Politics & Power Quote by Indira Gandhi

Power, in Indira Gandhi's telling, isn’t a chessboard; it’s a pyre. By calling her “games” political and then yoking them to Joan of Arc’s execution, she reframes what critics might dismiss as calculating maneuvering into a moral trial staged in public. The line works because it compresses two ideas that normally clash: the cold implication of “games” and the heat of martyrdom. She admits to strategy while insisting the price of strategy, for her, was perpetual punishment.

The Joan of Arc comparison is deliberately volatile. It borrows a globally legible icon of female defiance crushed by authority, turning Gandhi’s opponents into inquisitors and her own endurance into sanctified suffering. Subtext: if you see me as ruthless, understand I have been forced into ruthlessness by a political culture that punishes women for governing at scale. It’s also a shrewd inoculation against critique: who wants to be cast as the one lighting the match?

Context matters because Gandhi’s career was defined by high-stakes gambits that triggered backlash: centralizing power, crushing dissent, navigating war and secessionist violence, and the lasting shadow of the Emergency, when democratic norms were suspended and civil liberties curtailed. The metaphor doesn’t erase those actions; it tries to overwrite their interpretation. “Perpetually” is the tell: it asks history to read her not as a singular leader accountable for specific choices, but as a figure trapped in an endless cycle of persecution. It’s self-mythmaking with a hard edge, designed to make political survival look like spiritual endurance.