private life of gandhi nehru and indiragandi

The private life of Indira Gandhi
  August 29.2001
There have been biographies on Indira Gandhi by Pupul Jayakar, Zareer Masani and Inder Malhotra ... does Katherine Frank's show us her feet of clay?

A FRIEND once told me a clerihew about Robert Clive which, with the appearance of Katherine Frank's biography of Indira Gandhi, seems equally suited to her:
The best thing about Lord Clive
Is that he's no longer alive.
There's a great deal to be said
For being dead.
For if Indira Gandhi were not safely dead, it is pretty certain that Katherine Frank would have been clapped in irons within Tihar Jail, locked up by the woman whose prolific love life she seems, rather eponymously, the first to have been entirely frank about.
It is in the nature of biographies of the safely dead to expose or demolish privacies long rumoured or whispered about during the subject's lifetime. But if the subject happens to be a holy cow or has achieved the status of a deity, there is usually a conservative furore in our part of the world when it is proven she had something as depraved as a normal sex life. Rushdie's foray into the Prophet's sanctum may have been provocatively calculated to stir an Islamic hornet's nest, but even ordinary depositions about the erotic relationships of sacred heroes make people deeply uncomfortable.
About five years ago, Sisir Kumar and Sugata Bose published a volume of letters exchanged between Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose and his Austrian lover, later his wife, Emilie Schenkl. Of course Netaji was not dead five years ago and we know he is still alive and eating shorshe machh even as we speak, but the book did demolish the peculiarly Bengali-Victorian myth that Netaji, being God, had no sex life. Netaji's letters went so far as to show that not only did he love a being other than Bengal, he even had a daughter by her. Which self-respecting Bengali could swallow such an insult? This was even worse than the equivalent news in Britain, some years ago, that Field Marshall Montgomery was gay all along. The Forward Bloc immediately rioted and burnt the book in Calcutta, though in the end they seem to have accepted that Bengali deities too can be allowed the occasional carnality so long as everyone continues to believe they are immortal.
At roughly the same time, there appeared a surprisingly third- rate biography of Nehru by the American historian Stanley Wolpert - surprisingly because Wolpert had always possessed the most authentic credentials for being unfailingly second rate. This book suggested that Nehru's many wild oats were not sown exclusively among womankind: he had also favoured mankind when young. Wolpert's creative enthusiasm for the multiple exercise of Nehru's crotch, which had failed to intrigue earlier biographers like S. Gopal and Michael Brecher, caused him to forget that there happens to be a boundary between speculation and fact. His book was temporarily banned in India: "stopped at Customs for inspection".
Unlike her father, who himself would never have banned Wolpert, Indira Gandhi was no Voltairean liberal. During her lifetime no one would have dared openly accuse her of wanting men in bed. P. N. Haksar and P. N. Dhar, both strikingly handsome Kashmiri pandits who served her with integrity and distinction and have written fine memoirs, analyse her emotions with perception but say nothing about their boss's private life. In fact the most perceptive observation about Indira Gandhi was once made by the singer-writer Sheila Dhar (Mrs. P. N. Dhar), who knew Mrs. G. well enough to notice that "Indira Gandhi had the developed instincts of an animal, she always responded to people with her skin". The political animal that was Indira Gandhi has long been known and done to death: there have been biographies by Pupul Jayakar, Zareer Masani and Inder Malhotra. It is high time someone gave us an insight into the human animal and showed us her feet of clay.
If Katherine Frank's Emily Bronte: A Chainless Soul (Hamish Hamilton, 1990) is any indication, she is the very woman for the task. The Bronte biography is one of the most moving pictures of tragic womanhood I have ever read. Some of the phrases in Frank's Preface to her Bronte biography provide an indication of why she has also chosen to write about Indira Gandhi: "I see Emily Bronte's life as troubled, solitary and austere ... she made her own choices boldly and stuck by them ... she cared nothing for the opinions and values of others ... there was much that was dismaying, even forbidding, in her personality and the story of her life is riddled with misfortune, loss and failure ... yet there was an undercurrent of triumph in this life ... It was a life of rare and awesome autonomy".
It is an indication of the intellectual condition of the Congress Party that its old horses, who are very hoarse and very old, are in a flutter about the fact that Mrs. G. may actually have had an enjoyable sex life. My instinct is to applaud, but this just will not do. Even in an era accustomed to scurrility, sleaze and Shobha De, the Indian Caesar's daughter should be seen to be chaste, Hindu and properly womanly. Whereas, if the stories told are true - and in such matters every substantial accumulation of rumours substitutes for proof - Indira Gandhi may even have been a bad case of epitomising the brilliant parodic one-liner against Hindu hypocrisy which says caste no bar lekin sex baar-baar. Mrs. Gandhi had, it seems, nearly as much love for the pleasures of her residential bed as of her prime ministerial chair. The Kissa was as much Kursi Ka as Palang Ka.
Her list of hits is impressively long. A Parsi husband who turned philanderer, a scandal-mongering Malayali old enough to be her father's typist (he was once appropriately called a Remington Randy), a yoga teacher who degenerated into a physical instructor, a poodle Foreign Minister who never stepped far from her Home Ministrations - how wonderful to learn that even as she was shackling her country with authoritarianism, she was unshackling her libido at home. What a riproaringly wonderful and motley crew of purdah paramours our Rushdiean Widow seems to have had. Our hearts go out to poor R. K. Dhawan. How awful he must feel to be left out of this litany of lovers. Can we hope for a memoir by him which regales us with proclamations of his non- innocence? Can we hope that Mrs. Shobha De's publishers have given her an "undisclosed sum" as royalty advance for her next potboiler on a subject which seems so entirely tailor-made to suit her well-polished talons?
Anyone with half an eye can see that Indira Gandhi's life can be made, beyond the politics and jingoistic nationalism, the very stuff of sex drama, of Babban Khan's Punjabi farce "Chaddhi Javaani Buddhe Noo" (which translates roughly as "The Old Chap's Turning Horny"), of the carnivalesque Restoration Comedy tradition of parodying the aristocracy, of the "lewd" literature of subversion which has such strong popular roots in so many of the country's regional languages. Though it is now too late, the material within Frank's biography could even have been made, for instance, into an Italian romantic film starring Gina Lollobrigida as the lovely Indira, Marcello Mastroanni as Feroze, Edward G. Robinson as the seductively ugly M. O. Mathai and Anthony Quinn as the rugged yoga teacher. Surely Sonia Gandhi, liminally poised between India and Italy, could have been persuaded to script such a film? The finances would naturally have been provided by a joint venture set up between the Quattrochi Family and the Sangh Parivar. The Guests of Honour at the first screening would have been Khushwant Singh arm in arm with Maneka Gandhi. What scenario other than the private life of Indira Gandhi could possibly give such an equal measure of delight, for such diverse reasons, to secularists and feminists, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP)?
By art alone might such contraries be fused, enmities overcome. As exponents of the comic tradition - from Aristophanes to Shakespeare to Swift to Rushdie to Yes Minister to Spitting Image to R. K. Laxman to Jaspal Bhatti to Black Adder - have shown, the literary inflation and consequent deflation of politicians into caricatures via comic art is the only certain method for the ordinary citizen to get even with those who exercise everyday power over us, to make us feel that our ordinariness at least transcends the insanities of their politics. Those who love the exercise of power fear ridicule even more than they fear retirement. Mrs. G. seems to have feared it most of all. In this seems to lie the psychological roots of the Emergency.
If the Congress Party were less stuffed with hypocritical geriatrics it would realise that in this epoch, when Kaliyuga has gone global and formed a multinational joint venture with the bold and the beautiful, with liberalisation and liberalism, the world of vice has, in large sections of urban India, been turned upside down into the world of virtue. If you want to be politically correct, sexuality and hedonism in the woman now betoken female power. The idea of womanly virtue, of the fallen woman, has fortunately no more stability than the Berlin Wall. It may remain generally embedded as a patriarchal ideal, but everyone knows that the winds of gender equality in sexual matters have been blowing hard and chilling the traditional Indian male's privates into a deep recession.
Yes, there is no doubt about it, Frank has done us a favour by making Indira Gandhi roll out of her Cleopatra rug, by making the skeletons in her bedsheets come tumbling out with her. It is time we took the politics out of Indira's life and started to democratically look her straight in the face. What if Katherine Frank has got minor dates and details wrong? The next printing will sort those out. Meanwhile, how delightful to know at last that Mrs. G. was only as human as any of us, that the peccadilloes for which Jawaharlal Nehru was moralistically castigated merely inaugurated a tradition which continued and flourished with his daughter. As we await the future biographies of Rajiv and Sanjay, Sonia and Maneka, Varun and Priyanka, we can only pray that this tradition of a rich and varied sexuality is being actively maintained even now by India's immortal First Family.
Rukun Advani is the author of Beethoven Among the Cows and runs Permanent Black, a publishing company in New Delhi.
After all it is in the grand tradition as described in the Mahabharta. Draupathi in the story had 5 husbands. As in Braham temple custom, did the Nehrus get formal training in the art of sex and seduction? Certainly seems like it. Nehru seduced bother Edwina and Lord Mountbatten and his daughter Mrs. Gandhi used sex to her advantage and to move up the corridors of power.
 Indira Gandhi was a tough cookie coming from a very high profile family in India. Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto said that Indira Gandhi was not a very good student at Berkley. By all accounts circulating in the media Mrs Indira Gandhi had a list of lovers. There are the known ones:
1) “Remington Randy” her father’s typist:Mathai Merely (M. O. Mathai author of “Reminiscences of the Nehru Age“ and “My Days With Nehru”, 1979)
2) Her Yoga Teacher:Dhirendra Brahmachari
3) The Foreign Minister:Sardar Swaran Singh
4) Dhinesh Singh
5) Mohammad Yunus author of the book, ‘Persons, Passions & Politics’
6) Frank Oberdorf (A German teacher on the staff at Santiniketan) The new biography is indeed a remarkable story of the woman in Indira, controversially focusing on her intimate side—from her first love, a German teacher at Shantiniketan, to her long pre-marital relationship with Feroze Gandhi and then Mathai, Dinesh Singh and Dhirendra Brahmachari.
To mold Indira according to his aspirations, Nehru sent the young Indira to Shantiniketan, the school of the great poet, Tagore. Indira was expelled from the shcool at Shantiniketan by Tagor for her “wrong” habbits. Santiniketan is a small town near Bolpur in the Birbhum district of West Bengal, India, approximately 180 kilometres north of Kolkata. It was made famous by Nobel Laureate Rabindranath Tagore. the town housed Visva-Bharati which became a Central University in 1951. Indira Gandhi was one of its more illustrious students and was known for her after hour activities at the University.
Source: Indira: The Life of Indira Nehru Gandhi By Katherine Frank, Various authors, plus, http://www.outlookindia.com/article.aspx?211174 , http://www.hinduonnet.com/2001/04/29/stories/13290463.htm
Indira Gandhi (1917-1984) was known as a feisty young woman and a uber-hyper leader. Indira Gandhi was the only child of Kamla and Jawaharlal Nehru. The young Indira was found in bed with her German Teacher at Shantineketan–Frank Oberdorf. She always had a big libido, probably inherited from her father who had a line of affairs, the most famous with Un-Lady Edwina Mountbatten. Stanley Wolpert and other have provided proof that Jawaharlal Nehru was gay and he consorted with the gay Viceroy of India Lord Mountbatten. (Nehur’s tyrst with homosexuality. Nehru dated both Ediwina, and Lord Mountbatten.Menage de trois impacted independence). Indira had many lovers when she was young. She was friendly with Mohandas, and may have participated in his infamous and perverted Bharamacharya sexual experiments–where Mohandas Gandhi slept naked with young 12 year old young girls and married women. Sex life of Mohandas Gandhi, his failures and sexual perversion.
“Indira Gandhi had the developed instincts of an animal, she always responded to people with her skin” Singer-writer Sheila Dhar (Mrs. P. N. Dhar), who knew Mrs. Gandi well
Indira finally settled for one Feroze, someone who was docile and would interfere with her desire for other men. Some say she was pregnant when she wanted to marry a young man Feroze. Due to caste issues, she ran into problems. Mohandas adopted Feroze so that he could have the last name Gandhi. This made it appear that she was marrying a person with the last name Gandhi. This is a very strange episode because Indira already had a famous last name “Nehru”. The Gandhi nomenclature had more to do with religion than anything else. Her belligerence with world leaders is well known. She constantly tangled with Henry Kissinger and they were not even on speaking terms. While in power Indira Gandhi liasons were pretty much an open secret to those who had access to the corridors of power in New Delhi.
Wolpert had always possessed the most authentic credentials for being unfailingly second rate. This book suggested that Nehru’s many wild oats were not sown exclusively among womankind: he had also favoured mankind when young. Wolpert’s creative enthusiasm for the multiple exercise of Nehru’s crotch, which had failed to intrigue earlier biographers like S. Gopal and Michael Brecher, caused him to forget that there happens to be a boundary between speculation and fact. His book was temporarily banned in India: “stopped at Customs for inspection”.
Unlike her father, who himself would never have banned Wolpert, Indira Gandhi was no Voltairean liberal. During her lifetime no one would have dared openly accuse her of wanting men in bed. P. N. Haksar and P. N. Dhar, both strikingly handsome Kashmiri pandits who served her with integrity and distinction and have written fine memoirs, analyse her emotions with perception but say nothing about their boss’s private life. In fact the most perceptive observation about Indira Gandhi was once made by the singer-writer Sheila Dhar (Mrs. P. N. Dhar), who knew Mrs. G. well enough to notice that “Indira Gandhi had the developed instincts of an animal, she always responded to people with her skin”. The political animal that was Indira Gandhi has long been known and done to death: there have been biographies by Pupul Jayakar, Zareer Masani and Inder Malhotra. It is high time someone gave us an insight into the human animal and showed us her feet of clay. http://www.hinduonnet.com/2001/04/29/stories/13290463.htm
Frank dwells at some length on the rumours of Indira Gandhi’s affairs with “none other than her father’s squat and moon-faced secretary, M.O. Mathai.” She writes: “Admittedly it was Mathai himself who was the primary source of these rumours. He boasted openly of his liaison with Nehru’s daughter, both at the time and for many years after.”
Frank, however, says there was “definitely a certain attraction” between them, quoting Nehru’s biographer Sarvepalli Gopal to say that “Indira Gandhi encouraged him beyond normal limits.” She also says that ‘She’, which Mathai withdrew, surfaced in the Eighties, five years after Mathai’s death, “when Indira’s estranged daughter-in-law Maneka Gandhi circulated it among a small group of Indira’s enemies”.
Frank writes: “The ‘She’ chapter contains such explicit material that even if Mathai had not suppressed it, it is doubtful whether his publishers would
While Brahmachari was the silent lover, Dinesh Singh had no qualms about playing up rumours of an affair.
have taken the risk and proceeded to publish it. Mathai describes Indira as ‘highly sexed’ and includes among other salacious details the claim that she became pregnant by him and had an abortion.” A disillusioned Mathai had a strong motive to lie but Frank says that people who knew them well, “including B.K. Nehru, who is a reliable source and no enemy of his cousin (Indira), feel that the ‘She’ chapter contains more fact than fiction”.
So open was their relationship that in ‘She’ Mathai claims to have been afraid that Indira’s careless behaviour would alert her father. But “Delhi buzzed with rumours” about their relationship. In Parliament, Feroze Gandhi was teased that Mathai was Nehru’s real son-in-law. “Indira, significantly, did nothing to quell the rumours of the alleged liaison,” writes Frank.
Subsequently, Indira Gandhi wrote to Dorothy Norman, her lifelong confidante, that she had taken to yoga taught “by an exceedingly good-looking yogi”—Dhirendra Brahmachari. She wrote that “it was his looks, especially his magnificent body, which attracted everyone to his system.” Dhirendra was probably no brahmachari: a raid on his ashram in Kashmir after the Emergency yielded, among other things, a vibrator! If she had a lover as prime minister it would have to be him. “Brahmachari was the only man to see Indira alone in her room while giving her yoga instruction, and he was the only male with whom she could have had a relationship during this period.”
To her men Indira was quite a catch—and perhaps that’s why they encouraged rumours about their relationships with her.Congressman Dinesh Singh had this tendency as much as Mathai. “Indira relied on Singh and conferred with him at all hours. Inevitably, there were rumours that he was her lover, rumours which Singh himself encouraged.”Mrs G’s String of Beaus. A new book chronicles Indira Gandhi’s loves and gets rave reviews in the UK , Sanjay Suri in London. http://www.outlookindia.com/article.aspx?211174
Here is a sketch of at least three:
 Controversy was the second name of Dhirendra Brahmachari. He was mentioned in the press during his hey days as the Rasputin of India. He was a charishmatic yoga teacher who befriended the Nehru-Gandhi Family. He was also the personal tutor of Indira Gandhi. It was rumored that he had an affair with Indira gandhi, which might be quite possible as he was a handsome healthy man. He had an open access to Indira Gandhi’s house when she was the prime minister of india and many of the sychophants around Indira were quite jealous of Brahmachari’s proximity to Indira Gandhi. Kushwanth Singh has mentioned a lot of incidents of his encounter with dhirendra brahmachari. Kushwanth singh devotes an entire chapter in his book ‘God and Godmen of India’ for Dhirendra Brahmachari:(http://drvasu.wordpress.com/2007/10/22/dhirendra-brahmachari-sukshma-vyayama/)
 Mr. Sardar Swaran Singh, Minister of External Affairs of India (from 27 June 1970 to 10 October 1974)
Mathai Merely: There is much information available on Mr. M. O. Mathai who befriended Mr. Nehru and then became one of the most powerful men in his office. Mr. Merely has said some very nasty stuff about Mrs. Indira Gandhi.
(http://books.google.com/books?id=0eolM37FUWYC&pg=PA205&lpg=PA205&dq=Nehru%27s+typist&source=web&ots=KfkLh_u1TS&sig=oB_BiKqIHbZ3ULE2dFPgnfZZxSg&hl=en&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=1&ct=result#PPA207,M1)

 This is what Khuswant Singh says about Indira Gandhi.
There is nothing spectacular about her rule.
She was incapable of tolerating any criticism and she picked up an aversion to some persons because she thought they were challenging her, among them Jayaprakash Narayan, a good, honest man. She couldn’t stand him because he was a challenge to her as the leader of the country, especially as people grew disillusioned with her rule. There were problems, droughts, challenges and Jayaprakash Narayan had emerged as a leader.
During her reign, corruption increased to enormous levels. She was really very tolerant of corruption, which was another negative mark against her. She knew perfectly well that some of her ministers were extremely corrupt, yet she took no steps against them till it suited her.
If she knew someone was corrupt, she tolerated him but if it suited her, she used the same corruption charge to get rid of him. She really had no strong views on corruption, which went sky high during her time.
Also, she felt uncomfortable with educated, sophisticated people. So you have the rise of people like Yashpal Kapoor, R K Dhawan, who was a stenographer who worked in her office, Mohammad Yunus, who just hung around her.
I believe this was because she had no real education.
She went to Shanti Niketan, then she went to Badminton School abroad, then to Oxford. Nowhere did she pass an exam or acquire a degree.
I think that bred a sort of inferiority complex of not being recognised as an educated person. She would pretend to have read a lot of books. She spoke French, which she picked up when she accompanied her ailing mother Kamala to Switzerland, which went in her favour. There were pros and cons but there was this sense of insecurity when it came to highly intelligent people and people with clear records. She felt more comfortable with second-rate people.
How did her insecurities, about which much has been written, affect India?
In her insecurity, she destroyed the institutions of democracy. She packed Parliament with her supporters with loyalty being more important than ability; she superseded judges; she corrupted the civil service. Favouritism became a great sport with her.
She also knew how to use people against each other and was quite a master of that. She would patronise somebody and when she thought he was getting too big, instead of appointing him to a senior post, she would appoint his close associate, knowing this would create a rift between them.
The best example is of V P Singh. It was his elder brother (Santa Bux Singh) who believed he would be made minister but instead she picked V P Singh, the lesser qualified of the two brothers, which only created enmity between the brothers. She would do this with calculated skill and in the bargain cause enmity between brothers, split up families.
In the long run it was not good for the country to play such games as she did. Few journalists interacted with Indira Gandhi the way Khushwant Singh, doyen of Indian journalism, did. As editor of the now defunct The Illustrated Weekly of India and later The Hindustan Times, he was witness to some of the most historic moments in Indira Gandhi’s 16-year-long rule.
 Mars and Venus
 Did the young Indira Nehru (maiden name) eagerly and actively participate in Mohandas Gandhi’s “Bharam Acharaya” pedophilia “experiments with truth” where he would sleep naked with young women, including his niece Manu?

..the list is long…read on for salacious details.
In 1964, the year of her father’s death, Indira Gandhi was for the first time elected to Parliament, and she was Minister of Information and Broadcasting in the government of Lal Bahadur Shastri, who died unexpectedly of a heart attack less than two years after assuming office. The numerous contenders for the position of the Prime Ministership, unable to agree among themselves, picked Indira Gandhi as a compromise candidate, and each thought that she would be easily manipulable. But Indira Gandhi showed extraordinary political skills and tenacity and elbowed the Congress dons — Kamaraj, Morarji Desai, and others — out of power. She held the office of the Prime Minister from 1966 to 1977. http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/southasia/History/Independent/Indira.html
There was much to write about during the years that Mrs. Gandhi in power.
 “It is an indication of the intellectual condition of the Congress Party that its old horses, who are very hoarse and very old, are in a flutter about the fact that Mrs. G. may actually have had an enjoyable sex life. My instinct is to applaud, but this just will not do. Even in an era accustomed to scurrility, sleaze and Shobha De, the Indian Caesar’s daughter should be seen to be chaste, Hindu and properly womanly. Whereas, if the stories told are true – and in such matters every substantial accumulation of rumours substitutes for proof – Indira Gandhi may even have been a bad case of epitomising the brilliant parodic one-liner against Hindu hypocrisy which says caste no bar lekin sex baar-baar. Mrs. Gandhi had, it seems, nearly as much love for the pleasures of her residential bed as of her prime ministerial chair. The Kissa was as much Kursi Ka as Palang Ka.
  Her list of hits is impressively long. A Parsihusband who turned philanderer, a scandal-mongering Malayalioldenough to be her father’s typist (he was once appropriately called a Remington Randy), a yoga teacher who degenerated into a physical instructor, a poodle Foreign Minister who never stepped far from her Home Ministrations – how wonderful to learn that even as she was shackling her country with authoritarianism, she was unshackling her libido at home. What a riproaringly wonderful and motley crew of purdah paramours our Rushdiean Widow seems to have had. Our hearts go out to poor R. K. Dhawan. How awful he must feel to be left out of this litany of lovers. Can we hope for a memoir by him which regales us with proclamations of his non- innocence? Can we hope that Mrs. Shobha De’s publishers have given her an “undisclosed sum” as royalty advance for her next potboiler on a subject which seems so entirely tailor-made to suit her well-polished talons?
  Anyone with half an eye can see that Indira Gandhi’s life can be made, beyond the politics and jingoistic nationalism, the very stuff of sex drama, of Babban Khan’s Punjabi farce “Chaddhi Javaani Buddhe Noo” (which translates roughly as “The Old Chap’s Turning Horny”), of the carnivalesque Restoration Comedy tradition of parodying the aristocracy, of the “lewd” literature of subversion which has such strong popular roots in so many of the country’s regional languages.
 Though it is now too late, the material within Frank’s biography could even have been made, for instance, into an Italian romantic film starring Gina Lollobrigida as the lovely Indira, Marcello Mastroanni as Feroze, Edward G. Robinson as the seductively ugly M. O. Mathai and Anthony Quinn as the rugged yoga teacher. Surely Sonia Gandhi, liminally poised between India and Italy, could have been persuaded to script such a film? The finances would naturally have been provided by a joint venture set up between the Quattrochi Family and the Sangh Parivar.
 The Guests of Honour at the first screening would have been Khushwant Singharmin arm with Maneka Gandhi. What scenario other than the private life of Indira Gandhi could possibly give such an equal measure of delight, for such diverse reasons, to secularists and feminists, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP)?
 By art alone might such contraries be fused, enmities overcome. As exponents of the comic tradition – from Aristophanes to Shakespeare to Swift to Rushdie to Yes Minister to Spitting Image to R. K. Laxman to Jaspal Bhattito Black Adder – have shown, the literary inflation and consequent deflation of politicians into caricatures via comic art is the only certain method for the ordinary citizen to get even with those who exercise everyday power over us, to make us feel that our ordinariness at least transcends the insanities of their politics. Those who love the exercise of power fear ridicule even more than they fear retirement. Mrs. G. seems to have feared it most of all. In this seems to lie the psychological roots of the Emergency.
  If the Congress Party were less stuffed with hypocritical geriatrics it would realise that in this epoch, when Kaliyugahas gone global and formed a multinational joint venture withthebold and the beautiful, withliberalisationand liberalism, the world of vice has, in large sections of urban India, been turned upside down into the world of virtue. If you want to be politically correct, sexuality and hedonism in the woman now betoken female power. The idea of womanly virtue, of the fallen woman, has fortunately no more stability than the Berlin Wall. It may remain generally embedded as a patriarchal ideal, but everyone knows that the winds of gender equality in sexual matters have been blowing hard and chilling the traditional Indian male’s privates into a deep recession.
 Yes, there is no doubt about it, Frank has done us a favour by making Indira Gandhi roll out of her Cleopatra rug, by making the skeletons in her bedsheets come tumbling out withher. It is time we took the politics out of Indira’s life and started to democratically look her straight in the face. What if Katherine Frank has got minor dates and details wrong? The next printing will sort those out. Meanwhile, how delightful to know at last that Mrs. G. was only as human as any of us, that the peccadilloes for which JawaharlalNehru was moralistically castigated merely inaugurated a tradition which continued and flourished with his daughter. As we await the future biographies of Rajiv and Sanjay, Sonia and Maneka, Varun and Priyanka, we can only pray that this tradition of a rich and varied sexuality is being actively maintained even now by India’s immortal First Family. Rukun Advani is the author of Beethoven Among the Cows and runs Permanent Black, a publishing company in New Delhi.”
By 1973 the decline had begun. This was just the beginning of the end for Indira Gandi.
1973, Delhi and north India were rocked by demonstrations angry at high inflation, the poor state of the economy, rampant corruption, and the poor standards of living. In June 1975, the High Court of Allahabad found her guilty of using illegal practices during the last election campaign, and ordered her to vacate her seat. There were demands for her resignation.
Mrs. Gandhi’s response was to declare a state of emergency, under which her political foes were imprisoned, constitutional rights abrogated, and the press placed under strict censorship. Meanwhile, the younger of her two sons, Sanjay Gandhi, started to run the country as though it were his personal fiefdom, and earned the fierce hatred of many whom his policies had victimized. He ordered the removal of slum dwellings, and in an attempt to curb India’s growing population, initiated a highly resented program of forced sterilization. In early 1977, confident that she had debilitated her opposition, Mrs. Gandhi called for fresh elections, and found herself trounced by a newly formed coalition of several political parties. Her Congress party lost badly at the polls.
In the second, post-Emergency, period of her Prime Ministership, Indira Gandhi was preoccupied by efforts to resolve the political problems in the state of Punjab. In her attempt to crush the secessionist movement of Sikh militants, led by Jarnail Singh Bindranwale, she ordered an assault upon the holiest Sikh shrine in Amritsar, called the “Golden Temple”. It is here that Bindranwale and his armed supporters had holed up, and it is from the Golden Temple that they waged their campaign of terrorism not merely against the Government, but against moderate Sikhs and Hindus. “Operation Bluestar”, waged in June 1984, led to the death of Bindranwale, and the Golden Temple was stripped clean of Sikh terrorists; however, the Golden Temple was damaged, and Mrs. Gandhi earned the undying hatred of Sikhs who bitterly resented the desacralization of their sacred space. In November of the same year, Mrs. Gandhi was assassinated, at her residence, by two of her own Sikh bodyguards, who claimed to be avenging the insult heaped upon the Sikh nation. (http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/southasia/History/Independent/Indira.html)
WILL THE FILM ON INDIRA SHOW HER AFFAIRS?What else could the main opposition party in center have thought of than to have a full-length feature film on its late leader Mrs. Indira Gandhi? The film has made headlines right from the day it was announced that veteran journalist, television personality and littérateur Kamleshwar is writing a film script on the life of late Congress leader who stayed as prime minister of India for a very long time. The latest news is that Manisha Koirala who shot to fame for her controversial film Ek Chhoti Si Love Story , has been selected to portray Indira Gandhi on the silver screen. This was formally announced in Mumbaiveryrecently. The film titled Indira Gandhi-A Tryst WithDestinywill roll in the beginning of the next year and will be released worldwide by the end of the same year. This happens to be 100th film for its writer Kamleshwar.But it is the second film for producer Nitin Keni who last made Gadar-Ek PremKatha with director Anil Sharma

Rukun Advani singlehandedly built the Oxford University Press academic section for 18 years and made OUP one of the most respected and prestigious publishers in India. Then, suddenly, he was asked to leave. Now he and his wife, Anuradha Roy have started their own publishing house called Permanent Black. With their first book, Amitav Ghosh’s The Glass Palace just out, Advani speaks to Shoma Chaudhury about OUP, academic publishing, Indian writing in English, and his plans for Permanent Black.

Also on this site:
Sex Antics of Monhadas Gandhi:


Any comments? If is this subject taboo? Will gladly delete if so....

Feroz Gandhi grand son of Indira Gandhi is considering legal action against the American author of the book "The life of Indira Gandhi" K. Frank. published by Harper Collins in London.

The book alleges:

Sanjay Gandhi had eliminated opponents during India's infamous Emergency in 1975. Sanjay Gaandhi who died in a air crash ordered his "hitmen"to "liquidate" several "human targets".

The book also explores Mrs. Indira Gandhi's problematic sex life and the possibility that her husband FEROZE GANDHI have had an affair with her mother KAMALA NEHRU.

Biography Book is less then flattering about Maneka Gandhi. It describes her as "erratic and uncontrolled" and says her "wild outbursts and tantrums" created a "pervasive atmosphere of uncertaainty and anxiety".

The book alleges that Mrs. Gandhi have had affair with the Private secretary to Jawaharlal Nehru Mr. M. O. Mathai and many others.

"The only thing I did was to assess whether these rumors were credible" Frank said. "I included them because everyone in Indira Gandhi's circle knew about them........It was 1000% inconceivable that Mrs. Gandhi's husband had an affair with the woman who became his mothert-in-law, she said.

t's a brave biographer who will take on the subject of Indira Gandhi's sex life. The world, though, could have had a glimpse of it had M.O. Mathai, Jawaharlal Nehru's special assistant, not withdrawn the chapter titled 'She' from his autobiography My Days With Nehru. In it Mathai apparently claimed he had had an affair with Indira Gandhi for 12 long years.

Indira Gandhi's new biographer Katherine Frank (Indira: The Life of Indira Nehru Gandhi; HarperCollins is to be released in India next month and has already received rave reviews in Britain) believes she and Mathai were probably lovers.
 
 Frank blames Indira Gandhi's extra-marital affairs on her husband's philandering.
 

Frank, who seems to have read 'She', says it would have been unprintable anyway.

The new biography is indeed a remarkable story of the woman in Indira, controversially focusing on her intimate side—from her first love, a German teacher at Shantiniketan, to her long pre-marital relationship with Feroze Gandhi and then Mathai, Dinesh Singh and Dhirendra Brahmachari.

Frank dwells at some length on the rumours of Indira Gandhi's affairs with "none other than her father's squat and moon-faced secretary, M.O. Mathai." She writes: "Admittedly it was Mathai himself who was the primary source of these rumours. He boasted openly of his liaison with Nehru's daughter, both at the time and for many years after."

Frank, however, says there was "definitely a certain attraction" between them, quoting Nehru's biographer Sarvepalli Gopal to say that "Indira Gandhi encouraged him beyond normal limits." She also says that 'She', which Mathai withdrew, surfaced in the Eighties, five years after Mathai's death, "when Indira's estranged daughter-in-law Maneka Gandhi circulated it among a small group of Indira's enemies".

Frank writes: "The 'She' chapter contains such explicit material that even if Mathai had not suppressed it, it is doubtful whether his publishers would have taken the risk and proceeded to publish it.
 
 While Brahmachari was the silent lover, Dinesh Singh had no qualms about playing up rumours of an affair.
 

Mathai describes Indira as 'highly sexed' and includes among other salacious details the claim that she became pregnant by him and had an abortion." A disillusioned Mathai had a strong motive to lie but Frank says that people who knew them well, "including B.K. Nehru, who is a reliable source and no enemy of his cousin (Indira), feel that the 'She' chapter contains more fact than fiction".

So open was their relationship that in 'She' Mathai claims to have been afraid that Indira's careless behaviour would alert her father. But "Delhi buzzed with rumours" about their relationship. In Parliament, Feroze Gandhi was teased that Mathai was Nehru's real son-in-law. "Indira, significantly, did nothing to quell the rumours of the alleged liaison," writes Frank.

Subsequently, Indira Gandhi wrote to Dorothy Norman, her lifelong confidante, that she had taken to yoga taught "by an exceedingly good-looking yogi"—Dhirendra Brahmachari. She wrote that "it was his looks, especially his magnificent body, which attracted everyone to his system." Dhirendra was probably no brahmachari: a raid on his ashram in Kashmir after the Emergency yielded, among other things, a vibrator! If she had a lover as prime minister it would have to be him. "Brahmachari was the only man to see Indira alone in her room while giving her yoga instruction, and he was the only male with whom she could have had a relationship during this period."

To her men Indira was quite a catch—and perhaps that's why they encouraged rumours about their relationships with her.Congressman Dinesh Singh had this tendency as much as Mathai. "Indira relied on Singh and conferred with him at all hours. Inevitably, there were rumours that he was her lover, rumours which Singh himself encouraged."

Frank suggests that Indira was provoked into extra-marital relationships due to the constant infidelity of Feroze Gandhi. Well into the marriage, Feroze "openly flaunted his affairs with other women, including the MPs Tarakeshwari Sinha known as 'the glamour girl of Indian Parliament', Mahmuna Sultana and Subhadra Joshi". His other girlfriends included "a beautiful Nepalese woman who worked for All India Radio and a divorcee from a high-caste Kerala family".

FRANK details the troubled relationship between Feroze and Indira. He proposed to her a month before her 16th birthday and was rebuffed because both Indira and mother Kamala said she was too young. Feroze seemed an unlikely match for Indira and an even more unlikely son-in-law to Nehru. He was "loud and passionate with a great appetite for life, including food, drink and sex".

Frank says rumours of an affair between Kamala and Feroze were also then the talk of the town. "Posters in fact had been put up in Allahabad proclaiming an improper relationship and the instigators of this smear campaign, which enraged Nehru who was in jail at the time, were not British sympathisers but members of the Congress party," Frank notes in her book.

And Frank doesn't put these rumours to rest either. Kamala strongly opposed a marriage between Indira and Feroze saying Indira would be making "the mistake of her life". So did Nehru. The biographer asks why and then offers an answer: "...Even if he (Nehru) had dismissed the idea that Kamala and Feroze had had an affair, it may have occurred to him that Feroze had behaved inappropriately towards Kamala."

But marry they did and through the troubled years found happiness often. But never more than before the marriage. The two were secretly engaged for four years and lived as man and wife long before they married. Living through the German bombing of London brought them closer.

But Feroze wasn't the first man Indira fell in love with. She was attracted to Frank Oberdof, a German who taught her French at Shantiniketan. "Oberdof declared his love for Indira and he probably loved her for herself, not for her family," Frank writes. Soon she was asked by her family to leave Shantiniketan, but "she did not want to leave the Abode of Peace, or possibly Frank Oberdof, or both," observes Frank. Then Tagore spoke to her and sent her off to Europe. Indira left reluctantly. Oberdof still "hovered in the wings" and later caught up with her in London, but Indira declined his invitation to join him in Germany for Christmas.

The biography is, however, more than the sexual diary of the Indira family. It portrays Indira as a far more sympathetic figure than the dictatorial leader she is often held out to be. Frank makes Sanjay, not Indira, the villain of the Emergency.

For Sanjay the emergency was "Open Sesame to power and money". Frank says he arranged for an underworld man, Sunderlal, to be murdered. Sanjay and Maneka then asked a Delhi official, Navin Chawla, to take anticipatory bail for his own arrest in that case—in short, to take the rap. "Understandably, Chawla refused," Frank writes. Sanjay also had another man murdered with whose girlfriend he had an affair. He did as he liked; it was the "emotional grip on his mother that was the source of his power".This makes the biography both poignant and controversial.
  Sex life of Jawahar Lal Nehru: Tryst with homosexuality and Manege de trois! Nehru, Edwina & Lord Mountbatten changed Subcontinental histor tanley Wolpert in his book clearly states that his book is not the only one that has discussed the subject of Nehru’s homosexuality. There are a lot of books that he lists in his bibliography.
Stanley Wolpert is a great author. His research methods are above reproach. He had access to a lot of information, but he was not allowed to use a lot of the information on Nehru…hence he could use only public records. In the preface he complains about this. He read the information but was NOT allowed to use it. In the book he used only publicly available information.
He also describes instances when Nehru dressed in drag “Wearing his wig, made up with lipstick, powder and eye shadow, his body draped in silks and satins, Jawahar most willingly offered himself up night after night to those endless rehearsals for the Gaekwar’s At Home as a beautiful young girl, holding out her jug of wine and loaf seductively to her poet lover, Omar,” he writes in one passage.
In the book, Wolpert says Nehru’s first attachment was with a young man called Ferdinand Brooks who was his French teacher. Brooks was a theosophist but Wolpert says before coming to India the “handsome’ man was a disciple and lover of Charles Webster Leadbeater, a renegade Anglican curate who was accused of child molestation and pederasty on several continents. Leadbeater openly advocated mutual masturbation among young boys.
The fact that Nehru had a relationship with his tutor who was a disciple of a well-known pederast (pp. 8-9) is evidence of Nehru’s own homosexual interests. The pederast and Jawahar’s love interest, not only espoused homosexuality and sex with boys but was summarily dismissed by Nehrus father despite the protestations of the young Nehru.
The material (story of Nehru and his Englishman who went for a swim naked in the hot weather) on the later pages esp. pp. 23-25 is based on actual and more detailed personal Nehru documents that Wolpert had access to. Wolpert could NOT use actual Nehru letters to describe the incident in detail. Permission to publish letters and information was first given to Wolpert and then permission to use the material was DENIED.
Stanley Wolperts letter to the Statement is piece of literature. There is a large body of evidence on Nehrus homosexuality. The bibliography in Wolperts book is now a list of other books that also list incidents.
“About Nehru, I think he is one of the titans of modern history along with the likes of Gandhi, Azad, Badshah Khan, Gokhale and Tilak. He was a red blooded human being with all the concomitant frailities and passions. He spent his formative years at Harrow (an English Public (Prep) School) and Trinity College, Cambridge during the early years of this century. Homosexuality was then quite prevalent in upper class England and in fact was generally known in Europe as an English disease(sic).
Did he have a homosexual encounter with his teachers? possibly. If he had one, in today’s parlance, it would be considered sexual molestation or rape: As he, presumably a minor was presumably attacked by an adult. Was he an homosexual? the evidence does not point in that direction. His sexual exploits with the other sex are legion. Whatever his sexual predilections, his accomplishments vis a vis the country he loved are without rational question.”
The Nehrus have been great for India. They took more than 570 states and forged a country. Stalin and Mao had to murder millions to accomplish the same. Nehru had a great vision for India. The Mao, Nehru, Nasir, Sukarno combo would have created a new power block and changed the course of the cold war. His daughter could never see that far, and his grandson couldn’t see beyond Italy.
His beliefs in Socialism has not only kept India behind the rest of Asia it has kept the Subcontinent in the throws of penury. His bias in Kashmir led to several wars between our respective countries. His sexual promiscuity set a bad example in interfered with the running of the state.
Here are some of Rajib Dogars comments:
“To the extent that I think one cannot truly separate the private from the public in the sense that the same person acts in both domains, I cannot agree. Nehru’s personal likes and dislikes very much affected his
relations with Gandhi, with Patel and even with his own father and thus his strategy. This much is very clear. Nehru’s rather cold and boorish behavior, by today’s standards anyway, toward his wife do raise the
question about his mental set and his attitude towards sex and towards women.
His relationships with other women also raise questions about how his policies may have been affected by his relationships-recall that Nehru liked his women to be somewhat intellectual. So to the extent that his personal reactions to people affect his policy making, these are relevant questions, both for history and for biography.”
he line I would draw is between the public and private life of a historical figure. To the extent that the private life affects the public policy, I would admit it. (Frankly, many of the examples you cite above are not exactly “private.”) If the private life is brought into discussion, I would like to see justification for why it is being brought in.
That is not my impression. But I cannot also fault people who construe it that way, like the editors of Pioneer. Mind you, all that they did was to publish extracts from Wolpert’s book. If there was nothing unreasonable about the extracts, there should have been no need for Wolpert to respond..)
Why is homosexuality is such a big deal? For me, it is not. But, we are talking about the leader of a country for many of whose people homosexuality is outside the realm of experience. One doesn’t need to be a genius to figure out that they are going to be thoroughly scandalized.
Nehru : A Tryst With Destiny
Those two tyrants soon merged in his mind, for loyalist Congress moderates–Gokhale’s liberal Anglophile wing of gentlemen like Motilal–Page 72:
In India, the elections to the provincial councils as well as the Central Assembly were held in 1926, and Motilal was forced to bear alone the full burden of the Swaraj campaign, for his dear friend and president of the party, C.R. Das had died…I hardly had any workers worth the name to help me in my province.”
Not only had Jawaharlal deserted him, but former friends and old allies, Pandit Madan Mohan Malaviya and Lal Lajpat Rai, both ex-Congress Presidents, founded their own Nationalist Party that year, a Hindu first communal party, which won many seats in the United Provinces…..
THE MALAVIYA FACTOR & THE LAST ENGLISHMAN WHO RULED INDIA: Malaviya was president of the Hindu Mahasaba, a conserative communal society that focused on saving cows and slaughter Muslims while trying to force the conversions of Muslims to Hinduism, arguing that most of India’s Muslim population had originally been Hindus but had forcibly been converted to Islam during some five hundred years of Muslim rule.
One of the most militant popular Hindu communal leaders of that “reconversion” (shudhi) movement, Swami Shraddhanand, was assassinated in Delhi that December by a Muslim extremist. The swami, like Lala Lajpat Rai, belonged to another fundamentalist Hindu society, the Arya Samaj, which advocated turning back India’s history more than three thousand years to an ancient Aryan tribal polity, reflected in Vedic scripture, when Brahmans and cows were treated as gods on earth.
FRESH claims that Jawaharlal Nehru, one of India’s 20th-century gods, had homosexual relations have provoked a furious row in the country’s newspapers. A new biography suggests that India’s founding father, and first prime minister, had a number of homosexual encounters during his English school days in Harrow, and later at Cambridge. And there is a description of the great man in drag at a London soiree.
The allegations occupy only three pages of the 500-page (Nehru: A tryst with Destiny by American historian Stanley Wolpert), but they have already taken on the proportions of a scandal. The Pioneer, an English language daily, described the claims as “sacrilege” and “blasphemous” and demanded government action. Prof Wolpert said the newspaper “obviously considers Nehru a god” and asked if India was not yet ready to discuss the lives of its leaders, warts and all. Obviously not.
 The correspondence between Edwina Mountbatten and Nehru, whom she called her “beloved Jawaha”, remains sealed by agreement between the estates of both families. But the central questions that provoked the row over the book – did Nehru have a homosexual side and did he have an affair or merely a platonic romance with the last Vicereine of India? – have been ignored in the furore over Nehru’s divinity.
India loves its deities. Not content with several hundred gods and goddesses, it is constantly creating new ones and there is little doubt that Nehru is regarded with reverence bordering on worship. There is not a government office – or even many homes – without a picture of him gazing nobly from the walls.
“We love a lavish pantheon, a multiplicity of gods and goddesses. It has to do with ancestor worship,” said Swapan Dasgupta, a newspaper editor.
Curiously, Nehru considered himself “the last Englishman” to rule India. He was a patrician anglophile, given to quoting Greek myths to bemused Congress party workers and singing old Harrovian songs. His home, Teen Murti House in Lutyens’s Delhi, now a museum, is a celebration of Englishness: a Thirties colonial oasis of neatly tended lawns, country house flowerbeds and peacocks. Prof Wolpert describes young Nehru’s “passionate love affair” with an Englishman and his “attachment” to his tutor, Ferdinand Brooks, a disciple and lover of an Anglican curate, Charles Leadbeater, who advocated mutual masturbation.
Nehru’s penchant for make-up and drag is also noted. One reviewer claims that the revelations will cause “anger and distraction” among Nehru’s admirers.
A previous book by Prof Wolpert, “Nine Hours to Rama“, an account of Gandhi’s assassination, was banned in India.
If his Nehru survives, it is sure to sell out – even if it does not secure its subject’s place on India’s altars.
PARIS: The government’s attempt to censor the film `Indian Summer’ on the Edwina-Nehru affair has drawn flak from French author and philosopher Catherine Clement, who has written a novel on the romance. The author, whose book `Edwina and Nehru: A Novel’ was published in 1993, said Edwina had admitted that her relationship with Nehru was “mostly platonic”, indicating it was not always so.
Speaking to TOI, 74-year-old Clement pointed out, “Edwina in her letters to Lord Mountbatten has written that her relationship with Nehru was mostly platonic. Mostly, but not always.” Clement, an Indophile with a large collection of books and essays about India and Indians, felt the government’s involvement in the cinematic presentation of the romance was unnecessary.
“Why are people bothered? Both (Edwina and Nehru) were adults and it is a relationship that has been documented through letters and eyewitness accounts. I have myself spoken to close aides of Nehru,” she said, adding that they knew intimate details of the leader’s life.
Recalling the time her book was launched, Clement said she had spoken to Congress president Sonia Gandhi and given her a copy. When asked if it had got Sonia’s nod, Clement said, “She (Sonia) said it was alright to be published. I don’t think she was shocked at all.”
The statement comes close on the heels of I&B ministry’s conditional clearance to Universal Pictures promoted film `Indian Summer’. The film – expected to star Cate Blanchett as Edwina – was cleared with a directive that permission to shoot in India would be given only if changes were made to the script, effectively sanitizing the film of all intimate scenes. The film, based on Alex von Tunzelmann’s book, has since been shelved.
Clement, who plans to launch three books including her memoirs at the Jaipur literary festival – being organized as part of the French festival Bon Jour India later this year – said she empathised with Edwina.
“I could understand Edwina’s situation and how she felt,” Clement said. The author, part of the original feminist movement, said there was nothing shocking about their relationship. “It was not a sex scandal. They were not kissing or claiming their love in public. Edwina visited India only once a year,” she added.
Clement has to her credit books on India like `Le Roman du Taj Mahal’ and `Pour l’amour de L’Inde’. Not only has the author visited India almost every year since 1983 but has been spending time in Haryana village Nandan working on a project for ecological conservation. Edwina-Nehru affair not always platonic: French author. Himanshi Dhawan, TNN 9 November 2009, 12:10am IST
Another interesting twist to this saga is the homosexuality of Lord Mountbatten.
HOW THE GAY LIFE KILLED MOUNTBATTEN: Encounters with youths exposed him to IRA. BY FRANK DOHERTY. First published in ‘NOW’ magazine , Volume 1 , No. 4 , October 1989 , page 37 .
‘Lord’ Mountbatten was particularly attracted to boys in their early teens ; it was this characteristic which made him especially vulnerable to the IRA , because he needed to slip away from his personal bodyguards to keep dates with such boys , some of whom came in contact with IRA men .
His vice habit was similar to that of the former British Secret Service Chief , ‘Sir’ Maurice Oldfield , who was appointed ‘ Ulster (sic) Security Co-Ordinator ‘ by Margaret Thatcher in the wake of the Mountbatten assassination .
‘Sir’ Maurice also slipped away from his ‘personal protection detail’ – a team of handpicked , plain-clothes British ‘Royal’ Military Policemen – on various occasions while he was living in Stormont House , beside Stormont Castle in Belfast . But a plan by the IRA to kill him during one such expedition into County Down failed when he was unexpectedly moved back to London .
[END of ' HOW THE GAY LIFE KILLED MOUNTBATTEN ' ]. (Monday 7th – ‘ A STICKY END ; THE OFFICIALS ‘ , from 1981 ).
STANLEY WOLPERT ON NEHRU:
Wolpert’s suggestion of Nuhru’s homosexuality and Mountabetten’s own alleged homosexuality adds a new dimension to the relationship (wolpert 1996). Clearly Mountbatten and Nehur was fascinated with one another; both were upperclass public schoolboys and there is little doubt that they had amused each other in 1947
What did the three people see in each other? How did the menega de trois come about? What does each realtionship tell us about the lover and the loved one? Three different sets of answers need to be constructed. Let us start with Lady Mountbetten who adored and who was adored by Nehru at first sight. In the words of former Labor MP, she became bewitched by Nehru (Roberts 1994a: 182)
Jinnah REBUFFED MOUNTBATTEN OVERTURES:
…for this cozy traingle Jinnah was the outside…”with his legendary charm and verve Mountbatten turned the focus of Operation Seduction on the Moslem leader. Jinnah froze
Nehru died of Tertiary Syphilis-Aortic Aneurysm
Nehru’s affair with Edwina Mountbatten has been well documented. With Lord Mountbatten being gay, was Nehru being screwed from all sides? This had a great impact on the boundary commission and the creation of Pakistan.
JUDITH BROWN DESCRIBES NEHRU A HEDONISTIC FAILURE
Nehru: a political life Judith M Brown Yale University Press, 407pp, £25, ISBN 0300092792
Jawaharlal Nehru reportedly once described himself as the last Englishman to rule India. Raised in an affluent, westernised family, educated at Harrow, Cambridge and the Inns of Court, and an Anglophile all his life, Nehru was a prime minister with whom British and other western leaders felt at ease. Even as an Indian nationalist committed to driving out the British, Nehru never rejected the western culture that had shaped him. The great virtue of Judith Brown’s new study is its careful account of how Nehru tried to graft the best of British institutions and values on to a country largely resistant to them.
This attempted fusion of east and west created considerable conflict between Nehru and his mentor, Mahatma Gandhi. It also meant that, despite the frenetic activity and lack of privacy entailed by his position, Nehru was often an isolated, lonely and ultimately rather tragic figure. As Brown’s assessment of Nehru’s 17 years as prime minister makes clear, his project for India failed. India today – led by a Hindu nationalist government, crippled by corruption and riven by communal conflict – is a nightmarish inversion of everything he tried to achieve.
But do we need yet another life of Nehru? Michael Brecher’s political biography, written while Nehru was still alive, and Sarvepalli Gopal’s three-volume work, completed in 1984, remain indispensable. Stanley Wolpert published a sensationalist biography in 1996, and both Nigel Hamilton and Sunil Khilnani have Nehru biographies forthcoming. Brown makes much of Sonia Gandhi allowing her to see previously classified, post-1947 papers “almost in their entirety”. But the qualifying “almost” suggests that, like many before her, Brown was probably denied access to unpublished letters to family and close friends, including the crucial correspondence between Nehru and Edwina Mountbatten.
Brown believes that following the declassification of these papers, we need to look at Nehru’s life “afresh”, but there is little in her book that is new. The first three parts rehearse the well-known narrative of Nehru’s years in the lead-up to independence in 1947. But most interesting and original are the last two sections, which provide a convincing assessment of Nehru’s often neglected premiership from 1947-64. While Brown’s sobering conclusion that Nehru’s “new India” miscarried is not news, her careful and detailed exploration of the reasons why it did so are valuable.
Nehru’s inability to delegate, his deteriorating health and his reliance on dubious characters such as Krishna Menon, his confidant and cabinet minister, all contributed to this failure. There were also external factors – for example, the opposition to him among state governments frustrated federal initiatives, and rapid population growth (which Nehru long refused to recognise as a major problem) hampered economic development. But perhaps Nehru’s greatest enemy was his misguided, Soviet-style model of industrialisation and economic transformation. A series of five-year plans simply did not yield the results he had envisioned, and India became increasingly dependent on foreign aid. Nor did the country’s brand of socialist democracy work effectively. Government-run industries proved inefficient: tight control constrained rather than encouraged economic development.
Among the many aspects of Nehru’s “new India” project that backfired were the federal policies designed to reduce social inequities; ceilings on landholding, intended to benefit the rural poor; and legislation that aimed at improving the plight of Indian women and other oppressed groups. Abolishing “untouchability” in the new Indian constitution did not change entrenched prejudices, beliefs and traditions.
And then there was the debacle of China’s invasion of India in 1962. A lack of adequate intelligence and foresight caught India totally off guard. It was saved only by China’s unilateral ceasefire and withdrawal – a development that was as inexpli-cable to Nehru as the invasion itself. Menon, then defence minister, took the blame and resigned, but Nehru’s reputation was gravely damaged.
Although the day of the Carlylean view of history as “the biography of great men” is long past, Brown concedes that “at particular historical junctures individuals can be of considerable importance”, and this is her justification for a new biography of Nehru. She subtitles her book “a political life”, and we are warned that most of “the personal dimension” will be excluded. On these terms, there is little to fault in her book.
But can an individual life be so easily bisected into the political and the personal? The policies of both Nehru and Indira Gandhi on Kashmir, for example, were rooted in their own deep feelings about their land of origin. There is no indication that Brown conducted any interviews, even though many of Nehru’s colleagues, followers and family are still alive. We look in vain for love affairs (Edwina Mountbatten is despatched in a paragraph), childhood conflict, rivalries between the Nehru women, or the story of Nehru’s strange but ultimately successful marriage and the lingering grief he felt after his wife died.
Brown defends her approach by claiming that Nehru’s was “essentially a political life . . . utterly dedicated to politics . . . at the expense of normal family experience, of all but a few close friendships and ultimately of his own health”. This is undoubtedly true, but his personal relationships were vital to him, especially those with women: his wife Kamala, his daughter Indira (their published correspondence reveals a complex relationship) and, to a lesser extent, with the two women to whom he was closest as prime minister, Padmaja Naidu and Edwina Mountbatten. All were privy to Nehru as both private and public man.
Brown’s “political life” is an absorbing, scrupulously resear-ched and convincing assessment of one of the most important political figures of the 20th century. But for the whole man, we must wait for a future Nehru biographer.
Katherine Frank is the author of Indira: the life of Indira Nehru Gandhi (HarperCollins)
The Pakistani movie “Jinnah” showed the deep love affair between the Brahman Hindu who called himself the last Englishman in India and the promiscuous Jewish wife of Lord Mountbatten–the last viceroy of the British Indian Empire. According to Stanley Wolpert, the gay Lord Mountbatten was too much in a hurry to return to his activities in England and moved the independence date by two years. South Asia was supposed to be independent in 1949. The reduction in time led to the atrocities committed by the Radcliff Line hurriedly put together by Lord Radcliff–who burnt all his maps and left Delhi the day the actual boundaries were announced.
The love affair between Edwina and Nehru changed history, because Edwina influenced Mountbatten with the Nehru’s ideas on Kashmir and the partition of Bengal and Punjab–which were not agreed upon in the Cabinet Mission Plan.
Gandhi was funded by India and it tried to change the impression of Mohnadas Gandhi–the pervert who slept with married women and allowed his guests to insert an anemia in his behind. Pakistan should fund the venture showing the true nature of Nehru.
Indian Summer, the proposed Hollywood film about the alleged love affair between Jawaharlal Nehru and Edwina Mountbatten, will not get made.
Reason: the economic slowdown and the curbs suggested by the Indian government.
“We were in between a rock and a hard place,” PTI quoted film director Joe Wright as saying in New York. “The Indian government wanted us to make less of the love story while the studio wanted us to make more of the love story.”
The comments evoked a strong reaction in India.
“We haven’t debarred Universal Studios from making a love story,” said a senior information and broadcasting (I&B) ministry official who did not want to be named. “We’ve asked them to make minor changes in the script as recommended by an expert committee and to add a disclaimer that it’s a work of fiction.”
The ministry had asked the producers to delete four scenes from the film: a kiss between Nehru and Edwina, a dancing scene, Nehru saying ‘I love you’ and a shot of them in bed.
I&B minister Ambika Soni had earlier told HT that the procedure in the case of Indian Summer was the same as the one adopted for other Hollywood films such as the Oscar-winning Slumdog Millionaire.
Another reason for the scrapping of Indian Summer was the reported financial cuts at film studio Universal.
The production of the about $40 million (Rs 180 crore) film — with Hugh Grant as Lord Mountbatten and Kate Blanchett as Edwina — was to start next year. Jinxed Nehru-Edwina film nixed for good, Chetan Chauhan , Hindustan Times, New Delhi, October 21, 2009, Last Updated: 00:21 IST(22/10/2009)
Gandhi Unmasked: Criticism of Mohandas Gandhi by his grandsons and other Indians, Nobel Committee & US Congress


Sex Antics of Mohandas Gandhi: His Failures, Pedophilia, Adultery, Incest, Sexual Perversion & Fetishes
Posted on December 25, 2007 by The Editors
45 Votes

 THE NAKED FAKIR UNMASKED:-Updated 2/21/2010
| RUPEE NEWS| December 27th, 2007 | Moin Ansari | معین آنصآرّی | Complied from recent books by Dr. Singh, Dr. Watson, and Mr. Mohandas Gandhi two grandsons –Arun Gandhi and Rajmohan Gandhi. Additional material and quotes are from Saijorni Naidu, records from South Africa, Mr. Bose and Time Magazine. A seminal critique of Mr. Gandhi was written Erik Erikson titled “Gandhi’s Truth“. We have also quoted from the reports of the Nobel Peace Committee and the records of the US Congress.
Of course no research paper on Mohandas Gandhi would be complete without references to the Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, Government of India (CWMG). CWMG page numbers have been quoted in the article.
Was he a politician or a saint? if both, how did these two Gandhis combine, and in what proportion? Or was he, as criticts have alleged, someone who broke a pledge, that he would rather die than accept Partition? Was not an unfeeling husband and father? A man who did strange things in the name of chastity? Or emasculated India in the name of Nonviolence? Or patronized Dalits without empowering them? Rajmohan Gandhi on Mohandas Gandhi, Page X, “gandhi”.
This article discusses the sexual antics of Gandhi, and it sheds light on his political and personal failures. It highlights his strange habits of urine drinking, and love for enemas. He brings out the facts about his consumption of his own piss, and his drinking of Holy Cow urine. The article lists Mr. Gandhis pedophilia incest, adultery, weird fetishes, and sexual perversion. Our article presents solid proof and well research supporting documentation on these and other issues. The following site lists all material in one place. (The Truth about Mohandas Gandhi).
Mr. Gandhi himself know he was a failure. Gandhi had jotted on a scrap of paper in 1946: “I don’t want to die a failure. But I may be a failure.”
The Congress of the United States of America has condemned the bigotry and racist remarks of Mohandas Gandhi. United States Congressional Record on Mohandas Gandhi‘s racism
 “it costs the nation millions to keep Gandhi living in poverty.” Sarojini Naidu
 
This article summarizes the writings of Gandhi’s grandsons, and other authors and contains the following sections:

SUMMARY: Mohandas (not Mahatma) Gandhi’s Failed Leadership in Politics and Gandhi’s Domestic Violence and weird Sexual Perversion in his private life.
Many Indians are doled out the 8th grade version of psychodrama doled out to you in the temple. They never get a chance to read any international appraisals of the man. Obviously not. Read the book by his two grandsons, and by Dr. Singh. A majority of Indians don’t feel the way you do about the man. Making him into a diet doesn’t serve any historical purpose. Not only was he infallible–he was a failure
The progeny of Einstein, the Jewish Defense League (JDL), and the ADL feel disgust for Gandhi. Certainly his cozying up to Hitler didn’t endear him to the Jews. Asking all Jews to commit mass suicide while praising Hitler doesn’t make him popular in Israel or the Jewish world. The 109th Congress of the United States of American condemned him for his racism, and the Nobel Peace prize Committee criticized him for his war mongering, and requesting the Government of Bharat (aka India) to wage war on Pakistan. That telegram according to the Nobel peace prize committee clinched his dumping.
South Africans won’t even tolerate his statue in Durban. There were huge riots in South Africa against him and his fake non-violence. His various statues in the US (mostly built by Indians) are constantly harasses with graffiti or simply ignored.
Prime Minister Atlee, the last PM of Britain before independence when asked about how important were Gandhi’s significance in forcing the British to leave South Asia–to this question Attlee said Gandhi was not a insignificant.
We wrote the article with a different headline with a focus on Gandhi’s but it lies buried in the 4000 or so articles on history. We also similar articles focusing on Mr. Gandhi’s policies, but they are part of the archives, without as large an audience as this article. “They” all want to read the salacious details. This article is a primer. Discussing his his personal failure should lead the reader to his political failure in South Africa– trying to set up a Caste System with special privileges for the “Indians”, and supporting–nay participating in wars against the Zulus, and the Kaffirs (Tribe in Africa).
He supported all British wars–Zulu, Boer, WW1, and WW2–in fact there wasn’t a war he did not support–thus enhancing the ability of England to continue colonization. His greatest achievement—was no achievement at all–the British had decided to leave South Asia. Ghana, Nigeria, Malaysia–all got their freedoms from British colonialism at about the same time.
By not giving the Dalits separate electorate, he kept them in slavery. He said that one would have to go over his dead body to abolish the caste system. That is why the 450 million Dalits and Lower Caste hate him so much. Read Ambedaker who disliked Gandhi. His followers detest him also. Dalits hate him for calling them Harijans– a name that they have rejected because it is condescending.
Surely he is disliked in Pakistan and even Bangladesh for antagonizing with the Muslim leadership and alienating the Muslims–contrary to the propaganda doled out by the Indian National Congress, which thinks that the history of the INC is the history of India. Jaswant Singh a NJP leader writes pretty much what we have said.
Gandhi and Nehru assassinated one of the most important leaders of Independence–Mr Bose (with whose wife, Mr. gandhi was caught sleeping with). Not only that 29000 members of the Indian National Army were murdered in cold blood—these were the sons who were fighting for independence and were a significant factor in the British decision to leave.
Sairojni Naidu was very critical of Gandhi and said “we have to spend millions to keep Mr. Gandhi in poverty”. Sarawarkar, and Golwalkar surely disliked Mr. Gandhi. His attitude forced the Muslims out of the Congress
A man’s success or failure is determined by his accomplishments and his character. Mr. Gandhi it seems–didn’t have either.
Sex Life of Nehru: Menege De trios:-Tryst with Homosexuality:-Love triangle Edwina, Nehru and Lord Mountbatten changed history
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Of course the history of Bharat has been pretty much the history of the Indian National Congress–where all INC leaders are good and all those who opposed the INC are evil. However even withing the INC, there was serious opposition to the old man. Mr. Jaswant Singh in his new book on Jinnah describes how Nehru used to attack Mr. Gandhi.
Messrs Nehru and Patel were offensively aggressive to Gandhi ji….There was something psychopathic about it. They seemed to have set their heart on something and, whenever they scented that Gandhi ji was preparing to obstruct them, they barked violently.” It is both disheartening and insulting because ‘sons’ are not expected to bark at their Bapu. Jaswant Singh in his book India, parition and Jinnah
The official historical discourse in India has also purposely cultivated a mythical Nehru-Gandhi relationship with Gandhi as the ‘political father’ of Nehru. Jaswant’s research has blown apart this myth. Way back in the 1927 Madras session, these two stalwarts clashed with one another: Gandhi insisting on dominion status whereas Nehru demanding complete independence for India. Moreover, Nehru disagreed with several other Gandhian precepts: “…you expected the Khadi Movement to spread rapidly…our Khadi work is almost wholly divorced from politics….What then can be done?…you only criticise and no helpful lead comes from you…” After reading Gandhi’s articles in Young India, he lamented: “I have often felt how very different my ideals were from yours… You misjudge greatly….I neither think that the so-called Ramaraj was very good in the past, nor do I want it back.” And while disagreeing with his ‘Mahatma’ that Indian poverty could be eradicated by village employment, Nehru lambasted: “You do not say a word against the semi-feudal zamindari system…or against the capitalist exploitation of both the workers and the consumers.” Gandhi could not digest such strictures lightly and shot back: “The differences between you and me appear to me to be so vast and radical that there seems no meeting ground between us.” Jaswant’s ‘shock therapy’ By Basharat Hussain Qizilbash | Published: October 12, 2009
PERSONAL FAILURE: The Dark side of the pedophile
• My meaning of brahmacharya is this: “One who never has any lustful intention, who . . . has become capable of lying naked with naked women . . . without being in any manner whatsoever sexually excited.” –M. K. Gandhi
• The greater the temptation, the greater the renunciation. –M. K. Gandhi
• I threw you in the sacrificial fire and you emerged safe and sound.–Gandhi to his grandniece Manu Gandhi
• I can hurt colleagues and the entire world for the sake of truth.–M. K. Gandhi (letter to shila Nayar)
• [Gandhi] can think only in extremes-either extreme eroticism or asceticism. –Jawaharlal Nehru
• The professional Don Juan destroys his spirit as fatally as does the professional ascetic, whose [mirror] image he is. –Aldous Huxley, Do What You Will
If gandhi was alive today, he would be arrested for sexual abuse and put away for life as a sexual offender.
 “We know from his autobiography how shamefully he treated his wife. He was transparently honest and he had much less to hide from anyone else. Nothing can be found if other public figures are to be scrutinized because things have been carefully hidden and suppressed.” Gandhi, the family man. Gandhi’s Grandson.

1. Gandhi used to beat his wife up routinely making a mockery of Non-Violence.
2. Gandhi was having sex when his father lay breathing his last upstairs.
3. Gandhi denied sex to his wife for decades while sleeping with other peoples wives (Bose etc)
4. Gandhi was an adulterer and had a spiritual marriage with two British women who were in the Ashram
5. Gandhi slept naked with his niece (and 12 year old girls) and other women to prove that he could control his manliness.
6. Gandhi would do enemas twice a day and if he liked you allowed you to enter the piece up his rectum.
7. >Gandhi used to drink his own urine and also the urine of cows. Chilled Urine drinking hot in India. From Gandhi to Prime Minister Desai to common man
8. Hindu India: A gift from the Hindu Gods:Cows Urine: UK Telegraph reports by Julian West
9. Gandhi son left him and converted to Islam
10. The racist Gandhi was a total failure in South Africa where he tried to stratify the society, Whites, Indians and Africans. His racism towards the Africans was horrendous. His horrific advice to all Jews to commit suicide was abomible. His atrocious letters to his friend Hitler were the height of stupidiy.
11. Gandhi condones Zulu massacres and defends the British. Aug 4 1906
12. The sex life of Mr. Gandhi, and his failures as a politician
13. The myth of Mohandas K. Gandhi debunked. He gets an “F” on South Africa, Salt Match, Non-Violence, and independence
14. Which war did Mohandas Gandhi support. All of them. There wasn’t a war that the prophet of Non-Violence did not support. He was Sergeant Major in the British Army and won a medal for his war duties
15. Gandhi’s racism. The truth behind the mask. Behold Sergeant Major Gandhi who supported the British during the Boer war, Zulu rebellion. Behold the prophet of peace who worked to stratify the South African society.Gandhi did not bring the British Empire down.
16. Gandhi’s letter to his friend Hitler.
17. Sex life of Mohandas Gandhi, his failures and sexual perversion
18. Gandhi’s wrote letters to his friend Hitler and supported him. Gandhi’s horrific advice to Jews—Commit mass suicide. “We have no doubt about your bravery or devotion to your fatherland, nor do we believe that you are the monster described by your opponents.” Gandhi to Hitler
“The Indian government contributed $10 million for the movie Gandhi (Detailed debunking on this site). It is based on a book of fiction called “Freedom at Midnight” by Collins et al. You can see glossed over failures and the perversion in the movie Gandhi but it is not overt and explicitly shown. You have to be smart and familiar with the history to see it embedded in the movie.
For all his vaunted selflessness and modesty, he made no move to object when Jinnah was attacked during a Congress session for calling him “Mr. Gandhi” instead of “Mahatma“, and booed off the stage by the Gandhi’s supporters.
  He was determined to live his life as an ascetic, a symbol of a religious man. As the poet Sarojini Naidu, who was known as the “Nightingale of India joked, “it costs the nation a fortune(millions) to keep Gandhi living in poverty.” An entire village including an Ashram was built for him His philosophy privileged the village way over that of the city, yet he was always financially dependent on the support of industrial billionaires like Birla. Birlas were the ones who controlled his every move and were responsible for marketing Gandhi Inc.
This is what Time Magazine says:
“Exceptions to the author’s reserve mostly center on Gandhi’s limitations as a family man. Where the world sees a saint, Rajmohan Gandhi sees a cruel husband and a mostly absent father, paying scant attention to his children’s schooling and dragging wife Kasturba across continents at will, belittling her desire for the simplest of material possessions, then expecting her to comply when he turns from amorous husband to platonic companion to apparent adulterer.”
Gandhi took on a magnetic personality in the presence of young women, and was able to persuade them to join him in peculiar experiments of sleeping and bathing naked together, without touching, all apparently to strengthen his chastity. (Whether these experiments were always successful is anyone’s guess.) It is also revealed that Gandhi began a romantic liaison with Saraladevi Chaudhurani, niece of the great poet Rabindranath Tagore—a disclosure that has created a buzz in the Indian press. The author tells us that Gandhi, perhaps disingenuously, called it a “spiritual marriage,” a “partnership between two persons of the opposite sex where the physical is wholly absent.“
This bombshell occupies only five pages, but it gives Rajmohan Gandhi enough material for his book’s redeeming feature—namely, the clear depiction of the tensions between Gandhi’s erratic emotional compass and his unswerving moral one. For despite the occasional salacious lapses, the overarching principle that infused Gandhi’s life was his intrinsic belief in the equality of all souls.
“>“Mahatma Gandhi was not shy of speaking about his relationship with his women associates, except in a few cases. He wanted the world to know of his tryst with Brahmacharya in which women constituted an integral part. He kept a meticulous record and tried to make the players keep the records too. Alas! Most of them seem to have either destroyed the records or refused to disclose the intensity of their feelings. A construct, however, is still possible based on Gandhiji’s writings and on basis of writings of some of them, who were involved. Gandhiji persuaded Kanchan Shah, his role model for Married Brahmacharya, and Prabhavati, wife of Jaiprakash Narayan, to practice married Brahmacharya. It was a difficult odyssey and the book tries to analyse why it was difficult.”
“It was the revulsion from sex that forced Gandhiji to take the vow of Brahamacharya in 1906. Then onwards, till the laboratory experiment in Noakhali, Gandhiji kept trying to find out if it was possible to overcome desire and remain a brahmachari. There were more than a dozen women who came to closely associated with him at one time or the other. Some of them were foreigners – Millie Graham Polak, Sonja Schlesin, Esther Faering, Nilla Cram Cook, Margarete Spiegel and Mirabehn. Prabhavati, Kanchan Shah, Shushila Nayyar and Manu Gandhi formed a part of his entourage at various points in time. He called JEKI “the Only Adopted Daughter”. Gandhiji was too found of Saraldevi Chowdharani, Rabindranath Tagore’s niece, and often displayed her as his mannequin for popularizing Khadi. He called her his “spiritual wife”.
 His closeness to Saraladevi or arguments on Brahmacharya with Premabehn Kantak created a storm in the ashram and exposed him to public glare. He was undaunted and made a tactical retreat to allow the storm to subside. Soon things were back to normal. While the world was unsure, the Mahatma was sure of his actions.
There was a definite attraction in Gandhiji that brought womenfolk to him. It is quite possible that they were looking for glory and he provided the opportunity. Some like Mirabehn were inspired by his ideals and wanted to devote their entire life to his cause. But once they came close, Gandhiji and not his cause became their obsession. They hardly knew this was the next step to losing him, as the Mahatma could not be chained. He had higher goals. The book is a psycho-biography and a study of man-woman relationship involving one of the greatest men in living memory.”

Gandhi’s limitations as a family man. Where the world sees a saint, Rajmohan Gandhi sees a cruel husband and a mostly absent father, paying scant attention to his children’s schooling and dragging wife Kasturba across continents at will, belittling her desire for the simplest of material possessions, then expecting her to comply when he turns from amorous husband to platonic companion to apparent adulterer. Gandhi took on a magnetic personality in the presence of young women, and was able to persuade them to join him in peculiar experiments of sleeping and bathing naked together, without touching, all apparently to strengthen his chastity. (Whether these experiments were always successful is anyone’s guess.) It is also revealed that Gandhi began a romantic liaison with Saraladevi Chaudhurani, niece of the great poet Rabindranath Tagore—a disclosure that has created a buzz in the Indian press. The author tells us that Gandhi, perhaps disingenuously, called it a “spiritual marriage,” a “partnership between two persons of the opposite sex where the physical is wholly absent.”
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1609478,00.html


Excerpts from Gandhi’ grandson’s Book “Mohandas”:
“Saraladevi was the topic of discussion in undertones and overtones among his friends, associated and family members. How could Ba not be affected? The years 1919 and 1920 were years of mental torture and agony for her”. (page 220)
Gandhiji referred to “small-talks, whispers and innuendos” going around of which he was well aware: “He was already in the midst of so much suspicion and distrust, he told the gathering, that he did not want his most innocent acts to be misunderstood and misrepresented”. (page 339)
“The Sarla Devi episode in his life establishes his humanity. To suppress any information on Gandhi would have meant doing injustice to what he stood for all his life – truth. I have only presented the facts as a scholar not a sensationalist journalist” (Mr Gandhi the grandson of Mohandas Gandhi

The book “Mohandas” also describes Gandhi’s practice of brahmacharya in his life. He would sleep nude with his niece Manu. “It’s a matter of historical record. This has been written about many times. Even Gandhi wrote about it. In doing so, he was surrendering his sexuality and that of his partner’s, after passing a huge test,“
Dr. Sushila Nayar told Ved Mehta that she used to sleep with Gandhi as she regarded him as a Hindu god.
 Responding to noted Gandhian Rajmohan Gandhi’s recent claim about Mahatma Gandhi’s fondness for Sarla Devi, his granddaughter Tara Gandhi Bhattacharjee on Friday said as a man of great aesthetic sensibility, if Gandhi felt attracted to a “woman of intellect”it could be natural. Elaborating her point, Bhattacharjee said Mahatma Gandhi also admired the way Rajkumari Amrit Kaur held her pen.
In another book “Mira and the Mahatma”, psychoanalyst Sudhir Kakkar delves deep into the desires that lay buried in the “Mahatma’s” heart. The hero pines for the company of his Mira who is away from him. “You are on the brain. I look about me, and I miss you. I open the charkha and miss you,” (Excerpt from Sudhir Kakkar’s book).
  Indira Nehru and Mohandas Gandhi. How close were they?
Behold the God that supported the British wars, did not oppose “Apartheid” in South Africa, beat his wife, slept naked with his niece and had affairs with various women.”
In his book The Sexual Teachings of the White Tigress: Secrets of the Female Taoist Masters, Hsi Lai writes that Mahatma Gandhi “periodically slept between two twelve-year-old female virgins. …as an ancient practice of rejuvenating his male energy. . . . Taoists called this method ‘using the ultimate yin to replenish the yang.’” Thackeray questions Gandhi’s celibacy:
NEW DELHI, Dec. 27: Remarks by right-wing politician Bal Thackeray questioning the celibacy of Mahatma Gandhi, father of the Indian nation, have caused a furore, reports said on Friday.
 “Gandhiji was always accompanied by two girls. Yet that was okay with everyone. If we do something, we are criticised. Gandhi’s celibacy was a fraud,” press reports quoted Thackeray, chief of the regional Shiv Sena party which rules the western sate of Maharashtra in coalition with the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), as having said”.
“Freedom at Midnight”: Interested readers may look up Chapter 4 (A Last Tattoo
“…at the age of sixty-seven, thirty years after he had sworn his vow of brahmacharya, Gandhi awoke after an arousing dream with what would have been to most men of that age a source of some satisfaction, but was to Gandhi a calamity, an erection.” [Page 81, Freedom at Midnight, Simon& Schuster Edition,1975].
The following is a quote from Collins and La Pierre in Freedom at Midnight.Chapter 4 (A Last Tattoo For A Dieing Raj)
 “Gandhi saw in Manu’s words the chance to make her the perfect female votary. “If out of India’s millions of daughters, I can train even one into an ideal woman by becoming an ideal mother to you” he told he “I shall have remembered a unique service to womankind”. But first he felt he had to be sure she was telling the truth. Only his closest collaborators were accompanying him to Noakhali, he informed her, but she would be welcome, provided she submitted to his discipline and went through the test which he meant to subject her.

They would, he decreed, share each night the crude straw pallet which passed for his bed. He regarded himself her mother; she had said that she found nothing but a mothers love for him. If they were both truthful, if he remained firm in his ancient vow of chastity and she had never know sexual arousal, then they would be able to lie together in the innocence of a mother daughter. If one of them was not being truthful, they would soon discover it.
“…at the age of sixty-seven, thirty years after he had sworn his vow of Brahmacharya, Gandhi awoke after an arousing dream with what would have been to most men of that age a source of some satisfaction, but was to Gandhi a calamity, an erection.”[Page 81, Freedom at Midnight , Simon & Schuster Edition,1975].
 Collins does not mention what Manu said or did, or what the collaborators heard!! Apparently Bose did. He raised Cane, and alerted many around Gandhi.
Erik H Erikson (american psychoanalys) while doing his research in india on Ghandi wrote about Ghandis episodes with other women besides Manu the articles were also published in new yorker of 1996. He gives the reference of a book by Nirmal Bose : My days with Gandhi. It deals with this problem and other, very respectfully in two chapters
On 3.2.1947 he said, as Nirmal Bose quotes :
” What [ he was ?]doing was not for imitation. It was undoubtedly dangerous, but it ceased to be so if the conditions were rigidly observed. ”
GANDHI GETS CAUGHT WITH HIS PANTS DOWN:-LITERALLY
 “During his Noakhali tour of 1946, Gandhi used to sleep with the nineteen-year-old Manu. When Nirmal Bose, his Bengali interpreter, saw this he protested, asserting that the experiments must be having bad psychological effects on the girl.
In his book “My Days with Gandhi”, published in 1953 with great difficulty and at his own expense, he offers a Freudian interpretation to Gandhi’s experiments. It is generally believed that Gandhi started sleeping with women toward the close of his life. According to Sushila Nayar, he started much earlier. However, at the time he called it ‘nature cure.’ She told Mehta, ‘long before Manu came into the picture I used to sleep with him just as I would with my mother. He might say my back aches. Put some pressure on it. So I might put some pressure on it or lie down on his back and he might just go to sleep. In the early days there was no question of calling this a brahamacharya experiment. It was just part of nature cure. Later on, when people started asking questions about his physical contact with women, the idea of brahamacharya experiments was developed. Don’t ask me any more questions about brahamacharya experiments. There is nothing to say, unless you have a dirty mind like Bose.’Mahatma Gandhi and His Apostles is an extremely well-written book. Mehta has made it highly readable with his subtle expression and suave sarcasm, particularly when he reproduces his conversations with Gandhians. He has shown courage in unraveling some of the myths woven around Gandhi by his blind followers. The latter will certainly be dismayed by Mehta’s forthrightness. The book has created a tumult in the Indian Parliament. It will be a great pity if it is banned”. http://www.sikhtimes.com/books_020278a.html

POLITICAL FAILURE OF GANDHI:
For his services in helping the British raise an army, he was awarded titles.Meanwhile India was still suffering under British colonial rule. Gandhi arrived in England during the first week of the World War, and again he supported the British by raising and leading an ambulance corps; but he became ill and returned to India in January 1915….In the spring of 1918 Gandhi was persuaded by the British to help raise soldiers for a final victory effort in the war. Charlie Andrews criticized Gandhi for recruiting Indians to fight for the British. Gandhi spoke to large audiences……
Romain Rolland, the French Nobel Laureate in literature thought of Gandhi not only as a Hindu saint, but also “another Christ”. He wrote Gandhi’s new biography in French which poured praise on the the deity— “Gandhi is the One Luminous, Creator of All,” “Mahatma.”
At this juncture the Nehru-Gandhi loyalist Hindus were brought in. Muslims and others from the Subcontinent were left aghast when Krishnalal Shridharni elevated Gandhi to the status of twentieth century Hindu god – “The seventh reincarnation of Vishnu, Lord Rama.”
One of the objectives of colonialism was the “civilize” the “natives” and the “tribes”. According to Rudyard Kipling this was the “White Man’s Burden”. The British machinery and their acolytes, the Christian clergy had an ulterior motive in building the Gandhi myth. Similar schemes had worked in Africa and Latin America. Local deities were “included” in Christian concepts to make it more palatable to the people. Later these “local influences” would be purged.
The Colonial rulers thought that by elevating Gandhi to a 20th century messiah and then converting him would open the flood gate for evangelizing and converting the Hindu and masses. However Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was not Emperor Constantine, and was unable to fulfill the wishes of the colonial masters.
Many believe that this wish of foreign funded Christian Missionaries is being fulfilled by Christian Sonia Gandhi and her Christian lobby. Many Indians are upset that Glady Stains was awarded Padmshree. Many Indians are upset at the missionary activities of the faith healer Benny Hinn’s organized in Bangalore with the support of Andhra Government to please, Sonia Gandhi, the Pope and the Vatican City’s its Indian ambassador.
The biggest Urban Myth is that Mr. Gandhi led a movement for the independence from the British. Gandhi did not bring the British empire to its knees. By supporting the British war effort in South Africa as well as in the Subcontinent, he actually prolonged Britain’s occupation of the Subcontinent and prolonged the life of the British Empire. In 1945 the tottering “empire” was its knees already. Actually it had been knocked out (KO!).
WW2 with 50 million dead had totally destroyed London and decimated the infrastructure of the country. There was no appetite for empire. British voters threw out Churchill. The exhausted British had already decided to leave all her colonies after the 2nd world war.
  It is nonsensical to say that Gandhi won freedom for the Subcontinent “without spilling a drop of blood.”Non-violence was just a slogan. One million died in 1947. In the 40′s when the British colonial rule was taking its last breadth there was a strong wave of nationalism across the globe, in China, in Malaysia, in Nigeria, in South Africa, and in the Subcontinent. Many of the leaders were Tipu Sultan, Bahadar Shah Zafar, Alam Iqbal, Mohhammad Ali Jinnah, Maula Mohammad Azad, The Ali Brothers, Maulana Abdul Bari Farangi Mahali, Lokmanya Tilak, Chaudhry Rehmat Ali, Gokhale, Lal Lajpat Rai, Veer Savarkar and many other unnamed heroes.
Their sacrifices were not less than Mahatma Gandhi. Gandhi came to the political scene in India after Jinnah, Iqbal, and Sir Syed. He came after Tilak Yug, Subhash Chandra Bose launched the “Azad Hind Fauj.” The devastating affects of the 2nd Tribal War (World War II) forced the British government to abandon her Colonial Empire.

GANDHI WAS “CREATED” TO USE THE SOUTH AFRICANS IN THE BRITISH WARS: Gandhi was a creation of the British and they used him to get the South Africans to fight in the British wars. He also stratified the South African society. From Oct. 1899 to May 31st, 1902 Mahatma Gandhi did not mention in “Non-Violence.”At the beginning of the South African War, Gandhi argued that “Indians must support the War effort in order to legitimize their claims to full citizenship. ”
 
The “Prophet of Non-Violence“, the “apostle of peace” urged the Indians to support the British by enlisting in the army during World War I.
GANDHI WAS A TOTAL FAILURE IN SOUTH AFRICA: Gandhi was a failure in South Africa and a failed attorney in Bombay. His failure hardened “Apartheid” and it took decades to dismantle it. This created a rift with the Black of South Africa who rejected this. Gandhi urged the colonial authorities to raise a volunteer militia of Indians to fight for the Empire. Gandhi informed the “South African Natal Authorities” that it would be a “criminal folly” if they did not enlist Indians for the war. Mr. Gandhi urged the Indian community to show their loyalty to the British Empire by raising funds for the War. He reminded them that they were in South Africa due to the courtesy of the Empire.
• “A general belief seems to prevail in the colony that the Indians are little better, if at all, than the savages or natives of Africa. Even the children are taught to believe in that manner, with the result that the Indian is being dragged down to the position of a raw Kaffir.” (Reference: The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, Government of India (CWMG), Vol I, p. 150)
• Regarding forcible registration with the state of blacks: “One can understand the necessity for registration of Kaffirs who will not work.” (Reference: CWMG, Vol I, p. 105)
• “Why, of all places in Johannesburg, the Indian Location should be chosen for dumping down all the Kaffirs of the town passes my comprehension…the Town Council must withdraw the Kaffirs from the Location.” (Reference: CWMG, Vol I, pp. 244-245)
• His description of black inmates: “Only a degree removed from the animal.” Also, “Kaffirs are as a rule uncivilized – the convicts even more so. They are troublesome, very dirty and live almost like animals.” – Mar. 7, 1908 (Reference: CWMG, Vol VIII, pp. 135-136)
• The Durban Post Office: One of Gandhi’s major “achievements” in South Africa was to promote racial segregation by refusing to share a post office door with the black natives.
GANDHI WAS IMPORTED TO THE SUBCONTINENT BY THE BRITISH:The British Empire included many countries in Africa and Asia. In the Subcontinent it included more than 500 states. At the end of the 2nd Tribal War in Europe (WW2), the pillars of the once mighty British Empire were collapsing. In the Subcontinent the War of Independence of 1857 (also known as “Indian Mutiny“) had failed.Gandhi’s arrival in India was a carefully planned and crafted scheme to get rid of the Muslim leadership in the Indian National Congress. Some of the biggest millionaires in India devised a marketing plan to construct a leader for a superstitious, illiterate and colonized people. Gandhi was the perfect candidate.
He was imported from South Africa. Special trains were constructed to transport Gandhi in “3rd class” bogeys. the brilliance of his image: the huge ears, toothless smile, round glasses, the loincloth, the staff. I remember a factoid from somewhere that the most recognized characters on earth were Gandhiji and, no offence, Mickey Mouse. And no, it wasn’t the big ears. It was the deliberate cultivation of an iconic figure with his sartorial abnegation, something that would appeal instantly and instinctively to his target audience, the average Indian. Something that would resonate strongly with the ascetic tradition of the land; the intentional invocation of the poorest of the poor, the salt of the earth…..As Sarojini Naidu is said to have complained, it cost India millions to keep Gandhiji in poverty. But the packaging and positioning” The Man who knew marketing byRajeev Srinivasan The man who knew marketing
The Salt March and his fast in Calcutta were managed events for publicity and fund raising. Huge crowds were attracted to this circus. Funds were generated to support the Indian National Congress and other organizations which unleashed a campaign of terror against the Muslims of Bengal and Kashmir.
Initially the INC was not a communal organization but it used the RSS and the Jan Sangh to do its dirty work. The machinery worked overtime to put the Subcontinent on the track of Ram Rajhya.
  Gandhi first introduced Hindu religious symbols to Motilal Nehru’s Secular Indian National Congress and then tried to make all of India succumb to a racist Hindu Ram Rajha rule.

 G D Birla’s personal memoirs “‘In the Shadow of the Mahatma: A Personal Memoir’” reveal that he undertook many visits to England on his own and utilised the opportunity of to sell Gandhi. He acted as the appointed agent of Gandhi to meet Winston Churchill, Lord Halifax, Sir Samuel Hoare, Lord Lothian, Stanley Baldwin, Ramsay McDonald and several other great English statesmen were G D Birla’s close friends. G D Birla’s was in close touch Lala Lajpath Rai, Pundit Madanmohan Malaviya, Pundit Motilal Nehru, Srinivasa Sastri, Sardar Vallabhai Patel, Rajaji and several others. The racists bigots like Patel, Rai and others were the ones who were advising Birla on how to sell Ram Rajha to the British under the guise of Non-violence.
Sunil Khilnani has says that Gandhi’s vision was essentially religious His solution was to forge an Indian identity out of the shared knowledge of ancient scriptures. “He turned to the legends and stories from the India’s popular religious traditions, preferring their lessons to the supposed ones of the history“.
Today’s India tells us that it didn’t work then and it doesn’t work now. In today’s India, Hindu nationalism is rampant in the form of the Bhartiya Janta Party. During the recent elections, Gandhi and his ideas have scarcely been mentioned. India has had wars with all her neighbors, Nepal, Burma, Bangaldesh, Sikkim, Bhutan, Sril Lanka and of course Pakistan.
The British brought Gandhi back to India from South Africa to sabotage Indian national movement against British rule. The Congress Party at the time was a secular party. At the expense of other important people Nehru-Gandhi were imposed on the party which had been set up under the patronage of the British authorities.
“One of his reason for launching the Civil Disobedient Movement is to contain the violence of revolutionaries.”
The 2nd World War broke out in 1939 after Nazi Germany invaded Poland. Initially, Mr. Gandhi favored offering “non-violent moral support” to the British effort, but other Congress leaders were offended by the unilateral inclusion of the people of the Subcontinent into the war, without the consultation of the people’s representatives (INC,ML, AD, RSS, Jan Sangh etc.).
MR GANDHI INTRODUCED RELIGIOUS SYMBOLISM INTO THE SUBCONTINENTAL POLITICS: THIS LED TO THE ALIENATION OF MUSLIMS ETC.
Mr. Gandhi introduced religious symbols into politics which led to the Indian National attracting the communalists like Patel.
As a result of the Ashrams and the satyargarhs and the Banda Mahtaram INC became a Hindu Party with the Muslims in the Muslim League and the Sikhs in the Akali Dal. Unable to agree on the Cabinet Mission Plan all agreed to gain independence in a different manner from the British. Gandhi’s religious symbols eventually led to the BJP ruling India, Ayodhia and the massacres in Gujrat. Secularism in India means “Hinduism Light”. Dynastic “Democracy” in India was imposed to wrest the control of India from Muslim lands. Land reforms were forced on a vulnerable Muslim population and their lands were confiscated.
SCHEME TO DETHRONE THE MUSLIMS FROM THE CORRIDORS OF POWER: A scheme was created to disable the Muslim infrastructure of India and get rid of the rulers who had ruled India for more than a thousand years. A word that had not been in vogue was issued into the lexicon of the English language. This word “Democracy” did not appear in the American Constitution and Socrates, Jeffersen, Hamilton and others had written much against it. However the word galvanized the people of Britain and America to fight Fascism. It worked to draw in the Americans to the war. The British used this word to seduce the Hindus of the Subcontinent to lure them into supporting them so that after they left, they would rule the Subcontinent–something they had not dreamed about in more than a thousand years.
The politics of sex locked the British Empire into irrational decision making. There is an overwhelming body of evidence to show that Lord Mountbatten was gay. Lord Mountbatten was seduced by Mr. Nehru whose homosexual tendencies have been mentioned by Stanley Wolpert and others. Lord Mountbatten’s wife Edwina’s affair with Mr. Nehru is well known also.
GANDHI WAS A FAILURE IN THE SUBCONTINENT:
Gandhi had pledged to keep a several fasts to death to prevent. Invariably he got sick enough and stopped.
The anti-Muslim thrust of some of Gandhi’s Hindu opponents combined with Muslim separatism to produce Pakistan.” Gandhi’s grandson
The Gandhi opponents in India were unhappy with him for “allowing Pakistan”. They also think that the “protest fast unto death and the non-violent arm of Gandhism was a fraud. Both Mahatma Gandhi and British Empire knew this. This was a friendly fight as Congress, its allies and left fronts are doing. After all they are true loyalist of Nehru Gandhi dynasty. “
Gandhi’s girls – sex scandal Washington Monthly, July-August, 1987 by Art Levine
Gandhi’s Girls
India, 1942: In the end, the political demise of Mohandas Gandhi came with stunning speed. Until last week, he was the reversed Mahatma–the Great Soul– leader of 400 million Indians in the drive for independence from British colonial rule. With the election of the Labour Government in Britain increasingly likely, chances never seemed brighter for the free India that Gandhi had sought for so long.
But by week’s end, in the wake of newspaper accounts of Gandhi’s sexual peccadilloes, bizarre personal habits and mind-bending cult practices, his career–and perhaps Indian nationalism –lay in ruins. Those closest to Gandhi likened it to a Greek tragedy, a giant cut down by his own hands. “Gandhi’s personal life was a political time bomb waiting to explode,’ said one distraught associate. “Now it’s finally blown up in our faces.’
 Ironically, Gandhi set the stage for his demise through his own pronouncements on sex. His obsession began in 1885 when he learned of his father’s death while in bed with his wife. By 1906, he had taken a much celebrated vow of celibacy. An extraordinary commitment, but even then Gandhi was angling for moral loopholes. “If for want of physical enjoyment,’ he wrote, “the mind wallows in thoughts of enjoyment, then it is legitimate to satisfy the hungers of the body.’ For years, supporters now admit, Gandhi had pushed the outer limits of propriety. “The man in the loin cloth, it seems, has thought a good deal about loins,’ said one observer.
After years of such rumors, it was the specific nature of the latest charges, followed by other damaging revelations, that undermined his political base. The shock waves were felt throughout the British empire–and new questions were raised about how relevant a politician’s character was to his work, and whether in the case of Gandhi, the Fourth Estate went too far.
 A Spiritual Experience? The trouble began a week ago when the New Delhi Herald published a front page story reporting that Gandhi had spent the weekend with five attractive young women–aides in his nonviolent campaign–at his ashram in Sevegram. Meanwhile, his wife Kasturbai was 2,000 miles away at their mountain retreat in Kashmir recuperating from an illness.
Escorting them was Gandhi’s aide, the movie star-handsome Jawaharlal Nehru. With his urbane charm and stylish taste in jackets, Nehru never had any pretense to celibacy. (His intimacies with Lady Mountbatten are infamous.) Campaign insiders said that they had long been alarmed by Gandhi’s ties to Nehru, and several suggested their time together be cut back. “We told him to dump Nehru,’ said one aide. “But the old man would just sit there and smile. He didn’t see the storm coming.’
It was advice Gandhi must now wish he had heeded. New Delhi Herald reporters and photographers were hiding in nearby bushes, guarding both the front and rear entrances. Except for a breath of fresh air at 3 A.M., the women had spent the entire night with the erstwhile spiritual leader. If the chronology was indicting, the photographs were positively damning. Wielding telephoto lenses, the Herald photographers snapped shots that seem sure to snuff out a political career. The scene: Gandhi and his cabal sprawled on his rope bed– naked.
Late Sunday morning, a weary Gandhi finally spotted the Herald reporters and confronted them. The women were only there as an experiment in self-restraint, he insisted, and nothing sexual transpired between them. “True brachmacharya (celibacy) is this: one who, by constant-attendance upon God, has become capable of lying naked with naked women, however beautiful they may be, without being in any manner whatsoever sexually excited. I have done nothing wrong,’ Gandhi insisted.
The Indian public wasn’t buying it. His explanations had become the issue of the campaign, according to a poll taken two days after the Herald story broke. Only 34 percent of those questioned believed Gandhi’s claim that he hadn’t had sexual relations with the women–and a scant 16 percent believed he hadn’t been sexually excited. A mere 26 percent claimed to be disturbed by the incident itself; what bothered them, said 75 percent of India’s citizens, was the appearance of hypocrisy.
But the questions kept coming. Every stop on his campaign swing turned into a media circus. A protest march in Dandi was cut short by a throng of reporters, barraging Gandhi with questions about his sexual self-control. A new low in political discourse may have been reached when a reporter for the Bombay Post asked during a sit-in, “Did you get an erection last weekend?’ Although Gandhi was well within his rights when he responded, “I don’t have to answer that,‘ some observers felt that the appearance of evasiveness further eroded his credibility.
Matters were only made worse when the Herald was widely rumored to be on the verge of publishing more damaging photos–of nothing less than unmistakable signs of Gandhi’s physical excitement. When a pack of enterprising reporters caught up with her at her sickbed, Mrs. Gandhi stuck by her man. She told them: “Honestly, if Mahatma told me that nothing happened, then nothing happened.’
More Revelations: Still, by week’s end, the prospects for Gandhi’s political recovery looked grim, despite his denials and counter-attacks. In the next few days, there were other newspaper accounts of Gandhi’s celibacy experiments. The Bombay Post ran an insiders’ account of life in Gandhi’s ashram. Contrary to the image he had cultivated of a gentle, loving soul, the two-part series, “The Dark Side of Gandhi,’ detailed the brutal regimen imposed on his followers. His 100-plus disciples, forced to live in primitive mud and bamboo huts, were awakened daily at a A.M. to eat nothing but a few crumbs of unseasoned vegetarian gruel and dry wheat. Weakened, they were subjected to long harangues on arcane religious topics. Eyewitness accounts were gruesome. “We had to spend hours on our knees chanting prayers and spinning cotton,’ said one American follower who defected. “We were like zombies.’ Cult experts say Gandhi had dozens of ingenious schemes to weaken his followers’ ties to their families and strengthen his control over them. Their secret name for their leader: “Bapu,’ or father.
The Post story was the final straw. In his political death throes, Gandhi made a dramatic appearance before his supporters–and stopped just short of abandoning his campaign for a free India. “I intended, in all honesty, to come to you this sunrise and tell you that I was leaving the cause. But, then, after tossing and turning all night, as I have through this ordeal, I woke up and said, “Heck, my goodness, no.”
Instead, Gandhi with his back against the proverbial wall reached deep into his bag of tricks and, like a cat with nine lives, pulled yet another rabbit from his hat: a hunger strike. Over the course of a fifty-year career, Gandhi had turned this familiar strategy into a crowd pleaser that could move the masses or pummel an Empire. “Under certain circumstances, fasting is the one weapon God has given us for use in times of utter helplessness,’ said Gandhi defiantly.
No one doubts that Gandhi can go weeks on end without even a drop of chutney. But political analysts are doubtful that the man, once dubbed “Mr. Hunger Strike,’ could make this latest gambit work. “Gandhi represents the politics of the past,’ said Patreek Chardeli. “A new generation of Indians wants vital, robust leadership. I don’t think a starving old man is well positioned to do it.’ More ominously, other pundits said the political damage was too much to contain– even with a high-profile play for sympathy. Davidahr Garthati, the media consultant credited with Gandhi’s decision to abandon the suit and tie of his early barrister days and “go native’ instead, was equally pessimistic. Garthati noted, “His celibacy shtick was crucial to the saint image he’d cultivated for all these years. The non-violence thing, the spinning wheels, the fasting–that was brilliant. But his celibacy really set him apart, made him genuinely holy. Without it, he’s just another pacifist do-gooder.’
Political opponents moved quickly to capitalize on the gaffe. Columnist Robert Novakilli, a longtime Gandhi critic, lambasted Gandhi’s hijinks from his nationally broadcast McRajan Group. “The real perversion is Gandhi’s political agenda. For years, he and his pacifist pals have had two things in mind: tinkering with the salt tax and cozying up to Stalin.’ And his most formidable rival, Moslem leader Muhammed Ali Jinnah, sought to subtly position himself to pick up Gandhi’s fleeing supporters. “Family life has always been sacred to me,’ he told reporters, standing outside his family’s mosque with his wife and daughter. “I don’t think it’s my place to comment on the controversy surrounding some of those in the public eye. It’s up to the Indian people to judge for themselves.’
And their judgment seemed harsh. Within a matter of days, the squalid controversy over Gandhi’s private parts turned him from a national hero into a laughingstock. On his nightly radio program, comedian Charu Carson quipped, “Well, at least we know the Mahatma is big enough for the job of running India.’ He added, to more laughter, “I guess he was really meditating his brains out this weekend.’ Editorial cartoonists had a field day, as a bulging loin cloth quickly became the Mahatma’s new trademark.
In the next few days more revelations came trickling out about other celibacy “experiments’ he had been conducting since his forties, including one report of a pleasure trip down the Ganges with Nehru and two female assistants on the awkwardly named Holy Cow. The Post also revealed that at the end of each day, he had one of his attractive, young female disciples administer an enema, which he insisted was for “health’ and “cleansing’ purposes. “Gandhi gives as much as he takes– even to total strangers,’ said one Gandhi aide.
New Ground rules: Gandhi’s sudden demise triggered an orgy of self-examination in the media. Did the press go too far? “At first, I agonized over whether we should risk tarnishing a great man’s reputation with close-up photos of naked women and speculation about his sex life,’ said Ved
Fiedleraba, who led the Herald stakeout. “But then I realized that the public had a right to know.’ Fiedleraba reasoned that if there was the slightest possibility that Gandhi was lying about his celibacy, then that raised serious questions about his candor and his ability to negotiate with foreign leaders were India ever to become independent. “So, naturally, it was my moral obligation to set up camp outside his bedroom.’
Clearly, the ground rules have changed. Historically, the press has had a gentlemen’s agreement with India’s rulers. When Viceroy Lord Lillybottom himself brought a bevy of beauties to the Taj Mahal, the muckrakers of Madras looked the other way. But with the rise of Indian Nationalism and the decline of British sea power, the mores of Indian society have been loosened–and so have those of the press. Today, nothing is off limits, even enemas. Many wondered what’s next: asking Jinnah whether he had violated the Koran’s strictures against amorous relations with pigs or other unholy animals? But for now it was Gandhi who was caught in this whirlwind. This smiling man, from a more polite age, seemed oblivious to the new rules of his beloved India.
Whatever the press’s ultimate responsibility, the longstanding doubts over Gandhi’s character left India’s nationalist movement in disarray. Behind the scenes, some Congress party operatives were privately relieved. “We feel betrayed,’ said one. “Gandhi promised he would remain celibate, at least until India achieved independence. Now that he’s gone, at least we can move on.’
Ultimately, Gandhi’s fate hinged on those questions of character, rather than any moral revulsion. In her essay “Gandhi’s Women Problem, Women’s Gandhi Problem,’ Sukai Lessardai voiced the concerns of many women wary of Gandhi’s apparent philandering. “Whether or not he was celibate, his need to prove his spiritual manhood by lying with five naked women is an affront to the dignity and equality of women everywhere.’ And as Willmed Schneidermanai of the Indian Enterprise Institute points out, “It’s not so much the fact that he slept with these women or regularly indulged in enemas; it’s that he showed such bad judgment in doing so. I think this raises serious questions about Gandhi’s self-discipline and insensitivity to the appearances of impropriety –and finally about Gandhi’s ability to lead a successful non-violent movement.’
Now the question is: Whither India? In his stead, there are other leaders who could possibly win independence for India–the Moslem Jinnah, or even Vallabhaai Patel–but neither has the stature and name recognition of a Gandhi. Non-violent disobedience seems a memory now. And nationalism itself is on the backburner. As the likely next Viceroy of the Raj, Lord Louis Mountbatten, points out, “If an entire nation could be led down the primrose path by this charlatan and hypocrite, the Indian people are not yet ready for independence.’ Wise heads in India and Britain agreed, and with Gandhi’s political demise, a tumultuous chapter in India’s history closes, and calmer times lie ahead.