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Maneka rubbishes Indira biography

Katherine Frank's controversial biography of Indira Gandhi has been written to suit a member of the Gandhi family, "who happens to be European", Maneka Gandhi told rediff.com in an exclusive interview in London.

"This is a motivated book," said Maneka, who was in London to launch libel action against author Katherine Frank and publisher HarperCollins. "I really do not think that even the point of this book was Indira. I think the point of this book was to vilify the whole family and glorify a member of it, who coincidentally is European."

The book has "definitely been written at the behest of a member of the family," Maneka said . "The one she is trying to effusively praise, and who is the only one who comes out as the wonderful pillar who has held up the whole family. Everybody, Jawaharlal Nehru, Indira Gandhi, Rajiv Gandhi, Sanjay Gandhi, myself, come out as perverse, insane, corrupt, fiendish, all sorts of things right down to imaginary sex lives and over the top behaviour."

The author had made no attempt to contact many people who really would know something about Indira Gandhi, Maneka says. "What is so amazing is that none of us are inaccessible. There was very clear bias throughout. That is why I am saying that the job of this particular author had nothing to do with Indira Gandhi. Forget not contacting me. My son is there. There are hundreds of relatives, there are thousands of bureaucrats who had been in touch with her. There were so many serious politicians who had worked with her. You never contacted anybody. You contacted dress designers who had never met her in her life."

Maneka has sent a legal notice to Frank and HarperCollins in London through solicitor Sarosh Zaiwalla and to Rupika Chawla in Delhi, who is cited in the book as saying that Maneka and Sanjay Gandhi sought anticipatory bail through her husband Navin Chawla to cover up involvement in a murder.

"There is a paragraph that has really gone over the top," Maneka told rediff.com. "In that she said Sanjay was responsible for many murders. That we went two years after the event and asked Rupika Chawla's husband to take anticipatory bail to cover up the murder. Anyone who can write this nonsense doesn't even understand Indian law. Here is a dacoit who has been killed in the open by three groups of police from three states in a well publicised shootout. Two years later, Sanjay and Maneka go for some reason to the lieutenant governor's secretary and ask him to take anticipatory bail. Does that make sense?"

Maneka said she was taking legal action at least partly because her son Feroz Gandhi was very upset about the allegations. "He got very upset, you know, when she describes Sanjay's dead body. She says even his dead body looked like a Frankensteinian monster. That even his death had not improved his features. Come on, do you expect death to improve people's features? Is it a cosmetic job? That was all of 27 years ago. You weren't even there."

The book is crowded with false allegations against Sanjay, she says. "For instance, she has made an allegation that Sanjay killed the boyfriend of his girlfriend. What is the person she has got this from? An Englishman in England who had once told her he had spoken to Romesh Thapar in India, who told him this. Does she know how civilised society works? The people in India are just as civilised if not more than people in England. Do people go around shooting, killing, murdering? The people that she loosely refers to as thugs, goondas, monsters, cohorts and whatever else have held ministerial positions for many years. They are still members of Parliament in their 20th year, 15th year, whatever. So you degrade the whole of India by carrying on this senseless adjectival tirade."

The book is wrong even on simple facts, Maneka says. "That they raided the farm to find Sanjay's money. That farm is not Sanjay's. It is Rajiv's. That Sanjay died in a Pitts aircraft that belonged to his mother's, as she says, putative lover. This Dhirendra Brahmachari. That is not true, the plane belonged to Kamal Nath. Even on the small bits there was no attempt whatsoever to get anything right. Why would anybody write a book and not bother to do research on it? Only if they felt that they were protected. By access to information which they had reason to believe was correct."

Through the book "there's one shining light of calm grace, dignity, the only one who is normal in the family," Maneka says. "Now I find this very sad because as a person I have tried to carve a career and an entity doing the things I believe in. I don't think anybody can say I have bled on or been a parasite on the family name, even though I am very proud of it. But here we have a person whose only claim to fame is the constant repetition of a name. And yet this person calls in a writer and gives them access to documents out of context which have been denied to serious historians both in India and the world. And then fills her up with nonsensical fanciful allegations. Which means that all you've done is to use the family as a stepping stone for your own personal ambition."

A good deal of the matter in the book comes from "that first generation of two-minute books just after the Emergency," Maneka says. "That is 50 per cent of the book, and the other 50 per cent is motivated nonsense, given to establish one person's claim to fame."

Maneka said the book says the family sent out garbage trucks full of notes. "Is that the way it works? Is that the way politicians do it here in England? That they fill garbage trucks with notes and send them outside the house? And where are they sending it to? The garbage field?"

Given the motivations behind this book, Maneka said there was a need to investigate the other businesses of Rupert Murdoch. "One should start looking at all his other things, his Star TV and his other things. Perhaps we should have a look-see at what other rubbish is he bringing out. Everything can't be as slapdash as one of these Bold and Beautiful serials."

The book makes her out to be this irresponsible, arrogant, tantrum-throwing woman, she said. "Do you realise, I have been a minister four times. My last three elections I have won by the largest majority in India. I'm a very strong and committed member of the environmental and animal movement. I opened schools, much before I became minister, for kidnapped children. I do a great deal of work for the disabled. Would all this be coming from someone who is hysterical, insane, corrupt?"

The whole book is really libellous, she says. "And I would say that most of it is completely false. The true part is that I exist, Sanjay existed, Indira existed, the rest of it is all rubbish. It is one of those books that has been created from rehashing other nonsensical books, and adding more adjectives.

The total amount of research that's gone into it is so flimsy. If you want to do a serious book on a serious person, then you require a lot of work. You don't just go pick up rubbish written on her. Or us. And then rehash it."

Commenting on the allegation that she had circulated copies of the controversial 'She' chapter in a book by Nehru's secretary M O Mathai, in which he claims a 12-year relationship with Indira Gandhi, Maneka said: "If I have, there must be one person in the world I have given it to. You know where she's picked this up from? She's picked this up from Khushwant Singh having written it in a book that was banned by the court. And this affair with Mathai. What does she attribute it to? The fact that Mathai was Panditji's secretary. She wanted to get close to Panditji, so she slept with his secretary. Is this how India works?"

Maneka said this is the "sloppiest, most viciously biased and worst researched book" she has seen. "HarperCollins India told them not to touch it because it was nonsense. But they went ahead anyway."

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Maneka in London to file suit against author of 'Indira'
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