"I hope none of your brats is involved" - The Narcissism of Sanjay Gandhi
Excerpt from All The Prime Minister's Men
There’s this very juicy and insightful book that was published in 1977 called All The Prime Minister’s Men. It’s by veteran journalist Janardhan Thakur, and it covers the rise of Indira Gandhi and Sanjay Gandhi, the inside story of the excesses of the Emergency, and how the INC lost the election in 1977. I don’t think I have come across a source that goes so deeply into the perverse antics of Sanjay Gandhi from a contemporary lens.
Sanjay Gandhi was Indira Gandhi’s younger son, and while his widow, Maneka Gandhi, also a politician, talks glowingly of how principled he was, the popular memory is of a low-IQ thug who was responsible for millions of forced vasectomies at the height of the Emergency (India’s short foray into dictatorship).
This book could not have been written at any time other than in 1977. The loss in the election and the coming into power of the Janata party with popular support meant the morale of the Congress was low, and the author could afford to imagine he wouldn’t face retaliation for writing such a book. Not long after, the Janata government faced instability and unpopularity, and in 1980, India Gandhi came back to power. There wasn’t yet that specter of “what if she comes back?” keeping tongues from wagging.
The excerpt today is what the author opens with, and it’s very very punchy. He basically implies that news of Sanjay Gandhi’s shenanigans led to Nehru’s death. I thought of writing this tale in my own words, but it’s just so full of detail that the original does it justice best.
IT WAS the evening of 26 May 1964. Jawaharlal Nehru had just returned to Delhi from a three-day holiday in his favourite Doon Valley, accompanied by his chatelaine and protector, Indira Gandhi. There had been a stream of solicitous visitors at Teen Murti House that evening. After they had left, the father and daughter sat down for dinner, Nehru’s last. He had looked relaxed and cheerful. They had talked of various things. He was about to retire for the day when he picked up a morning newspaper and his eyes caught a small front-page item. “Teenagers on the Rampage: Car Thefts in the Capital,” said the headlines. He had gone through the report, which was veiled but not lacking in innuendos. It said there had been a marked increase in the number of such cases but the police had not been able to lay their hands on this “fun and liquor-loving” gang with connections in high places.
Putting the paper down, Nehru had remarked: “I hope none of your brats is involved in it.”
He had said it casually, more in good humour, but Indira Gandhi had gone ashen. Haltingly, she had told him a story she had kept to herself for several days. Deeply disturbed, the old man hobbled to his bedroom and, according to a household functionary, Nehru had kept pacing up and down his room for quite a while. His last night must have been a restless one. Early next morning he was very ill. Somewhere deep inside him, his aorta had burst and at 2 P.M. he was declared dead. It was the end of an era.
The report that had pained Nehru in his last feeble hours related, primarily, to a murky incident ten days earlier. A little after the midnight of 16 May, a bunch of “high-spirited” young men drove in a brand new Fiat to a petrol pump in Motibagh, a residential area of New Delhi, ordered 20 litres of petrol and sped off, leaving the lone petrol pump attendant shouting after them for money. Shortly afterwards the car crashed against a traffic island and the three drunken occupants, one of them an American, were marched off by a cop to the Motibagh police station.
As it transpired later, the Fiat had been stolen about an hour earlier from outside the Nizamuddin East house of Dharam Yash Dev, the Indian representative of the Jayanti Shipping Corporation and a former High Commissioner in Mauritius. On their way, the hoodlums stole a motorcycle from Golf Links, a posh residential colony. One of the boys jumped on to the two-wheeler and roared off; he ended up a little later with a serious head injury on a patch of road under construction on way to Palam airport. Some people returning from Palam identified him as Adil Shahryar, son of Mohammad Yunus, then a Joint Secretary in the External Affairs Ministry. Adil, a bosom pal of Sanjay Gandhi, the second son of Indira Gandhi, was rushed in an unconscious state to the Safdarjang Hospital and later to Sen’s Nursing Home.
Interrogated at the police station, one of the three boys gave his address as Teen Murti House. The police officer thought he was trying to act funny and gave him a rap on the back. “Now tell me where you live, scoundrel!” he barked. The boy still gave the same address. The bewildered officer rang up the Superintendent of Police who came rushing to the police station. After a little talk with the boys, the SP telephoned Teen Murti House. A functionary took the phone. Nehru was away in Bombay, attending the AICC session, and Indira Gandhi had gone with him. They were not expected back until next morning. However, within minutes, a very anxious member of the Prime Minister’s House turned up and got the boys released. Nothing was left onrecord, so that when Dr Ram Manohar Lohia, Atal Behari Vajpayee, and other MPs raised the issue later in the two houses of Parliament, the then Home Minister, Gulzarilal Nanda, suffered no qualms in replying that the case had been declared by his police force as “untraced.” The Sada-chari Home Minister was not to be spared, though, by some journals in the country which continued to snipe at him for trying to hush up the case of the “VIP Baby.”
Early morning on 17 May, Dharam Yash Dev had found the car missing and had reported the theft to the police. The Fiat belonged to his younger brother, a Major in the Army, who had come on a visit. Within a couple of hours the Motibagh police station rang up to say that the missing car had been traced and could somebody come and identify it. Major Yashpal rushed off to the police station. Just a few minutes later, a cream-coloured Mercedes stopped at the gate and a very flustered-looking man got down. He was making anxious inquiries about the house of Major Yashpal. Dharam Yash Dev came forward. He knew the man very well. He was Mohammad Yunus. What was the matter? Why was he so troubled? Yunus told him his son had got involved in a motorcycle accident the previous night and he wanted to find out if the Major had lost a motorcycle. It was all very puzzling. What had been stolen from the house was a car and not a motorcycle and yet Yunus was looking for the owner of a motorcycle. How on earth had he come to Dev’s house of all places? Yunus must have realized he had made a faux pas; he immediately left, saying that his son was in a very serious condition and he could not lose time.
A little Perry Masoning made things somewhat clearer. Major Yashpal’s driving licence, his Automobile Association membership card, and a few other personal belongings were missing from the smashed car’s glove compartment. These papers could have been the only possible clues to have brought Yunus to the East Nizamuddin house. Could Adil Shahryar have pocketed these papers before changing over to the motorcycle in Golf Links? Dev, a relentless pursuer, was determined to know the whole truth, but a friendly police officer had warned him saying: “Sir, now that you have got the car back, you should consider yourself lucky. Some big, very big people’s sons are involved in it.”
Several months later, on 10 October 1964, Dharam Yash Dev got a telephone call from an unexpected quarter. On the line was Yashpal Kapoor who was already on the way to becoming the principal factotum of Indira Gandhi. Kapoor told Dev that Indira Gandhi wanted to see him. Dev was somewhat puzzled. Not that he had not met her before, but he could not quite figure out this call from the blue. Anyway, he said he would go and meet her the next day.
“No, no, you must come and meet her today,” said Kapoor very excitedly. “Indiraji is going away to Europe tonight. Bahot zaruri milna chahti hain” (she wants to meet you very urgently).
And so at 5 o’clock that afternoon, Dev went to No. 1, Safdarjang Road, the house to which Indira Gandhi had moved after Nehru’s death. She had become the Information and Broadcasting minister in Lal Bahadur Shastri’s government.
She was effusive in her welcome. She told him how fond of him “Papu” (her way of addressing her father) had been, she showed him a page from Nehru’s diary where he had mentioned him, she brought out from the shelves of one of the books of Dev which the AICC had published in 1944. Evidently, she had kept herself prepared for the meeting, she had even kept the page from Nehru’s diary marked from before. It was all very nice, but surely it was not just for this that she had to meet him so urgently. Nearly an hour passed, but she had not come to the point, she just kept going round and round the mulberry bush, as it were.
Finally Dev asked her why she had sent for him.
“Er… well, Dharam Yashji, you know some people are linking up my son’s name with the car theft incident. You know very well my son could never do a thing like that. Besides, my son was not even here that night. He was in Kashmir on a holiday.
Sanjay Gandhi had an alibi. Years later, when he was poised to become the heir apparent to Indira’s throne, he told the editor of a New Delhi journal that he was in Kashmir at the time of the car theft. About the same time, Yunus, always a great drum-beater of Sanjay Gandhi, wrote an article in a Bombay weekly in which he gave the details of the alibi. “Sanjay and a friend went to Kashmir on a hitch-hiking trip, with only fifteen rupees between the two of them. A friend gave them a lift up to Chandigarh, from where they went in trucks, buses or other vehicles going in that direction and took three days to reach the beautiful valley. Again, they decided not to stay in one place and kept moving from one abode to another. Unfortunately, this exciting holiday came to a sudden end because of Jawaharlalji’s death on 27 May 1964.
Sanjay Gandhi had indeed gone to Kashmir, but allegedly not the way Yunus described it. That romantic hitch-hike was all a concocted story. Sanjay and his friend, many people say, had been packed off to Srinagar by an early morning flight on 17th May and they had turned up later that evening at the house of a Muslim lady teacher who was to be their host at Srinagar. They had taken care to arrive at the lady’s house looking like real hitch-hikers, with mud splattered all over their trousers and shoes. “Oh aunty,” they had announced, “we’ve been hitch-hiking from Delhi for the last three days!”
The entire episode, though murky in the extreme, was perhaps nothing very extraordinary for a pampered high-society boy. A famous doting grandfather, parents whose marriage was almost a total wreck, a whole retinue of fawning servants and craven courtiers, a pack of rumbustious friends, an environment of Western permissiveness, with all this a boy could hardly be expected to grow up into anything but a Sanjay Gandhi - arrogant, brash and cruel.
Indian movies from the ‘80s and ‘90s always had an evil politician with a son like this. But the politician was always a state politician, and the Prime Minister or some other agent of the Central government, like the Governor, would be a less rogue-looking actor and be portrayed as an incorruptible person who would ensure this evil state politician lost his position and power.
I assumed back then that the center was much less corrupt than the states, but alas, I had not read Janardhan Thakur then. Now it seems like Sanjay Gandhi was the prototype from which similar politician’s kids were minted. And, the evil state government politican was probably an endorsement of Congress high command culture, where the folks in Delhi could take down state politicians who were getting too big for their boots or even straight up dismiss state governments that weren’t sufficiently subordinate.
It’s interesting to go straight to the source of such covered-up misconducts and get an insight into how this worked back then.