SPEECH

Amalgam of Fine Qualities Was Indira Gandhi
Text of the acceptance speech of Mr. H.Y. Sharada Prasad, who was awarded the 16th Indira Gandhi Award for National Integration in New Delhi on 31st October

Shrimati Sonia Gandhi, Distinguished Members of the Award Committee, Friends :

Congress president giving away the Indira Gandhi award for National Integration to the distinguished media person and writer Mr. H.Y. Sharada Prasad at a function in the Capital

I am most grateful to you for the high honour you have done me. If I say that I am not worthy of it, that would amount to questioning your judgement. So I accept the sentence you have pronounced. But I wish to submit that I had already had another Indira Gandhi award - the privilege of working for her from the first day of her prime ministership to the last day and of earning her trust. It was an exciting experience to watch history being made and gain some understanding of how individuals shape events and are in turn shaped by them.

Indira Gandhi was an amalgam of numerous qualities that leadership requires. She had an extraordinarily swift and intuitive mind. She had limitless courage, initiative and staying power. She worked out her strategies carefully. She gathered the force necessary to achieve the objective and was yet nimble enough to make the required tactical changes. She was decisive. She met hundreds of people everyday, important and obscure. She was one of the most approachable leaders. She was an intent listener. She put in a great deal of preparatory work before her major speeches and encounters with the press. She had a wide range of interests. She was sensitive to poetry, music and art. She was responsive, above all, to the suffering of the common people. She was most at home when amidst them. That is why they placed so much faith in her.

Her pride in being an Indian and her aspirations for the country were limitless. She was totally free from parochialism. One of the favourite statements she used to make in her public speeches was : "All places in India are equidistant from Delhi." Likewise the equality of people of all religions was an article of faith with her - equality in law, in the matter of personal security and in opportunities of education and employment. All people who had been born in India and had grown up here were Indians to her. There were no original inhabitants and later intruders, no full citizens and citizens on probation who had to prove their loyalty. She was proud of the fact that it was during her time that Muslims became chief ministers of large states like Rajasthan, Bihar, Assam and Maharashtra. But for her initiative, even Dr. Zakir Hussain would not have become President.

It is sad that Indira Gandhi’s - and indeed Jawaharlal Nehru’s - record is being belittled today. Both are castigated for being busy building their dynasty rather than the country. The father is accused of obstructing India’s economic development because of his partiality for socialism and of alienating India from its natural allies abroad through his advocacy of nonalignment. The daughter is blamed for weakening our democratic foundations because of her totalitarian temper. This is not the occasion to go into the causes and consequences of the Emergency. But even her critics would probably grant that by using the Emergency clauses existing in the Constitution, Indira Gandhi has made it impossible for anyone to invoke them again.

The nation’s executive branch is now led by a party whose leaders had deliberately kept away from the freedom movement and inoculated themselves against Gandhi and his thinking. They are not in sympathy with the liberal and secular premises on which our Constitution is based. Spokesmen for the Bharatiya Janata Party have openly stated that they have kept some aims of their party in abeyance out of deference to their coalition partners. This is the reason why it has not embarked on a programme of forcing the various minorities into a status of subordination. Nevertheless a committee has been appointed to review the working of the Constitution, education is being tempered with, and thousands of names of Muslims are sought to be deleted from the voters’ rolls.

We have been hardly a few months into the new century and already we have a taste of the problem that will dominate the immediate future, namely the globalisation of terror. National boundaries have ceased to matter. International relations are no longer confined to dealings between nations. Now nations have to contend with elusive, well-armed enemies based in far-off lands. The other danger is the growing tendency to think that since bin Laden and al-Qaeda and Taliban are Muslim, all Muslims everywhere support them and Islam itself is a promotor of terrorism. We tend to forget that other religions have also bred terrorism. Hindu fundamentalism is not a response to Islamic fundamentalism. It existed much before. Otherwise how did Jainism dwindle and Budhism die out in our country? If we do not strive to remove the suspicions and fears of Hindus and Muslims about each other, then each region of India, each district, each city and each village will become a Panipat. This has got to be prevented.

In the last two centuries secularism gained ground with the spread of democracy, which in essence means that all people in a country have equal rights. Another source of sustenance for secularism was its identification with modernity. The orthodox have always been comfortable with both democracy and modernity. They could not prevent the surge of democracy but continued to be anti-science, describing the early inventions of science and technology as the work of the devil. But the people at large look at the new products when they found they saved drudgery and increased their incomes. In course of time the orthodox also came to use the fruits of the new knowledge. But they retain their prejudices and old modes of thinking. A mullah-in-training in a Rawalpindi madrassah can carry a Kalashnikov. A safari-suit-wearing entrepreneur from Delhi can be a financier of Bajrang Dal. Modernity and fundamentalism are matters of the mind and not of what kind of goods one chooses to surround oneself with. If you think that your religion alone is true and all others are untrue then you live in a world in which conflict becomes inevitable. If you think that a person has the right to follow his religion and people of all religions must coexist then you can expect to live in peace. Medieval minds and modern weapons of destruction make a dangerous mix. This danger must make all those who value democracy and peace unite against fundamentalists of all shades and shapes.

On this day of remembrance, several memories come back to me from the long years I had worked with Indira Gandhi. My mind goes back to 19th January, 1966. Indira Gandhi went to the Central Hall of Parliament House where Congress Party in Parliament elected her as its leader. She made the little speech she had worked on in the morning in which she thanked not only all those who had voted for her but also those who had voted against her. She came home to an empty house. Both her sons were away in England studying and there was no elder relative to welcome her and comfort her. I said to myself : here is the prime minister- elect of the country and there is no one in her own home to ask her whether she is tired or thirsty. She had to call out to an attendant for a glass of water. In a day or two her paternal aunt from Bombay and her maternal aunt from Jaipur came over to be with her. But it was Ekla Chalo for her that day and in fact throughout life. No wonder the Tagore poem as her favourite and she even made her own translation of it, not satisfied with the available renderings.

The following year she was speaking at a pubic meeting at Bhubaneswar when she was hit by a stone right in the face. Blood flowing from the nose she continued her speech. Flying back to Delhi she went straight to the Willingdon Hospital - it had not yet become Lohia. In a letter she wrote to her sons in England telling them the whole story she said she had always felt her nose was too long and waited for a chance to shorten it through surgery. Here was such a chance but the doctors had absolutely ruled it out. She also sent them a photograph showing her bandaged nose and forehead and at the back she wrote : "Don’t I look like Batman?" She always saw the lighter side of things.

In the early months of her prime ministership intense pressure was put on her by officials and even some colleagues who wanted her to move back to Teen Murti House as it was ideal for the prime minister. She rejected every one of their reasons and clinched the matter by saying : "I have lived there, gentlemen, and I know. Any house in which soup gets cold when it travels from the kitchen to the dining table is not good for living in."

She was quite content living at 1 Safdarjung Road, which must be the smallest official residence of the prime minister of any country in the world. She disliked waste and ostentation. She worked unbelievably hard on her papers, speeches and correspondence. "Files to go before I sleep," we used to quip in the office. She insisted on replying to as many letters from the public as possible, particularly if they were from children. She was a caring grandmother. When Rahul was an infant, she kept him in her study while working on her speeches many evenings so that her daughter-in-law had some time for herself. Every few minutes the Prime Minister got up from her chair to change the baby’s nappy. One day around that time, while flying on a plane, I received a note from her. It was a folded slip of paper on which was written : Important Announcement. My curiosity aroused, I opened it to find this : "Rahul’s first tooth peeped out this morning."

She was famous for her self-control and decisiveness. I remember the afternoon when the Pakistani troops surrendered in Dacca. She had worked on the announcement she would make in the Lok Sabha. For some reason Lt. Gen Niazi took longer than envisaged. A foreign television team had come in to interview her in her Parliament House room. She told me : "Instead of wasting time waiting, why don’t we call them in?" She was half way through the interview when the phone rang. It was Gen Maneckshaw to tell her that the surrender document had been signed. Her face betrayed no emotion whatever. She told the television team that she had to make a statement in Parliament and would be back to continue the interview. On the way back to her room from the Lok Sabha chamber, she said to me : "The fight must now be stopped in the west. If I don’t do it today, I won’t be able to get it done tomorrow." The cabinet was assembled (but only after the interrupted interview was completed) and it endorsed her proposal to declare cease-fire in the western sector forthwith.

The last time I spoke to her was a few minute before her death. Peter Ustinov, the well-known film personality, was making a film on her. He had been given a 9 a.m. appointment at 1 Akbar Road. When it was a few minutes past nine I walked across to the house to find out what was holding up the prime minister. She said to me : "Tell Mr. Ustinov I’ll be with him in just two minutes." I was giving him the message when I heard the ominous sound of gunfire. I ran to the spot, only to find Indira Gandhi being placed in a car to be rushed to hospital. But the sound will remain unerased in my ear.

So too will her memory live in the hearts of the people of India. They will remember her for her courage and her compassion, and her tigress-like determination to uphold the country’s freedom, unity and honour. They will remember her as one who kept her promises. That is why you will find thousands upon thousands visiting the house where she had lived. Thank you again for the honour you have done me.