a firm ethical and democratic foundation.

Despite his crippling socialist legacy, his unfulfilled promise of a plebiscite in Kashmir and his acceptance of China's invasion of Tibet, Nehru was a visionary who charted an independent, non-aligned course for his country during the Cold War. He made Indians proud of being Indian.

But what about Nehru's daughter, Indira Gandhi, who became prime minister in 1966, after the short-lived leadership of Lal Bahadur Shastri (he died of a heart attack in Tashkent, during the peace negotiations following the 1965 Indo-Pak war)? How will history treat her?

This question is being hotly debated in India, since Oct 31 marked the quarter century of her death. On that morning in 1984, two of her Sikh bodyguards gunned her down in her garden as she was walking to give a TV interview to Peter Ustinov, the famous English actor and producer. Her assassination was followed by the worst communal riots since independence. Around 5,000 Sikhs were butchered, most of them in the capital city, Delhi, in an orgy of horrific and numbing violence. (My father, Khushwant Singh, and my mother, were forced to take refuge in the house of the Swedish ambassador as Sikhs were being killed all around them, with the police doing nothing).

This was followed by over a decade of Sikh terrorism which took the lives of some 30,000 persons, mostly innocent civilians.

A few months earlier, Indira Gandhi had authorised the army's storming of the Golden Temple in Amritsar, the holiest shrine of the Sikhs. It had been virtually taken over by Sikh fundamentalists-cum-terrorists, who were demanding 'Khalistan', an independent Sikh state.

Operation Bluestar, as the army action was code-named, was Indira Gandhi's biggest blunder. It caused the deaths of hundreds — the exact figure is still unknown — of innocent pilgrims caught in the crossfire, along with soldiers and terrorists. Bluestar signed Indira Gandhi's death warrant.

Oct 31, and the days of anti-Sikh violence that followed, have left an indelible black mark on the 62 years that India has been independent. Fortunately, representative government has great healing powers and it is a tribute to Indian democracy that Sikhs eventually came back into the mainstream and a Sikh now heads the country.

Indira Gandhi took centre stage, described as a gunghi guriya (dumb doll). After Shastri's death, the most obvious candidate for prime ministership was Morarji Desai, an experienced, self-righteous and puritanical man. He was distrusted by those who mattered in the ruling Congress party, who felt that they could manipulate the dumb doll and thereby maintain control over the country. So, they engineered her victory and his defeat.

Indira Gandhi, however, turned out to have a mind of her own. She split the Congress party and using populist measures (abolition of the privy purses and nationalisation of banks) and catchy slogans ('gharibi hatao'), she emerged all-powerful, sidelining even those who had made her prime minister.

Her moment of greatest glory came with the crisis in East Pakistan. She was helped by Pakistan's inept military dictator, Gen Yahya Khan. The surrender of thousands of Pakistan troops in Dhaka and the creation of Bangladesh, capped her triumph. She was now empress of India and could do no wrong.

Unfortunately, it was all downhill for her after that. A high court judgment threatened to unseat her in parliament on a technicality. Instead of waiting for an appeal against it, on the advice of her thuggish younger son, Sanjay, she imposed an internal 'emergency', locking up many of her opponents, imposing press censorship and suspending the constitution.

In 1977, she lifted the 'emergency' and announced a general election, expecting to win. She, her son and her party lost badly. To her credit, she graciously withdrew from the political scene.

However, the Janata Party government that replaced her (a hotchpotch, led by Desai, who fought among themselves) turned out to be such a disaster that, soon afterwards, she was back in power. But in 1980, Sanjay's death while flying a stunt plane, seems to have disoriented her. She lost her famed political touch and the Punjab tragedy followed.

Indira Gandhi is still revered by the rural and urban masses, even more than her father, who has become a distant memory. Some of the elite also admired her for her style and grace, though she was no intellectual.

Was she good for India? That is a much more difficult question to answer.

On the economic front, she was a failure. While much of the world was moving from socialism to a more liberalised economy — the UK under Margaret Thatcher for instance — she continued with nationalisation, purely to keep herself in power.

India's economy grew by a pathetic 3.5 per cent annually under her, jokingly referred to as the 'Hindu rate of growth'. Income tax rates at the top level were an intolerable 98 per cent, giving little incentive for businessmen to expand or innovate. Since imports were heavily taxed, the protected Indian industry produced substandard goods.

Corruption increased under her rule, as did the black money economy. When this was once pointed out to her, she airily replied that corruption was a “universal phenomenon”.

At the same time, there is no doubt that she commanded respect, even awe, both at home and abroad. At home, perhaps it was because her main opponents, those like Morarji Desai, were lightweights. In comparison, she towered over them like a colossus. US President Richard Nixon and his secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, knew that she could not be trifled with. As for Pakistan, she proved to be a formidable adversary, getting the better of whoever was in power in that country.

The writer is former editor of the Reader's Digest and the Indian Express. He is working on a biography of Indira Gandhi.

singh.84@hotmail.com