Topic started by shiva (@ 203.94.234.43) on Wed Apr 4 11:34:35 .
All times in EST +10:30 for IST.

Is this book the definitive biography of indira gandhi? Inder malhotra's IG (published earlier) was a pleasure.Has anyone read katherine's book ?

Responses:

• From: ProTam (@ 1cust84.tnt7.redmond.wa.da.uu.net) on: Fri Apr 6 03:23:57
  
  I wanted to read, do u know when it is gonna be released in US?
  
  
• From: Saravanan (@ 192.88.212.48) on: Wed May 9 09:05:40
  
  I have no idea, but there's an article by Pritish Nandy on Rediff (http://www.rediff.com/news/2001/may/09nandy.htm). Gives some insight on what you can expect from the book.
  Saravanan
  
  
• From: g@9.c0m (@ fw.1ndchiil.dotspot.com) on: Wed May 9 10:31:37
  
  Here's the link again. I think this book is complete hogwash
  http://www.rediff.com/news/2001/may/09nandy.htm
  
  
• From: Tonmoy Phukan (@ 203.200.6.24) on: Thu May 17 08:32:10
  
  just want to read it.
  
  
• From: s (@ 210.186.101.89) on: Sat May 19 13:35:08
  
  http://mif.freeservers.com
  
  
• From: nikita (@ 203.145.138.179) on: Sun Jun 3 08:25:29
  
  i am very interested in reading it. just waiting for a chance.
  
  
• From: phani kumar (@ 210.212.193.200) on: Fri Jun 15 09:59:40
  
  Yes definetly it is.One can't be evasive of certain facts in a biography.
  
  
• From: Sumit (@ 61.1.218.210) on: Thu Jun 28 03:56:26
  
  Excellent book!
  
  
• From: pragya (@ proxy6.netz.sbs.de) on: Thu Oct 18 02:25:40
  
  I heard about the content really surprizing...
  
  
• From: K (@ 1cust233.tnt39.dfw9.da.uu.net) on: Wed Dec 26 18:09:18
  
  It is most stupid book ever,just goes to show ignorant stupid people with IQ less than 20 should not be allowed to write biographies. If I had my own country and planet,I would make stupidity a crime and have the bitch shot.
  Sorry for the serious tone,but the book sucks and full of lies. Pritish Nandy, I think has a good column about the book..somewhere..
  
  
• From: E (@ 155.44.56.77) on: Tue Jan 8 14:22:47
  
  The book will be published in the US on February 10, 2002.
  
  
• From: Prahsant (@ ) on: Fri Nov 15 18:23:45
  
  Excellent Fiction !!!! Where are the FACTS ??????
  I Recommend an award for the "THE BEST FICTION BIOGRAGPHY".
  
  
• From: so? (@ ) on: Sat Apr 3 14:15:33
  
  Great book, if anything too sympathetic to the subject...
  
  read on..
  
  
  Indira Gandhi led the most populous democracy of her time, but finally,
  ruthless and paranoid, she couldn't resist the temptation of tyranny.
  
  - - - - - - - - - - - -
  By Paul Festa
  
  
  
  March 26, 2002 | Just before assuming the highest office of the world's
  most populous democracy, Indira Gandhi entertained a fantasy of escaping
  public service by moving to London and becoming an anonymous landlady. After
  reading Katherine Frank's new biography of Gandhi, "Indira: The Life of
  Indira Nehru Gandhi," one rather wishes that she had, despite the hardship
  this would have imposed on Bloomsbury renters.
  
  Gandhi assumed power reluctantly at first, rebuffing those who sought to
  draft her into various public roles in favor of serving quietly in the
  shadow of her father, the prime minister. But like the teetotaler who, once
  alcohol passes his lips for the first time, never draws another sober
  breath, Gandhi fought to retain power once she had it -- and with enough
  zeal and ruthlessness to reduce the Indian constitution to a pile of
  saffron-dyed confetti.
  
  It may help to explain her later antipathy to democratic institutions that
  she was born in the cradle of Indian democracy, because Gandhi had to
  compete with it for her parents' time and attention. For the most part, she
  lost.
  
  She was born in 1917, the only child of Jawaharlal Nehru, the revolutionary
  agitator who would become India's first democratically elected leader when
  the country gained its independence from Britain in 1947, and his
  consumptive but politically active wife, Kamala. (Indira Gandhi was no
  relation to Mohandas, a close friend and mentor of the Nehru family.)
  
  Life in the Nehru household ran on an erratic schedule, with Jawaharlal
  being carted off to jail every so often by the British authorities for his
  pro-independence activities, and Kamala (in addition to serving a
  politically valuable jail stint of her own) trekking off to quack healers
  and European health spas in her protracted march toward death from
  tuberculosis at the age of 37.
  
  Indira Nehru, despite being a tubercular basket case herself (she's
  seriously ill or monumentally depressed about once every 20 pages for the
  first third of the book, until the TB cure reaches New Delhi in the late
  1950s), married one of her mother's acolytes, Feroze Gandhi. In terms of
  both personal and political comity, their marriage compared with other
  historically significant events in Indian history, including three wars with
  Pakistan and any number of domestic Hindu-Sikh conflagrations.
  
  After years of infidelity, illness and intranuptial political discord, the
  charismatic husband and his ambitious wife were for the most part estranged.
  However, before Feroze's death from a heart attack at the age of 47, they
  managed to produce two sons: Rajiv (who would follow in his mother's
  footsteps to serve as India's prime minister, from her assassination in 1984
  until his own in 1991) and Sanjay.
  
  It was Nehru's death in 1964 that knocked Gandhi from the sidelines of power
  to its pinnacle. She had yet to be popularly elected to any post, but she
  had become a force to be reckoned with. She was president of the Indian
  National Congress (a political party) and, as a result of traveling
  frequently with her father, had become a world-famous personality on a
  first-name basis with monarchs, presidents and prime ministers around the
  globe. Following the brief and undistinguished interregnum of Lal Bahadur
  Shastri -- whom Indira repeatedly upstaged from the vantage point of his
  cabinet and her newly appointed seat in the upper house of the Indian
  legislature, potentially contributing to his death by heart failure not two
  years into his term -- Gandhi was the clear choice to assume power.
  
  The vile, crushing marriage of Gandhi and Indian democracy had a decent
  enough honeymoon. In 1971 she led the military victory over U.S.-backed
  Pakistan that resulted in the independence of the wracked nation of
  Bangladesh. Emerging from this triumph, Gandhi found herself virtually
  deified by the Indian people and became, according to a Gallup poll, the
  world's most admired person. Considering its geopolitical consequences on
  the Indian subcontinent today, her detonation three years later of India's
  first nuclear device may or may not qualify to Western readers as a
  highlight of her 18 years in office, but the underground explosion certainly
  played well in the Punjab.
  
  Gandhi followed up those victories with electoral landslides in which her
  markedly socialist policies helped rally the poor -- her natural
  constituency -- to the polls in large numbers. But trouble loomed on the
  horizon in the form of what today might be called a vast right-wing
  conspiracy against her. Capitalizing on some minor elections infractions she
  committed, Gandhi's political and judicial enemies nearly succeeded in
  wresting power from her.
  
  But they might as well have tried to part a lit pipe from an armed crack
  whore. The picture that emerges most vividly of Gandhi at this juncture, and
  for the rest of her political life, is one of an addict yearning for the
  more serene life that awaits her if she can only quit her drug but
  frantic -- and ruthless -- the moment its withdrawal is threatened.
  
  Alternatively, and more kindly, you could view her as a classic tragic hero
  out of Shakespeare or Sophocles. Proud, paranoid and perpetually wounded
  (like her nemesis Richard Nixon), Gandhi clung to power so tenaciously and
  with so few scruples that she laid the groundwork for her most precipitous
  falls -- including her final one into the murderous hands of her own
  bodyguards.
  
  Her favored son, Sanjay, plotted out the Machiavellian schemes executed in
  her name. Gandhi's closest and most corrupt advisor, he plays a composite of
  Goneril, Iago and Lady Macbeth to Gandhi's increasingly myopic and
  manipulated crypto-monarch. (As one participant in the events reflected, his
  death in a 1980 plane crash was as lucky for India as it was unlucky for
  Indira.) But even setting aside Sanjay's criminal associations and tactics,
  his fraudulent business enterprises and dictatorial leanings, his mother's
  political character emerges as one increasingly hostile to the democratic
  values that inspired the men and women who brought her, and an independent
  India, into the world.
  
  Consider the dismal two years of Gandhi's Emergency, her end-run around the
  enemies who nearly ousted her on the elections charges: Hundreds of
  thousands were jailed for dissent, with nearly two dozen deaths from
  desperate conditions in overcrowded prisons. Some were tortured. As many as
  23 million Indian men were sterilized under Sanjay's coercive
  population-control scheme, and many thousands were rendered homeless by his
  "beautification" program of bulldozing slums. Meanwhile the domestic press
  was muzzled, the foreign press was expelled, the world's largest democracy
  went without elections and the courts and the constitution were all but
  disemboweled.
  
  Or consider her cynical practice, late in her life as her paranoia
  intensified, of playing her enemies off one another for her own political
  advantage -- even at the cost of letting bloody religious conflicts,
  including the one that inspired her assassination, play out until they had
  spiraled out of control.
  
  With friends like Gandhi, India's democratic institutions, its impoverished
  masses and victims of religious intolerance hardly needed enemies.
  
  Without delving too deeply in the shadowy realm of psychobiography,
  Katherine Frank identifies formative experiences and childhood wounds that
  help explain the paranoia and near-megalomania that would characterize
  Gandhi at crucial junctures in her career.
  
  But she is too forgiving by half in analyzing Gandhi's thirst for power.
  Gandhi's problem, Frank writes, is that the Indian prime minister believed
  that only she was capable of leading her nation. That is a charitable view,
  suggesting that Gandhi had a high opinion of her own capabilities and a low
  one of her opponents'.
  
  A more illuminating analysis of Gandhi's relationship to power might suggest
  that her proximity to it gradually stripped her of everything else in her
  life. She devoted everything to her father and his career, and he only grew
  away from her. With her parents' deaths, her husband's abandonment and
  death, her son's death, a creeping alienation from her few close friends and
  finally a permanent estrangement from her daughter-in-law and grandson,
  Gandhi (her left eye twitching furiously) ultimately wound up with one fix,
  one rush, one companion. She didn't even drink. All that was left to her was
  power -- that, and the adulation of multitudes, the greatest multitude a
  democratically elected leader had ever served.
  
  Even as she ached for the normality and peace of private life, the woman
  dubbed Empress Indira by admirers and critics alike could not bear to be
  parted from her crown. India suffered for it no less than did Indira. To the
  extent that Gandhi failed to produce lasting solutions to India's chronic
  woes -- religious tensions and the now-nuclear-charged conflict with
  Pakistan over Kashmir -- and to the degree that she sought to preserve her
  own power by playing politics with those incendiary situations, India, along
  with the rest of us, is still suffering for her shortcomings.
  
  
  - - - - - - - - - - - -
  
  About the writer
  Paul Festa is the author of disciplineandpublish.com and a frequent Salon
  contributor.
  
  Sound Off
  Send us a Letter to the Editor
  
  
  
  
• From: musicman (@ ) on: Mon Dec 6 06:51:22
  
  hello musicman,
  i m telling u to give me the website name in which we can see the leader LalBahadur Shatri.
  plz e-mail me at company303@yahoo.com
  
  
• From: Lorien Reclite (@ 63.164.105.224) on: Sat Dec 11 17:53:33 EST 2004
  
  There are NO real facts in this book. I need facts on Indira Gandhi! Help?
  
  

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