BackDelhi’s Belly | The queen’s white house
The current unpopularity of Indira Gandhi's family isn't reflected in the crowds at her residence
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One small group of women is wearing saris, Gujarati style. Another group is chattering in Bengali. A third group of women, with jasmine flowers in their hair, is clearly from the south. A barefoot man in a yellowing dhoti could be a farmer from any village in India.
This diverse crowd walks wide-eyed in a white bungalow on central Delhi’s 1, Safdarjung Road. Former prime minister Indira Gandhi lived in this house for 20 years, until her assassination in 1984. It is now a memorial to her.
Such conversion will not happen again. “Henceforth, no bungalow shall be made available for memorial for any person," Arun Jaitley, a cabinet minister in the Narendra Modi government, declared last month.
It’s not just Indira Gandhi’s residence that has been firmly set in the past, but perhaps her legacy too. This year has proved to be annus horribilis. The Congress party she led suffered its worst defeat ever in a general election. Sonia Gandhi, her daughter-in-law and party president, has severely curtailed her activities, reportedly due to poor health. Elder grandson Rahul, the party’s vice- president, is routinely mocked for his supposed naivety. Younger grandson Varun is a member of Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party. Grandson-in-law Robert Vadra is embroiled in controversial land dealings. And last month was the first time in many years that the Prime Minister failed to visit Indira Gandhi’s riverside mausoleum on her death anniversary—Modi is India’s first non-Congress prime minister in a decade.
Yet the historic magnitude of the regime change in Delhi is barely perceptible at the Indira Gandhi Memorial. Its 10,000-a- day visitor numbers have not dropped, say security personnel.
A senior officer, who did not want to be named, says the glass-barricaded rooms are cleaned every Monday, the weekly closing day. The keys to the rooms, he says, are with Sonia Gandhi, who heads the privately run Indira Gandhi Memorial Trust that looks after this property. “Madam herself supervises the cleaning," says the officer. “Madam takes a personal interest in the dusting of every artefact and furniture item." He says she occasionally visits on other days too, but only in the evenings, after visiting hours. Suman Dubey, trust secretary and a friend of Sonia Gandhi, confirmed this.
A short walk away sits another bungalow-turned-memorial. Mahatma Gandhi was assassinated there in 1948. While admission to both memorials is free, and Mahatma Gandhi inarguably commands a taller stature, it is Indira Gandhi who gets the bigger crowd.
Gandhi Smriti gets just 2,000 visitors every day.
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