Postscript : Indira Gandhi’s Troubled India Legacy : Ten years after the prime minister’s death, the Parliament, courts and party system remain wounded.

The favorite childhood pastime of the scion of India’s First Family was to summon the servants, clamber on top of a table and deliver a rousing speech.

“One day, I saw her standing at the balustrade of the veranda with outstretched arms,” her doting aunt wrote. “She said, ‘I’m practicing being Joan of Arc. I have been reading about her, and someday I am going to lead my people to freedom just as she did.’ ”

The idealistic little orator was Indira Priyadarshini Nehru, the only child of Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru. As Indira Gandhi, she would become one of the most powerful and best-known women of the 20th Century, serving a decade and a half as prime minister of the world’s second-most populous nation.

But in realizing her schoolgirl dream, this determined, steel-willed woman with an intense, brooding gaze and a chinchilla streak of white in her hair succeeded by only half.

Like Joan of Arc, she led her people, and she was gratefully christened Indira Amma--”Mother Indira”--by many of her country’s most desperate and destitute. But she also took independent India into the darkest time of its existence, the 18-month Emergency of 1975-77.

“Her legacy is a sort of continuous ruin; she did more than anyone else to destroy institutions in India,” author Arun Shourie said when asked to assess her impact. Shourie lost his job as a newspaper editor in 1982 after exposing a suspicious $200-million government contract involving Gandhi’s son, Sanjay.

“The fundamental point is that she didn’t believe in anything,” Shourie said. “Oh, she believed India should be strong. But she believed in no norms, only in the expediency of the moment.”

A decade ago, on the bright, clear morning of Oct. 31, 1984, what was known as “Indira Raj”--Indira’s rule--came to an abrupt and tragic end. At the sprawling walled compound at 1 Safdarjung Road in New Delhi where she lived, Gandhi rose and had a simple breakfast of milk and fruit.

Her first engagement, scheduled for 8:30 a.m., was a taping for Irish television with Peter Ustinov. There was a delay in setting up the equipment, and at 9:10, a restless Gandhi, shod in black sandals, left the house and started down a paved pathway toward her office.

As she reached the shade of a teak tree, at a spot now marked with glass flowers, two men assigned to protect her, Sub-Inspector Beant Singh, who had a .38-caliber revolver, and Constable Satwant Singh, armed with a 9-millimeter carbine, made their move.

Together, they fired 30 shots. Nearly all pierced the light-orange sari Gandhi was wearing.

She was rushed to the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, where she received 28 bottles of blood but to no avail. About 2:30 that afternoon, doctors pronounced her dead.

An era had ended in India’s history, one summed up in the sycophantic yet apt words of Congress President Dev Kant Barooah, “India is Indira, and Indira is India.”

Many of her acts have outlived her--often, observers and political scientists say, with baleful consequences.

During her reign, Gandhi increasingly ignored the country’s bicameral Parliament, which had been designed as the keystone of India’s Westminster-style system, and centralized power in her inner circle. Subordinates in the prime minister’s office became the superiors of even members of the Council of Ministers.

Judges were tightly subordinated to politicians’ whims and menaced with transfer if they did not listen. The chief ministers of Indian states, once-powerful figures with their own independent power bases, became Gandhi’s puppets.

The Indian National Congress, the patriotic movement to which her father and grandfather Motilal Nehru had been so devoted that the large Allahabad home where Indira grew up served for a time as its headquarters, became little more than her handmaiden.

“I heard her say, ‘My father was a statesman. I’m a politician,’ ” noted Congress spokesman Vithal N. Gadgil, who was her minister of state for defense production.

Official venality and lack of accountability, the bane of contemporary Indian public life, took root and flourished during Indira Raj, though their seeds antedate Gandhi’s two terms as prime minister in 1966-77 and 1980-84.

“Corruption started eroding into the political system seriously around Mrs. Gandhi’s time,” said H.K. Dua, editor of the Indian Express newspaper. “The nexus between business and politics, and the increasing influence of money on politics, became stronger.”

These days, some members of the current Congress government are suspected of wrongdoing or neglect in scandals involving large sugar shortages, payoffs for petroleum contracts and the biggest securities scam in the country’s history, to cite just three examples. Yet no one has been “brought to book,” as Indians say.

The courts remain so cowed by politicians that in Punjab, the chief minister’s grandson and his friends can, according to recent reports in newspapers, molest women with impunity, even using their police bodyguards to procure their prey.

It was quite different before Indira Raj, when, for instance, Nehru’s oil minister, Kesho Dev Malaviya, was forced to resign because of allegations that he solicited a 10,000-rupee bribe.

If Americans in the 1990s are suspicious of politicians, Indians have become positively cynical. For people who spent their formative years under Gandhi’s imperial style of leadership, it left deep and indelible traces.

“It’s been one steady decline since she came to power,” said Amrik Singh, former vice chancellor of Punjabi University in Patiala.

Like the protagonist in a Greek tragedy, Gandhi’s hubris was her own undoing. To challenge the radical Akali Dal Party, which had humiliated the Congress in 1977 to take control of Sikh-populated Punjab, she fostered the rise of Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale, an advocate of Sikh separatism who became far more extremist than the Akalis. To wipe out the monster she had created, Gandhi ordered the army to attack the Golden Temple, the holiest of Sikh shrines where Bhindranwale had holed up with his armed followers.

Her “Operation Blue Star” caused a blood bath, and to avenge it, two of the Sikh policemen assigned to protect Mrs. Ghandi gunned her down.

For purely political reasons, she also packed the voter lists in Assam and brought down Farooq Abdullah’s non-Congress government in Kashmir. Both of those frontier areas, like Punjab, became homes to stubborn insurrections or roiling unrest.

“All these are her creatures,” Shourie contended.

If political beliefs and practices are encoded in chromosomes, Indira Raj should have turned out very differently. It is true that her father recognized autocratic tendencies in himself. But as the first prime minister of independent India, in 1947-64, Nehru took painstaking efforts to nurture its young institutions.

“I remember as a schoolchild being taken to the Lok Sabha (lower house of Parliament),” Shourie said. “I saw Panditji (Nehru) sitting there while opposition members spoke, carefully taking notes. After four hours, he got up, and patiently answered the questions of people who were obviously his intellectual inferiors.”

On Jan. 24, 1966, 20 months after her father’s death, Gandhi became prime minister. She was 48. Her husband, Feroze Gandhi, no relation to India’s most venerated activist for freedom and justice, Mohandas K. Gandhi, had died of a stroke in 1960.

Timid and retiring when she served as her widowed father’s official hostess, Gandhi was tapped for the premiership by the party barons of Congress because she seemed docile. It turned out, she ended up outmaneuvering the “Syndicate” of provincial satraps, and made Congress into a political tool for herself and her sons Sanjay, who died in a 1980 crash of his stunt plane, and Rajiv, who became prime minister after her death. Rajiv was assassinated in 1991.

It is no easier for Indians to be as neutral about Indira Gandhi than it is for Americans who lived through Watergate to be coolly analytical in assessing Richard Nixon. She is now blamed for much, but her career may also have coincided with trends inevitable in a young democracy and a diverse land such as India: centralization of power, the subordination of party to elected leaders and erosion of old ideals.

In 1969, when the Old Guard ordered her kicked out of the Congress for “indiscipline,” Gandhi was able to coax most Congress members of Parliament to side with her, splitting the party. The subordination of Congress to her person became so complete that today the party is known as Congress-I--”I” as in Indira.

The quintessence of Indira Raj began at dawn on June 26, 1975. Gandhi had been found guilty by a judge of campaign malpractice, a verdict that meant she was supposed to be deprived of her seat in the Parliament. A grand alliance of non-Congress parties throughout India had also coalesced against Gandhi, blaming her for corruption, inflation and other ills, and demanding that she leave office.

She responded by arresting opposition leaders and having a state of emergency proclaimed that suspended civil rights, imposed censorship and led to the imprisonment without trial of about 150,000 critics or foes.

One of those jailed in a crowded, fly-infested Delhi jail cell was noted journalist Kuldeep Nayar.

“She’s the one who for the first time used government machinery for political purposes,” Nayar asserted. “She bugged the opposition’s telephones, used state intelligence to gather information for her own ends.”

Unexpectedly, for reasons that are still debated, Gandhi lifted the Emergency in January, 1977, and called elections that not surprisingly were a disaster for her and her followers. The left-wing Janata Party ended three decades of uninterrupted Congress rule.

In 1980, the “Indira wave” crested back to power after voters grew frustrated over the Janata government’s squabbling and impotence. James Manor, editor of a study on the office of India’s prime minister, was in Delhi for Gandhi’s comeback, and got a jolting insight into her “deep personal need to rule.”

“Minutes after learning that a huge election victory was assured, a Scandinavian journalist innocently asked her how it felt to be India’s leader again,” Manor recalled. “Visibly shaking with anger, Gandhi responded ferociously through clenched teeth, ‘I have always been India’s leader.’ ”

Stormy Reign

1966--Indira Gandhi, daughter of independence leader Jawaharlal Nehru, is sworn in as the first woman prime minister in India.

1969--In November, the Congress party splits, with Gandhi forming her own party--the Congress-I.

1971--As Pakistan breaks apart, India recognizes its eastern wing as a new country, Bangladesh, and Pakistan attacks on India’s western frontier. The Indian army marches into Bangladesh. On Dec. 17, the Pakistanis surrender.

1975--On July 26, a national emergency is proclaimed in India. For the first time since independence, press censorship is imposed, and thousands of Gandhi’s foes are jailed.

1977--The emergency ends. Congress-I and Gandhi suffer humiliating defeats in general elections.

1980--The “Indira wave” returns as Gandhi and Congress-I sweep back to power in national elections.

1984--The army invades the Golden Temple in Amritsar, Punjab, to stamp out Sikh separatists. On Oct. 31, Gandhi is slain by her Sikh guards.

Compiled by Times researcher AMITABH SHARMA in New Delhi