Stamps

31 st October is the day when both Indira Gandhi and Amrita Pritam left this world. Apart from both of them being contemporaries I find many parallels in their gritty and rebellious lives.

Amrita's life was a typical artist's life. She seems to have channelized both her personal sadness as well as public grief into an exquisite creative expression. So while her early work is driven by the loss of her mother at a young age and the colossal human suffering resulting from the partition of the Indian sub continent ; her later work drew more and more from her personal life. Her collapsing marriage , her unfulfilled relationship with Sahir Ludhyanvi and her eventual common law relation with Imroz probably firmed her feminist perspective. Her writings are intense and manage to take hold of you even in translation.

Indira Gandhi also lost her mother to TB at an early age . That fact seems to have shaped her personality to a large extent. Not only did this tragedy bring both father and daughter closer and made them interdependent , it also built a tough autocratic core to her . Again like Amrita she flayed convention to elope with Firoz ; not only many years her senior but of a different faith. That could not have been easy but obviously she got her way even in her youth. It is another matter that her marriage eventually was put on ice as she moved in to run her father's household. Leaving Firoz to his own devices. So both these women seem to have confronted personal relationship challenges. Great turmoil is a constant subtext of their life stories . Partition in case of Amrita and anti- sikh riots in case of Indira Gandhi.
As far as her life's work is concerned she has left an indelible stamp on modern India. Three things mainly stand out. Bangladesh war - the credit for winning that war has to go to Sam Manekshaw; Gen. Jagjit Singh Arora and the soldiers . One must say though that Pakistan did not stand any chance . What with open revolt in Bangladesh , most likely given enough time even mukti vahini alone would have done the job themselves. The political decision of helping Bangladesh to secede on the other hand is Indira's alone . In retrospect that has proved to be a poor decision. East Pakistan would have been a constant nag and a huge drag on Pakistan which suited Indian interests;. Instead now we have an ungrateful and hostile independent Bangladesh. Which is only another headache for India. However to be fair to Mrs. Gandhi it seemed like a good thing to do in '71.
Next in line is emergency that she clamped down in '75. Really no comments are necessary. It was a rank bad dictatorial move by her. A serious blot on her political sagacity. The last highlight of her political career is her Punjab policy which in association with Akali politics created terrorism in Punjab and culminated in Operation Bluestar. Aftermath of that ill thought action is still felt from Canada to HongKong. And of course that terribly shameful riot in '84,; that was more a handiwork of her legacy since she was already gone by then. Tragically felled by the bullets meant to protect her.