I was only five. Indira Gandhi had just taken over as prime minister in January 1966. My father, HY Sharada Prasad, had joined the Prime Minister’s Secretariat as deputy information advisor. My mother took my kid brother and me to the get together Mrs Gandhi held at Teen Murti House. My brother was bundled up against the January cold in parkas. She walked up to him while he
was crawling on the lawns and asked: “How is the little mountaineer?” Then she challenged all of us to a race. That is my earliest memory of her.
My father was later to recount how on the drive back from Rashtrapati Bhavan after her swearing in she was feeling very thirsty. But found her 1 Safdarjung Road home locked. Mrs Gandhi had to ask a neighbour for a glass of water. She expressed her displeasure to her old family retainer, who turned around and berated her: “Khaamosh ho jao, beti. pradhaan mantriyon ko chillanah nahin chahiye (It does not suit a PM to yell).”
I also remember when she hosted a reception for the Indian cricket team which had returned victorious from England in 1971. She encouraged all us children to take autographs of the cricketers. Later she signed my autograph book and made me feel very important. She also invited us whenever she hosted receptions for the Indian hockey team.
She invited all children of her staff to view the Peter Sellers comedy film, The Party. She enjoyed it greatly, and often repeated Sellers’ memorable line: “In India we do not think who we are; we know who we are.”
Mrs Gandhi was a constant doodler and illustrator. The several handwritten notes she sent to my father would invariably have doodles of various people, animals and flowers.
She would also pass on foreign magazines after she had finished reading them, and we would see that she had solved all crossword and other puzzles in them. She probably solved four to five difficult cryptic crosswords every day.
My father was a strict vegetarian, and Mrs Gandhi was keenly aware of how he suffered whenever he accompanied her on her foreign trips. At a state banquet in Europe, she found the vegetable entrée which she had just been served was in fact cooked in meat broth.
She interrupted her conversation with the host prime minister and whispered to the waiter that he should not serve the entrée to my father, but instead to serve him fruit salad and yoghurt.
Mrs Gandhi often discussed her childhood with my father. She would recount how her mother would be insulted and humiliated by her aunts for not being westernized enough. She resented her father not standing up for her mother against his sisters, and in fact for neglecting her mother during her long illnesses.
She recounted that just after her parents were arrested she ran to their empty bedroom and threw herself on their bed sobbing. Her aunt shooed her off their bed and scolded her harshly for even daring to climb on to bhai’s (Jawaharlal) bed.
This was the start of her antipathy towards her aunts, who often taunted her for being gawky. When she wanted to marry Feroze Gandhi, Jawaharlal asked her to consult his sisters. “How little my father understood me,” she remarked to my father.
The period from early 1974 onwards was a trying time for my father. Although he never discussed his official work with my mother or me, we could feel the tension he was under. More than once he offered Mrs Gandhi his resignation, but she refused to accept it. PN Dhar and Gopalaswami Parthasarathi were under similar tension and wanted to quit. They all went to PN Haksar, who told them not to resign under any circumstances, adding: “We must all stay within the system and fight. If we are not there, there will be no one left to counter the influence of the people at her residence. We will all feel morally superior and assuage our consciences if we resign, but outside the system we will count for nothing, and there will be no one left to stem the rot.”
At the declaration of Emergency, the only government officials present were BN Pande, PN Dhar, and my father. PN Dhar and my father remarked to each other that they had been witness to an evil act. My father again offered his resignation in protest against the censorship of the press, but she refused to accept it, adding she had several cogent reasons for imposing the Emergency. To overcome his objections, she showed him some intelligence reports and transcripts of intercepts. Some of these related to Jayaprakash Narayan exhorting the armed forces to revolt and to the sources funding George Fernandes. Then when Sheikh Mujibur Rehman was assassinated on 15 August 1975, she told my father: “Now you know why I was compelled to impose the Emergency. India was next.”
The Emergency was a tense time for us especially since my maternal uncle, KS Radhakrishna, who was a key aide of Jayaprakash Narayan, had been jailed. The key interlocutors for the negotiations between Indira Gandhi and Jayaprakash Narayan were PN Dhar and my father on behalf of Mrs Gandhi, and my maternal uncle, KS Radhakrishna on behalf of JP. PN Dhar had known JP long before he joined Mrs Gandhi’s staff and had won the confidence and trust of JP. Some of the negotiations in fact took place at home, when my brother and I would be told to go out and play.
The differences between Indira Gandhi and Jayaprakash Narayan turned out to be trivial, even petty. My father was one of the people who accompanied her to the crash site of Sanjay Gandhi as soon as she got the news of the crash. He later remarked on her remarkable self control and iron resolve in not showing her grief publicly. After a short while, she went to visit the family of Sanjay’s co-pilot to offer her condolences. Even while Sanjay’s mangled body was being stitched up, she returned to her office to deal with the crisis in Assam.
The last time I saw Mrs Indira Gandhi was during her visit to New York in September – October 1983 to attend the United Nations session. I was then a student in the US and my father was part of her delegation. She hosted a reception for leading American scientists to which I was also invited. Mrs Gandhi noticed that Nobel Laureate Rosalyn Sussman Yalow wanted to leave the reception midway. Mrs Gandhi interrupted her discussions with other scientists to send a bearer across to me with whispered instructions to engage Dr Yalow in conversation until an Indian diplomat could break free and escort Dr Yalow to her car with proper protocol.
At her press conference in New York, a prominent American lady journalist asked Mrs Gandhi a leading question: “Does India tilt? Which way?” Knowing of her closeness to the Reagan administration, Mrs Gandhi snapped back: “We stand upright.” The entire press corps erupted in loud applause.
My father was one of the last people to see Mrs Gandhi alive. He briefed her on her television interview with Peter Ustinov, and then walked over to see the camera arrangements. As he was returning to escort her to the interview, her guards opened fire.
As soon as she was lifted into a vehicle to rush her to hospital, he rushed to the nearest phone to inform the intelligence chiefs, as well as the Cabinet secretary and her principal secretary, both of whom were in Bombay. The day was October 31, 1984.