NEW DELHI, Nov. 4—She has been pictured as physically frail. She has suffered from tuberculosis, low blood pressure, kidney trouble and muscle spasms in the neck.

“I had an image of her as a very puny thing,” a confidant said. “When she became Prime Minister, I didn't know how she could cope with it. I asked her about her health. She said, ‘One day I simply decided I must become strong. So I got over my TB, I got over my difficulties.’”

Indira Gandhi, at age, 53, is no longer physically or emotionally puny, as her current trip to Europe and the United States shows. “She is the only man among a bunch of old women,” an Indian journalist remarked two years ago, when she was in the process of running rings around the old‐guard bosses of the Congress party and emerging as undisputed leader of the party and of India.

She once walked in the afterglow of her father, the late Jawaharlal Nehru, but she now provides her own light. “She feels she's important to the future of India,” an adviser remarked, “and this is why she fights so hard for political survival.”

“Her father was a Westerner who became Indian in his later years,” said a diplomat. “She has been an Indian all her life.”
Continue reading the main story

Her feeling about India is so fervent that to some Western leaders it has sometimes seemed self‐righteous and even arrogant. “We have our faults and shortcomings, but these are small,” she said in a speech in London the other day.

Apart from her singleminded nationalism, the quality that most marks Indira Gandhi is her loneliness. She has been a loner almost from her birth on Nov. 19, 1917, as the only child of Jawaharlal and Kamala Nehru. The sprawling ancestral mansion in Allahabad was nearly always filled with guests‐from India and abroad, but she lived inside herself.

When she was 4 there came the first of many imprisonments of her parents and close relatives for their role in the independence movement against the British. Her only companionship with her parents in those years was through the famous letters her father wrote from a succession of prison cells. She became shy, withdrawn, reflective—but also headstrong, determined and occasionally imperious.

“My public life started at the age of 3,” she said. “I have no recollection of games, children's parties or playing with other children. My favorite occupation as a very small child was to deliver thunderous speeches to the servants, standing on a high table. All my games were political games—I was, like Joan of Arc, perpetually being burned at the stake.”

At age 12, after erratic schooling in New Delhi, Allahabad and Switzerland (where she learned her fluent French), she came home and organized the Monkey Brigade—a children's army 60,000 strong carrying messages and performing errands for the independence movement. One of the Monkey lieutenants was Feroze Gandhi, no kin of the independence leader, whom she was later to marry.

A Degree at Oxford

Then came more schooling for young Indira—at Poona, at the university at Santiniketan, in West Bengal, founded by the poet Tagore and, finally—after accompanying her ailing mother to Switzerland to die of TB—at Oxford, where she received a degree in history and was active in the Labor party.

Travel in Europe followed before she returned to India early in World War lI and married Feroze in March, 1942. Six months later the British sent both to prison for short terms.

Although she and her husband had three years of happiness, living in relative solitude in Allahabad from 1943 to 1946—a son, Rajiv, was born in 1944 and another son, Sanjay, in 1946—the marriage could not survive the growing prominence of her father and the increasing attention she was devoting to him.

Eventually she and Feroze lived in separate houses—he in the bungalow allotted him as a Member of Parliament and she in the Prime Minister's residence as her father's hostess.

Withdrawal From Politics

In 1959, when she was 41, her father made her president of the Congress party, and she immediately began to impress the party pros, some of them once her critics, with her political acumen and ruthlessiness.

She withdrew from active politics after her husband's death in 1960 and did not return until after her father's death in 1964, when his successor as Prime Minister, Lal Bahadur Shastri, persuaded her to join his Cabinet as Minister of Information and Broadcasting.

Mr. Shastri died two years later and the Tammany‐like party bosses, known as the Syndicate, picked Indira to be the next Prime Minister—a partly because of her family's fame but largely because they thought she would be pliable. She proved about as pliable as a barracuda.

She challenged the bosses frequently, ignoring their counsel and finally breaking with them openly in the summer of 1969, driving them into a minority position in Parliament. They kept sniping at her, so she called their bluff this year by holding national elections a year ahead of schedule. She swept in with a stunning two‐thirds of the seats in Parliament.

Her slogan is “garibi hatao” — “remove poverty.” She says her platform is democratic socialism, which she is careful to define broad ly to avoid getting trapped in dogma.

Her critics, who say she has no grasp of ideas and is nowhere near the intellectual her father was, maintain that she has proved herself only, as a cunning political infighter.

Some Critical Kinfolk

Some of her critics, including close relatives, dwell on the personal. Her paternal aunt, Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit, former Ambassador to Moscow and President of the United Nations General Assembly, gossips openly that Mrs. Gandhi has no stamina, suffers from hysteria and breaks into tears at the hint of crisis. But most observers dismiss all that as the jealousy born of the days when Mrs. Pandit vied for primacy in Mr. Nehru's household and lost out to young Indira.

She is rarely an easy conversationalist. Long silences abound. While an interviewer struggles to get her to relax, her dark brown eyes wander and her delicate hands fidget and finally begin doodling exotic designs.

But put her in front of a crowd of 500,000 on a dusty athletic field in Uttar Pradesh and she converses with them. Her speeches do not soar. They do not rouse crowds to huzzahs. But she establishes rapport with the Indian villager.

Little Time for Family

She works a 14‐hour to 16‐hour day, which leaves little time for her family—her two sons, her Italian daughter‐in‐law, Sonia, and her year‐old grandson, Rahul —who call her Induji and live with her in her unpretentious single‐story house at 1 Safdarjung Road. Nor does she find enough time for her other loves—poetry, history, art, animals and music. She pays occasional visits to a Swiss hairdresser in New Delhi who designed the attractive streak of white that sets off her black hair. Between visits the gray spreads.Always well‐groomed, she likes brightly colored clothes and carries her handwoven silk and cotton saris well on her 5‐foot‐5‐inch frame.

Feminine but not a feminist, she nevertheless bristles at people who ask her if it is not harder for a woman than for a man to be Prime Minister. “Women can always be as tough as men,” she replies, “although they do not look it or show it.”