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Dec

Dec 14: Sanjay Gandhi Birth Anniversary

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Sanjay Gandhi –  A Man Of Many Contradictions

A person with white hair and glasses AI-generated content may be incorrect.Sanjay Gandhi’s presence on the Indian political scene was short-lived. He came to be noticed only after the Bangladesh war of December 1971 and died in an unfortunate air crash in June 1980. Even in his short public life, Sanjay Gandhi left a deep impact on society but left a mixed legacy.

Sanjay Gandhi never held any official position. But his mother, Prime Minister Mrs Indira Gandhi, started leaning on him as she declined in vigour and the opposition to her grew following the Sampurn  Kranti agitation of Jaya Prakash Narayan in Bihar and Navnirman Samiti agitation in Gujarat, both clandestinely backed by RSS. As was natural, Sanjay Gandhi became more relevant in public life and came to be noticed by the political class and the media.

Like the man, Sanjay Gandhi’s legacy is a story in contradiction. Son of an erudite mother and the best public school education, Sanjay had no interest in books or things involving serious thought. He was a man of practical work and quick action, exhibiting impatience of youth.

In his own way, Sanjay was a person with a vision for modern India. He galvanised the youth power and tried hard to break the status quo and the lethargy of the system to take the country on a path of quicker development.  The 20-point plan the Emergency Government of Mrs Indira Gandhi launched at his behest was statesmen Sanjay Gandhi was a vision for socio-economic development. It talked of rural development, tree plantation, birth control, as well as an end to the practice of dowry, a scourge of Hindu society that compromises the dignity of Indian womanhood.

 

Sanjay Gandhi’s political career was brief but left a deep and complex legacy. Emerging after the 1971 Bangladesh war, he became influential as Indira Gandhi increasingly relied on him during rising opposition movements. Despite having no official position, he mobilised youth and pushed for rapid modernisation, promoting initiatives like the 20-point programme, family planning, rural development, tree plantation, and the small-car project that later evolved into Maruti’s success.
Friday Fuss
By Pradeep Mathur
 However, his lack of ideological depth and impatience led to major errors, including pressuring Indira Gandhi into declaring the 1975 Emergency, which damaged the Congress and strengthened right-wing forces. Sanjay also faced widespread misinformation campaigns, often fuelled by political rivals. Though controversial, his efforts influenced India’s socio-economic direction, leaving a legacy that remains debated.

 

Sanjay could foresee the great Indian automobile revolution. Though much criticised for his small car project, the huge success of the Maruti car proved that his initial efforts were in the right direction. His emphasis on family planning and tree plantation has been part of the action plan of all successive governments in one form or another. How things would have shaped had he not met his unfortunate end in an air crash is a matter of guess and conjecture, but even in the short time he could do certain things which set our country on the right path.

Sanjay Gandhi worked against the elitism of Indian politics and brought it closer to the masses. However, his lack of ideological backdrop and intellectual dimensions of his predecessors opened the doors of Indian public life for riffraff elements of society.   

However, he also made big mistakes because of his lack of intellectual depth and characteristic impatience. Forcing his mother’s hands to declare the infamous Emergency in 1975 after the Allahabad High Court judgement declaring her election as void was one such huge mistake. It did permanent damage to the image of the Nehru-Gandhi family and the Congress party.  Another big mistake was to alienate the Left parties from the Congress, which ideologically weakened the left-of-the Congress and opened the field for the eventual takeover of the communal and pro-big business forces of the Right represented by the BJP-RSS ecosystem. 

However, like any leader in any field of activity who wants to change the set pattern and norms, Sanjay Gandhi met criticism, and as unfortunately happens in our country so often, a vilification campaign was launched against him in a systematic manner. I am personally a witness to one of the falsehoods which was propagated against him. I was working for The Tribune, Chandigarh, when in 1972 or 73 Sanjay Gandhi came to Punjab to campaign for his party in an assembly by-election. The next day, a prominent Hindi daily newspaper published a report on his election rally with a small box item headline Angazri Da Puttar ( son of English ). The item said that Sanjay could not speak Hindi properly, and he spoke Hindi as an Englishman would. I read the news item and thought that due to his public school education, he may not be well-versed and fluent in speaking Hindi. As a newsman I knew that it was no reflection on his politics but on the mind of an average newspaper reader of the newspaper person, it must have created a negative impression about Sanjay, something which his detractors obviously wanted.

Then, in the 1977 parliamentary elections, Sanjay came campaigning for his party in Chandigarh. I asked his campaign managers for a personal interview with him for The Tribune. It was fixed during his lunchtime, and we sat together talking for half an hour. Midway through the interview, I realised that Sanjay was speaking absolutely chaste Hindi while I, because of my English newsroom background, was putting questions to him which had many expressions in the English language. And then I was reminded of the small but mischievous news item I had read about him five years ago.

Around the same time, I heard another story maligning him. One day in the morning, I went shopping for food items. As I was waiting at a mutton shop for my turn, I heard one buyer telling someone that yesterday Sanjay had slapped his mother. When asked why, he said Sanjay was badly abusing an assistant for not bringing him the brand of whiskey he wanted. When Mrs Indira Gandhi intervened, he got enraged and slapped his mother, saying that she also gets upset when she does not get her brand of liquor.

The story was as shocking as it was unbelievable. But when I moved to a grocery shop, I heard people talking about the same thing, and finally, I heard a repeat of this story at the vegetable shop. It looked as if the whole of Chandigarh had come to know of it.

Back in The Tribune newsroom, when I mentioned it, colleagues said that they too hard heard the story. It was certainly a typical product of the RSS rumour mill working overtime during the election campaign.

It is a pity that the Congress never learnt the need to build an effective mechanism to counter this propaganda war. Because of this, they suffered in the time of Sanjay Gandhi, as they are suffering now. Perhaps Sanjay Gandhi could have effectively done it, but God willed otherwise. ( Veteran journalist and media Guru, Prof Pradeep Mathur, is Editor-in-Chief of Mediamap news network and Chairman of MBKM Foundation, a not-for-profit organisation for voluntary social work)

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