Sri Lanka’s Galle literary festival closes

Jan 23, 2012 (LBO) – Curtains came down on the five-day long Galle Literary Festival on Sunday with discussions on obsessive love, war and Indira Gandhi taking centre stage. Biographers Nayantara Sahgal and Katherine Frank shed light on the iron lady of South Asia, the iconic Indira Gandhi’s political career and how she exercised power during her rule as India’s Prime Minister following the death of Lal Bahadur Shastri in 1966.

She believed she was following in her father’s footsteps but in fact she was doing the opposite and departing from the democratic path Nayantara Sahgal, the author of the book Indira Gandhi: Her Road to Power said.

Sahgal, the first cousin of Gandhi and winner of the Commonwealth Writer’s Prize for Eurasia (1986) has written many books on the Nehru-Gandhi family.

The book Indira Gandhi: Her Road to Power deals with Gandhi’s rise to power and her flawed and ruthless style of governance.

Biographer Katherine Frank says her fatal flaw was that she didn’t have faith as her father did in the democratic institutions even though she had a craving to be a democrat.

Katherine Frank’s book Indira: The