The East India Company received its charter from Queen Elizabeth I in 1600 and went on to gain great wealth from India; indeed, it was the effective government from 1757 to 1858. It may be irony, it may be progress, but when BBC News Online held a vote in 1999 for the greatest woman of the second millennium, it reported:
India’s first woman prime minister had been running equally with Queen Elizabeth I in the first half of November but pushed ahead to top the poll by a large majority.
On Wednesday 19 January 1966, Indira Gandhi was elected leader of the Congress Party and, necessarily, prime minister of India. For one commentator:
Congress President Kamaraj orchestrated Mrs. Gandhi’s selection as prime minister because he perceived her to be weak enough that he and the other regional party bosses could control her, and yet strong enough to beat Desai [her political opponent] in a party election because of the high regard for her father [former PM Jawaharlal Nehru], a woman would be an ideal tool for the Syndicate.
Oops.
Gandhi’s theme was strength, centralism and a touch of socialism. For many, a darker side was a threat to democracy and the entrenchment of corruption and nepotism.
A particularly difficult legacy has been the policy of sterilisation, familiar to readers of Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance. As the BBC reported in 2015:
During the 1975 Emergency – when civil liberties were suspended – Sanjay Gandhi, son of the former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, began what was described by many as a “gruesome campaign” to sterilise poor men. There were reports of police cordoning off villages and virtually dragging the men to surgery…
An astonishing 6.2 million Indian men were sterilised in just a year, which was “15 times the number of people sterilised by the Nazis”, according to science journalist Mara Hvistendahl. Two thousand men died from botched operations.
The policy continues, primarily directed at women.
