India, a land where personality cults spring up overnight, is struggling to find a pedestal on which to put its assassinated leader Indira Gandhi. 

In the year since her murder last Oct. 31, the woman once portrayed by a leading painter as a Goddess has become mainly a face looking out from old election posters. 

 The swift fall of Prime Minister Gandhi from public memory moved the respected Times of India newspaper to comment this month that the “deindiralsation of Indira seemed to be in progress. 

For many of her ardent sup porters the final indignity came last month during the Punjab state election when Gandhi’s name was mentioned only briefly in campaign speeches. Campaign posters also studiously avoided showing her at the scene of the crisis which claimed her life. 

The campaign was a far cry from last December’s national poll when crude drawings of Gandhi’s blood-spattered body, alleged to have been shot down by two Sikh bodyguards, helped elect her son Rajiv. 

 “Who could have imagined that her name would become almost a taboo even for us and so fast,” the Times quoted a former Gandhi aide as saying. 

 Memorial services likely to be attended by hundreds of thou sands of people are planned on Oct. 31 but some of Gandhi’s sup porters take a cynical view of the remembrance ceremonies, 

“Of course when her death anniversary comes around we would all be bowing at her Samadhi (memorial) giving big speeches but we’d all be careful about what we say, the aide said. 

As Indira Gandhi’s Impact bas receded there has been renewed Independence leaders, Mahatma Gandhi and Indira’s father Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first Prime Minister. 

During the past year, as Indira Gandhi’s memory has dimmed, there has been a spate of articles and academic conferences which have examined, almost unanimously with Favour, the contribution to Indian history by the Mahatma and Nehru. 

“Nobody falls to notice how assiduously the young Prime Minister (Rajiv) skirts all references to Mrs. Indira Gandhi at his Press conferences, how quick he is to hark back to Grandfather Jawaharlal,” the Times said. 

Memory 

Aides of the present Prime Minister hotly dispute there has been a deliberate effort to gloss over his mother’s achievements. They say that if there is a campaign against her memory it is just a continuation of the vendetta carried out by critics during her lifetime. 

Indira Gandhi’s opponents Judge her 15 years of rule with a three-year gap in the period from 1966 to 1981 as among the most turbulent in independent India.

It included for Gandhi the high of the 1971 war with Pakistan which led to the creation of Bangladesh and the lows of the 1975-77 emergency rule and her three years in the political wilderness until her re-election in 1980. 

After the 1971 war, artist M.F. Hussain painted her as the Hindu goddess of war, Durga.

Civil Aviation Minister Jagdish Tytler, a close friend of Rajiv Gandhi, credits Indira with holding the nation together during the 1960s and 1970s and laying the basis for the modernisation policies Introduced by her son. 

“Today if it is possible for us to go forward economically, morally and nationalistically, it is because Mrs Gandhi created that Image,” Tytler said. 

During her life Gandhi’s opponents often accused her of pursuing short-term alms and acting only to retain power, a charge that has followed her to the grave. 

Janata Party leader Madhu Dandavate, who was part of the opposition that unseated Gandhi from 1977 to 1980, is not surprised that she has faded so quickly from public memory. 

“When one compares Mrs Gandhi with her father one cannot escape the historical lesson that those politicians who are guided by value judgements preserve their honour in the long-term,” he said. 

Political scientist Ashis Nandy. who teaches at New Delhi’s Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, thinks that unlike Nehru and Mahatma Gandhi, India’s only woman leader will become a sort of myth because of her com plexity. 

“She will be converted into a national monument, kicked upstairs from being an historical presence,” he said. 

 But one of Indira Gandhi’s closest personal friends is quietly confident that the strength she showed in leading India while alive will protect her memory in death. 

Pupul Jayakar, who knew her for 30 years and organized this year’s Festivals of India in the United States and France, recalls Gandhi often saying to her: 

“I’m a survivor, Pupul.—”Reuter