You've never been very generous, you Westerners, toward us Indians. You should have seen that things were changing, albeit slowly. You should have seen that something was happening. Not much, but something.
When you look at the beginning of the actual war, it's not hard to recognize that the Pakistanis were the ones to attack.
I always stayed married to my husband! Always, until the day he died! It's not true that we were separated!
I'm told [ Zulfikar Ali] Bhutto is ambitious. I hope he's very ambitious; ambition may help him see reality.
Do you know that, until recently, poor people brought children into the world for the sole purpose of making use of them? But how can you change, by force or all of a sudden, an age-old habit? The only way is to plan births, by one means or another.
When I'm not governing my country any more, I'll go back to taking care of children.
I'm not interested in one label or the other - I'm only interested in solving certain problems, in getting where I want to go.
For me it's absolutely the same - I treat one and the other in exactly the same way. As persons, that is, not as men and women. But, even here, you have to consider the fact that I've had a very special education, that I'm the daughter of a man like my father and a woman like my mother.
I grew up like a boy, also because most of the children who came to our house were boys.
At no point, at a very important point: that of having convinced the Indians that they can do things.
In the face of such a threat, they had no other choice but to throw themselves to the far left. But now that the people are conscious of our efforts, now that they see us resolving problems, the communists are losing strength.
A revolution is already taking place in India. Things are changing here already - peacefully and democratically. There's no danger of communism. There would be if we had a rightist government instead of mine.
Until today the rights of people have always been put forward by a few individuals acting in the name of the masses. Today instead of people no longer want to be represented; each wants to speak for himself and participate directly - it's the same for the Negroes, for the Jews, for women.
Politics...You see, it depends on what kind of politics. What we did during my father's generation was a duty. And it was beautiful because its goal was the conquest of freedom.
I examine the consequences later, when a new situation arises and I then face the new situation. And that's it.
[My mother] was the oldest of two sisters and two brothers, and she grew up with her brothers, who were about her age. She grew up, to the age of ten, like a wild colt, and then all of a sudden that was over. They had forced on her her 'woman's destiny' by saying, 'This isn't done, this isn't good, this isn't worthy of a lady.'
If I'm happy, I look happy; if I'm angry, I show it. Without worrying about how others may react.
I've always been able to do what I wanted. On the other hand, my mother was. She considered the fact of being a woman a great disadvantage. She had her reasons. In her day women lived in seclusion - in almost all Indian states they couldn't even show themselves on the street.
This is also something I've learned from experience. Didn't they perhaps give us the vote because we went too far?
We couldn't be everywhere, we couldn't see everything, and it was inevitable that some things would escape us.
If you only knew, for instance, how much I enjoy being a grandmother! Do you know I'm twice a grandmother? Rajiv and Sonia have had a boy and a girl.
Unfortunately even in India there are people who talk like that. And they're the same ones who say, 'We should never have accepted the existence of Pakistan. Now that it exists, it ought to be destroyed.' But these are only a few madmen who have no following among the masses.
It was the very fact that no one ever imposed anything on me or tried to impose himself on the others.
In India you don't find propaganda against Pakistan. During the war there was a little of it, naturally, but even during the war we were able to control it. In fact the Pakistanis were astonished by this. There were prisoners in the camp hospitals who exclaimed, 'What? You're a Hindu doctor and you want to cure me?'
Whether when I was a child and fought the British in the Monkey brigade, or when I was a girl and wanted to have children, or when I was a woman and devoted myself to my father, making my husband angry. Each time I stayed involved all the way in my decision, and took the consequences. Even if I was fighting for things that didn't concern India.
