After suffering a defeat, a less ideological Indira Gandhi, not a firebrand socialist anymore, came to power in 1980. Perhaps she had read or heard about the on-going reforms in post-Maoist China under Deng Xiaoping and how the leader had said that “I don’t care if it’s a white cat or a black cat. It’s a good cat so long as it catches mice.” She may have also realised that her anti-market, anti-big capital, and small-is-beautiful populism pursued earlier was not delivering the expected results in terms
of economic development.
In any case, there is little evidence of any ideological dogmatism in Indira Gandhi. She became the Prime Minister after Shastri’s death not because of her ideology, but because of her lack of it. She was “weak” and non-controversial relative to her adversary Morarji Desai, who was known for his decisiveness and dogmatism, and hence acceptable to all sections of the Congress party, including the Syndicate. Her ideological flexibility was manifest in the chequered history of her attitude to the communists. As president of the ruling Congress party in 1959, she got the first communist party government in Kerala dismissed on July 31, 1959, in spite of resistance from both her father Nehru…
