Given To Imperious Decisions

Most of Indira Gandhi's decisions were in the right direction, but were not swayed by people's movements, which are the very soul of genuine environmental activism

- Darryl D'Monte

I CAN cite an incident in which I was involved in the early 1970s. The National Institute of Bank Management in Bombay (now Mumbai) was to set up a R6-crore bankers’ training institute on the rocky foreshore of Carter Road in the suburb of Bandra. Test-drilling had begun and the structures were to be raised on a platform, with gates for the tides to flow in and out. The hostel was hexagonal-shaped to allow the trainees to get unrestricted vistas of the ocean.

Residents objected and—led by the honorary sheriff Mahboob Nasrullah and Russi Karanjia, feisty editor of Blitz weekly—held a meeting on the coast, the city’s first-ever environmental protest. Eventually, Ashok Advani, publisher of Business India, contacted the then prime minister Indira Gandhi’s aide Usha Bhagat. She informed the prime minister, who issued a diktat. The campus was shifted to Pune and observers reported that this was the first victory for environmentalists in the Maximum City.

This gives a good indication of her style of decision-making, as Jairam Ramesh’s recent voluminous tome, Indira Gandhi: A Life in Nature, constantly underlines. While not quite the patrician that her father was, she was very much a grandee, consorting and corresponding with influential individuals and institutes at home and abroad, while genuflecting towards the latter.

To revisit her green credentials, one could argue that she was given to imperious decisions, most often in the right direction but without being swayed by people’s movements, which are the very soul of genuine environmental activism. Two issues illustrate this tendency.