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from father to daughter. Barely three days after Jawaharlal’s death in 1964, Congress leader Lal Bahadur Shastri approached Indira and said, ‘
Ab aap mulk ko sambhal leejiye
(Now you take over the responsibility of the country).’ The belief ingrained in Indian culture that the right of first refusal lies with the son or the daughter in a succession plan permeates Indian politics as well. Katherine Frank writes in
Indira: The Life of Indira Nehru Gandhi
that other Congress leaders also approached Indira mainly because, being Jawaharlal’s daughter, the issue of her candidacy had to be clarified first. The invitation to Indira to assume prime ministership was apparently made out of courtesy rather than a serious desire to see her at the helm of the country’s affairs. The actual succession battle was between Lal Bahadur Shastri and Morarji Desai. But, had the grieving Indira taken up the offer, Congress leaders might have had to accept her decision. Backed by Congress president K. Kamaraj and the syndicate, Shastri was eventually the Party’s unanimous choice. On the evening of 1 June 1964, the day the decision was taken, he called on Indira again after visiting Jawaharlal’s cremation site. Once again, he suggested to her that she become prime minister even though the fact was that, at this stage, he was in no position to make such an offer to her. The next day, when he rose to speak in Parliament after acting prime minister Gulzarilal Nanda proposed his name as party leader, Shastri first lauded Indira and said he looked forward to her ‘continued association with us’. He went to the extent of saying that it was imperative to ‘have a Nehru in the Cabinet to maintain stability’, and promptly offered her the position of minister of information and broadcasting.
    One and a half years later, when Shastri died, Kamaraj and other Congress leaders decided to make the forty-eight-year-old Indira his successor. Kamaraj succeeded in persuading all the other candidates, except Morarji Desai, to withdraw. During the vote in Parliament, the scales were tilted decisively in Indira’s favour. She received 355 votes against Desai’s 169. Zareer Masani, in his book
Indira Gandhi: A Biography
, talks about how an otherwise-harsh critic of Indira’s, her paternal aunt Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit, former governor of Maharashtra and member of Parliament (MP) from Phulpur in Uttar Pradesh, issued a statement: ‘We Nehrus are very proud of our family. When a Nehru is chosen as prime minister, the people will rejoice.’ On 24 January 1966, Indira was sworn in as prime minister of India. The dynasty had established strong roots within the Party; Indira would only nurture it further.
    Some records indicate that Nehru was not in favour of Indira being promoted by the Party. On 2 February 1959, when she was formally elected president of the Indian National Congress, Jawaharlal had disapproved of the move. Not only was he doubtful of Indira’s political abilities, he was also worried about the impression her elevation would give, writes his sister Krishna Nehru Hutheesing in her book
Dear to Behold: An Intimate Portrait of Indira Gandhi
. Jawaharlal had said that he ‘would not like to appear to encourage some dynastic arrangement. That would be wholly undemocratic and an undesirable thing.’ However, journalist Kuldip Nayar writes in his book
India: The Critical Years
, published in 1971, that many senior Congress leaders of that time—including Kamaraj, S. Nijalingappa and even Shastri—thought Jawaharlal had Indira in his mind as his successor.
When Shastri was home minister I had occasion to talk to him on various matters. Once I ventured to ask him: ‘Who do you think Nehru has in mind as his successor?’ ‘His daughter,’ Shastri said without even a second’s pause, as if he had already pondered over the problem. ‘But it will not be easy,’ he added. Referring to this observation, which appeared in my book
Between the