FEROZE: THE FORGOTTEN GANDHI
Bertil Falk
Roli Books
304 pages; Rs 695
Feroze Gandhi died of a heart attack in 1960. He was only 48. In 2012, Feroze Gandhi’s birth centenary passed away unnoticed. His grandson, Rahul Gandhi, was then a second-term Lok Sabha member. His daughter-in-law Sonia Gandhi was at the helm of the Congress party, which then led the coalition government in New Delhi. India had forgotten Feroze Gandhi a long time ago. His descendants were no exception.
Bertil Falk, an 83-year-old Swedish journalist, first came to India in 1977, 17 years after the death of Feroze Gandhi. He met Indira Gandhi, who had been voted out of power earlier that year. In his book, Mr Falk writes he was intrigued to find that Indira had two sons and grandchildren. He asked where was Indira’s husband and was told his name was Feroze and he was nobody significant.
But as Mr Falk tells you in this brilliantly researched book, Feroze Gandhi wasn’t merely the son-in-law of Mr Nehru. Not that his status as the husband of Nehru’s only child didn’t help him his career, but it would be grossly unfair to his memory to compare him with Nehru-Gandhi dynasty’s other son-in-law.
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Feroze Gandhi was a freedom fighter of some standing. He had spent several years in jail, was an able organiser, a hit with Congress workers, fluent in Hindi and other dialects of Uttar Pradesh, admired for his conversational skills and flawless recitation of the Bhagavad Gita.
But he suffered from an inferiority complex, felt bitter about having to live away from his two sons, battled a weak heart, struggled to give up smoking and had a series of affairs. He had several close friends, but died a lonely and bitter man, Mr Falk quotes journalist Inder Malhotra as saying.
Mr Falk writes how Nehru thought little of his son-in-law during the latter’s lifetime, and expressed his surprise to his associates when he saw thousands of common men and women queueing up at Teen Murti Bhawan to pay their last respects to him and hundreds who lined up Delhi’s streets as the funeral procession made its way to the cremation ground at Delhi’s Nigambodh Ghat on September 7, 1960.
Feroze Gandhi was a champion of press freedom and nemesis of crony capitalism and corruption.
From 1955 to 1960, Feroze, who represented the Rae Bareli constituency, earned the reputation of a “giant killer”. He would frequently embarrass his father-in-law’s ministerial colleagues during parliamentary discussions, and employed his experience from his years in the National Herald and Indian Express to become India’s first “investigating parliamentarian”.
In 1955, with his investigations into the Haridas Mundhra scandal, he forced finance minister T T Krishnamachari to quit. In the subsequent court case, Ramkrishna Dalmia, the founder of the Dalmia-Jain group that owned the Bharat Insurance Company and had misappropriated money, was sentenced to two years in jail.
The Life Insurance of India Act was passed in June 1956, and nearly 250 insurance companies were nationalised and merged into the state-owned Life Insurance Corporation of India as a result of this. Mr Falk says this was a precursor to nationalisation, when 13 years later Indira Gandhi nationalised 14 privately-owned banks.
Later that year, Feroze got the Protection of Publication Bill passed in the Lok Sabha that provided the press protection to report legislative proceedings. Nearly two decades later, in 1975, his wife junked the Press Law when she imposed the Emergency.
In 1957, Feroze Gandhi’s investigation forced the Nehru government to admit that the price for buying boilers and locomotives from TELCO was higher than buying boilers and locomotives from other manufacturers. In 1959, he disagreed vehemently with his wife for playing a part in dismissing the elected Communist government in Kerala in 1959, and was perhaps the first to call her a “fascist”.
But little of this survives in the common discourse. There is a road named after Feroze Gandhi in New Delhi’s Lajpat Nagar, a market in Ludhiana and a college in Rae Bareli. A search for him on the internet delivers conspiracy theories, persistently circulated in the last couple of decades by India’s pre-eminent “rumour spreading society”.
The most startling of Mr Falk’s findings is that Feroze might not have been a Parsi, but a Hindu. He says there are birth records and other evidence to prove that his father was a Parsi marine engineer, he was the last and fifth child of his parents and was adopted by his maternal aunt Shirin Commissariat when he was seven months old. She was a trained surgeon and lived in Allahabad. But it is rumoured, and Mr Falk says only a DNA test could prove it either way, that Feroze was the son of Shirin and her Hindu male friend. Mr Falk also lays to rest the rumour that Feroze and Kamala Nehru had an affair. According to Mr Falk, the rumour reached Nehru’s years. But Nehru did not abuse his power to banish the 18-year-old from Congress circles. The 18-year-old Feroze nursed Kamala when she was unwell, and when her sisters-in-law had little time for her, the daughter was too young and Nehru was busy with politics.
Although Mr Falk demolishes several of the rumours associated with Nehru, Feroze and Indira, he admits that he couldn’t find answers to some questions and leaves us with this: “Time is not yet ripe to disclose every single piece of information I have unearthed over the years.”