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Deepshikha Ghosh in New Delhi
Seventeen years after her assassination, former Indian prime minister Indira Gandhi is still remembered as one of the most powerful leaders of the world's largest democracy.
Many people may have forgotten her death anniversary on Wednesday, but Gandhi's monolithic memory remains etched in public fancy.
Gandhi, who ruled India for 16 years over two spells, was gunned down by two security guards at her residence in New Delhi on October 31, 1984. This followed her order to the Indian Army to storm Sikhdom's holiest monument, the Golden Temple in Amritsar, to quell a separatist campaign.
In the past few years, whenever governments fell and prime ministers dithered over pressing issues, it would be a rare occasion when people did not recall Indira Gandhi's stern, even arrogant demeanour and iron-handed rule, marred only by the "Emergency rule" of 1975-77 when she jailed thousands of critics.
India misses her, say a cross-section of citizens who voted her the best prime minister the country ever had in an opinion poll published in August.
Chosen by Congress bosses in 1966 as a prime minister they thought they could easily manipulate, Jawaharlal Nehru's daughter stunned everyone by quickly building a mass following, splitting the century-old party, and establishing herself as the unquestioned leader - the only "man" in her Cabinet as some said.
Nothing that she accomplished is remembered more vividly than the way she led India to a decisive military victory over arch foe Pakistan in 1971, breaking up that country's eastern wing, which became an independent Bangladesh.
That came barely two years after she brought about radical changes in politics, injecting large doses of socialism, and went on to turn India from a food deficit to a self-sufficient economy, and took the country closer to the Soviet Union.
Domestically, however, she scored poorly.
She deftly - and often brusquely -- handled party leaders who ranged from noisy rebels to greasy sycophants. Gandhi proved vulnerable only when it came to her younger son Sanjay Gandhi, whom she tried to groom until he died tragically in a plane accident in June 1980.
There was a strong mind under the head of close-cropped hair with the signature silver streak, concede admirers and detractors alike.
Asked by India Today news magazine who they thought was India's best prime minister, 41 percent of the readers gave the mother of two the highest points, piping her father and independent India's first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru (13 percent), present Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee (11 percent) and Lal Bahadur Shastri (9 percent), at the post.
"It is hard to come by a leader like that. If only she were alive today," remarked Anil Joshi, an executive with an international bank who claims he is politically neutral.
Had she been alive she would have been 84, but he told Indo-Asian News Service that he found it hard to imagine that even a decrepit Gandhi could not run the government as she did till 1984.
Even Jagdish Prasad Mathur, a leader of the Bharatiya Janata Party, attributed some of the after sheen of the Indira persona to the canonisation of the dead.
"Past leaders are always remembered. She is also being remembered as a good leader," said Mathur, one of the founder members of the Jana Sangh that was born as an alternative to the Congress in 1951.
Mathur admitted that she was an effective prime minister.
"She was daring and decisive -- such as is needed in any good leader." The flipside, however, was her hunger for power.
To many minds, nothing compares to the audacity of the Emergency rule. Gandhi took this drastic step when her election to the Lok Sabha was challenged and a court unseated her.
Says Khushwant Singh, a noted writer-historian and a family friend of the Gandhis: "She was dynamic but she also destroyed all institutions of democracy."
There were two different facets to the same person. She was decisive, yet she put loyalty to her person above loyalty to the party and the country, sometimes at a great cost, Singh opined.
"Today's leaders are namby-pamby. They cannot make up their minds and always pander to their supporters," he observed. "I think what India needs today is a leader like Indira Gandhi but one who has learnt the lessons from her mistakes."
Over the years, Gandhi's charismatic personality seems to have prevailed over her dictatorial ways. She was named "Woman of the Millennium" in a BBC poll in 1999. She upstaged even Queen Elizabeth II.
Former prime minister Inder Kumar Gujral does not like comparisons but says: "There may have been faults in her policy, but viewed as a whole, she served the country to the best of her capacity. She had courage."
Indo-Asian News Service
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