Father's Daughter

In village after village, peasant women showered her with flowers and shouted her name; children fashioned garlands for her; elders asked her advice. A new political personality--a woman, at that--was emerging in India. The woman: Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru's only daughter Indira.

At 37, Indira is a slim, dark-eyed woman of practiced poise. "My public life started at the age of three," she recently explained. "I have no recollection of games, 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." At four, she was being taken by her mother to party congresses. At twelve, she organized "the Monkey Brigade," whose small members specialized in sneaking past British soldiers with political messages; at 24, she was in a British jail.

Into the House. Educated in India, Switzerland and England (Oxford), she married a lawyer named Feroze Gandhi (no kin to the Mahatma). But the marriage soon had to be subordinated to father's needs. By 1946, over her husband's objections, she moved herself and her two small sons into her father's house in New Delhi, began acting as Widower Nehru's hostess and housekeeper. Soon Nehru was taking her with him everywhere--to the U.S., to China, to Russia.

Until recently, Indira confined her outside activities to good works and women's welfare. But since the death of his old friend Ran Ahmad Kidwai, Nehru has lacked a personal troubleshooter and confidant. Most candidates were too old, too ambitious, or too antagonistic to Krishna Menon. Nehru's devious foreign-policy tinkerer. Last week it looked as if Indira was being groomed for the job.

Two months ago Indira topped the poll of candidates for election to the Congress Party's eleven-member Central Election Committee, to become the first woman member of the powerful committee that picks all party candidates. Since then, she has assumed the humble mannerisms prescribed for a Congress Party personality, putting away her jewelry, and discarding her costly embroidered saris in favor of homespun cotton.

Out to the Left. She began scolding and exhorting party workers with authority: "Progress calls for discipline, for a certain amount of regimentation." She praised Communist China ("The whole nation throbs with activity toward a single end--even infants are taught the benefits of collective life") and the example of Russia ("In Russia the party has impressed on people what it's doing for them. The sooner we do it, the better for us"). She seems to be considerably to the left of her father, who sometimes is capable of a searing skepticism about the Communist wonderlands.

In pursuit of her new duties, Indira has ordered daily rehearsals for New Delhi's schoolchildren in throwing flowers and shouting "welcome" in preparation for next week's visit of Russia's Nikita Khrushchev and Nikolai Bulganin. Last week her trained tots got a run-through welcoming the visiting King of Nepal. And close observers noticed a new recurrent phrase in India's press. Instead of the customary "enthusiastic masses" greeting Nehru, the phrase has become "enthusiastic but disciplined masses greeted Prime Minister Nehru and Mrs. Indira Gandhi."

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