MOSCOW: In her office at the Russian State University of Humanities, Dr Indira Gazieva smiles when the question she had been expecting for a while finally arrives. Is her first name just a remarkable coincidence? Or did she actually get it from an Indian Prime Minister? “I was born in 1963 in Taskhent,” she says. “That is now the capital of Uzbekistan, but was then in the Soviet Union. It so happened that a couple of years earlier, in 1961, India’s then Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru had visited Tashkent. He had also brought along his daughter Indira. And she captured everyone’s imagination. My parents named me after her.”
Thirty-four years after her death, the only Indian woman to become its Prime Minister still lives on in Russia, via statues, books and a bunch of women named after her. At one point, the level of adulation she commanded in the Soviet Union was so high that ‘Indira’ was one of the most preferred names for girls in the country. Dr Gazieva is far from the only one. “A few years ago, the Indian Embassy had organised a function and had invited people named ‘Indira’ to attend it,” says India’s Deputy Chief of Mission G Balasubramanian.
“More than 40 people named Indira had turned up for that.” Indira’s daughter-in-law Sonia Gandhi recently visited Moscow to open a photo exhibition about the former and revealed, during her inaugural address, that the former used to get fan mails from Soviet mothers who had named their kids after her. “Incidentally, many mothers in the Soviet Union named their daughters after her,” Sonia said. “In correspondence with one of them she wrote and I quote, ‘Indiratchka’ is rather long. My own family have always called me Indu which means Moon. Perhaps you could call your daughter Indutchka, which is easier to say”, unquote.”
While Dr Gazieva’s name is proof that Indira was already popular in the USSR even before she became Prime Minister, her popularity after her ascension to the top can be gauged from a short documentary made by the Films Division of India’s Ministry of Information and Broadcasting of her 1976 visit to the country. It shows thousands of people lining up the streets of Moscow with Indian and Soviet flags to watch her motorcade pass by. While her father Nehru tried to keep India neutral in the bipolar world that emerged after World War 2, it was Indira, who took the country firmly to the left of the Cold War divide, mostly motivated by how close neighbouring Pakistan had become with the US. During her three tenures, she visited the Soviet Union no less than nine times, making her a familiar figure to the people there. Her assassination in 1984 shook the Soviet Union as it did the world and her closest allies were the first to commemorate her, naming a park in her honour.
‘Ploshchad Indiry Gandi’ still retains its name and lies near one of the two metro stations that fans heading for the FIFA Fan Fest at the Moscow State University will get down at. And in one corner of that, a statue of Indira, sculpted by famous Russian sculptor Oleg Komov and erected in the wake of her assassination, still stands, waving to all her Russian admirers.