Economically died but politically alive-III

Coomi Kapoor has a piece in today's Indian Express on Mrs. G, but this one, she has subsumed views of few who have commented very gregariously. “To give a cross-section of views by prominent journalists on India's controversial iron lady:” She writes.

Some excerpts:

• "Vir Sanghvi praises Indira for her strength and leadership. He says her critics attack her mainly for her dynastic ambitions and her Left-wing economic policies. The Emergency she imposed, he believes, has been forgotten. Sanghvi credits Indira for keeping India together and gives her high marks for strengthening the electoral process and for her foreign policy.
• MJ Akbar believes that India welcomed the realism of Indira Gandhi after the travails of Nehru's idealism. He applauds her for calling elections in 1977 rather than following the example of so many post-colonial dictatorships in Africa and Asia.
• Karan Thapar opines that Indira Gandhi's imprint is not just resilient, but perhaps indelible. "She is not only the best remembered of our politicians, but also, I suspect, the most misunderstood," he says. He recalls his personal interaction with the Gandhi family and recounts an incident when as Prime Minister, Gandhi wanted to make sure that she was not later than the President in arriving for a screening of the film "The Pink Panther". Thapar's sister remarked in amazement, "She is virtually a dictator, yet she's so particular about protocol and politeness."
• Shekhar Gupta, with a more balanced view, feels that Indira was a different Prime Minister in each of her three spells in office. "She changed and evolved, often for the better, sometimes not quite so. She was "insecure about losing power. The extreme leftward swing in her politics came not from any genuine commitment to socialism, but as an ideological camouflage for a series of dictatorial and subversive blunders which she was to regret later."
• Pratap Bhanu Mehta argues that during her tenure, Indira willfully assaulted every single institution: the judiciary, federalism, the police. She tolerated and created a style of politics that was lumpen at its core; an odd combination of corruption, violence and the use of arbitrary power. Her economic policies were largely a disaster. He adds, however, that she was the last leader who truly belonged to the whole of India. The reverence and nostalgia for her has survived, in part because her personal qualities seem to transcend her politics.
• Tavleen Singh notes that Indira Gandhi was a charismatic politician with an amazing ability to convince ordinary Indians that she was their one and only benefactress. But "when I try to remember anything good she did for India from an economic or political point of view, I come up with a very short list. By 1984, when she had ruled India for over 16 years, she succeeded in turning India into a country in which everything was in short supply and everything second-rate."
• My own assessment of India's iron lady comes closest to those of Tavleen and Mehta."