Mrs G’s home in the hills

Had her life not been cut cruelly short by the assassin’s bullet, Indira Gandhi would have sought post-prime ministerial solitude in Himachal Pradesh’s gentle valleys. On Friday, Congress President Sonia Gandhi wound up an emotional, and high-pitched, electoral campaign by seeking to establish her family’s deep affection for the people of this hill state. Prime Minister Vajpayee may have acquired a holiday home in Manali — but it was Jawaharlal Nehru, she said, who gave this patch of heaven special status, and it was Mrs Gandhi, Sr, who conferred it statehood. But in disclosing her mother-in-law’s retirement plans, she touched a theme that runs right through Indira Gandhi’s copious writings.

Katherine Frank, Indira’s controversial biographer, alludes to her “secret dreams of escape” from politics, to her desire to quit politics before it annihilated her personality. In a heart-tugging note to Nehru, for instance, she sought a retreat from a strident involvement in Congress affairs. In letters to her American confidante Dorothy Norman, she articulated a yearning to flee the hurly-burly of public life. And Frank claims that this urge to leave was not limited to politics, but to India as well, that she aspired to be a landlady in London. In the event, Indira Gandhi stayed on in New Delhi and occupied centrestage in Indian politics. Like her father, and like Vajpayee, she was sustained by periodic R&Rs in the mountains — but she never really quit politics, did she?

In fact, they never do, do they? Politicians and retirement don’t mix, do they? There is the odd one, like Ronald Reagan, who heroically marches into the sunset of his life. But pols generally stick around, valiantly battling the threat of fading relevance, constantly seeking to reinvent themselves and stay in the frame. Ask Bill Clinton. Just fiftysomething and already a White House veteran, this month he voiced his dilemma — how to occupy himself beyond active politics — and reckoned he’d have to follow in Jimmy Carter’s do-gooding, peace-making footsteps. Ask our growing brood of ex-prime ministers, visibly striving to redefine their role in public life. Narasimha Rao may have disappeared into his numerous court cases, but his Third Front fellow ex-PMs seem understandably uncomfortable at the prospect of spending the rest of their years in quiet reflection outside Lutyen’s Delhi. The texture of a politician’s retirement is clearly unique.