Hell Hath No Fury by Rosalind Miles

carried out with complete success. Not for nothing was Gandhi sometimes compared to the Indian goddess Durga, who rode on a tiger.
    In 1971 India had carried the day, but victory was followed by a period of acute economic instability. In 1975, after a series of massive demonstrations, Gandhi declared a state of emergency, imprisoned thousands of political opponents, and imposed harsh censorship of the Indian press. Her growing unpopularity was exacerbated by the ambitious commercial plans of her younger son, Sanjay, and his project to control the spiraling Indian population by the enforced sterilization of men, for which each was to be compensated by a free transistor radio. She was defeated in the general election of 1977, and a coalition of parties, the Bharatiya Janata (BJP), came to power.
    In 1980 factional fighting among her political opponents enabled Indira Gandhi to regain power. But it could never be glad, confident morning again. That same year Sanjay died in a plane crash. His mother was now preoccupied with mounting political problems in the Punjab. In June 1984, seeking to crush the secessionist Sikh movement led by the militant Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale, she ordered the storming of the holiest Sikh shrine in Amritsar, the Golden Temple (Operation Blue Star), in which Bhindranwale died and the temple was badly damaged. In October 1984, Gandhi was assassinated at her home by two of her Sikh bodyguards. Her elder son, Rajiv, became prime minister in December 1984, and in 1991 he was assassinated by a Tamil Tiger suicide bomber (see Chapter 4).
    Reference: Katherine Frank,
Indira: The Life of Indira Nehru Gandhi,
1998.
    ISABELLA OF FRANCE
    â€œThe She-Wolf of France,” Queen of England, b. 1292, d. 1358
    Isabella, a French princess given in marriage to King Edward II of England, earned her wolfish nickname for raising the war that cost her husband his throne and his life. Her military prowess owed much to her lover, Roger de Mortimer, Earl of March, but her skill in winning the propaganda war against the king was all her own.
    The marriage in 1308 had been ill-starred from the first. Although a beauty, the fifteen-year-old Isabella held no charms for the openly homosexual Edward, who treated her with neglect, if not contempt. Although he performed his dynastic duty and fathered a son on her, the king centered his life on his male lovers, which provided Isabella with an opportunity she was not slow to take.
    In the religious Roman Catholic temper of the time, homosexuality was regarded as a mortal sin, and it was also a capital offense under the law of the land. Not for a king, however, who was above the law. Edward’s behavior thus alienated many of his subjects, who could not have said which they hated most, Edward’s gay lifestyle or his blunders in running the country, squandering money on his favorites while England’s overseas territories were being reannexed by the French. Playing upon this, Isabella secretly won to her side most of the powerful men of England, including the dashing Mortimer, later Earl of March, who became her lover.
    Isabella then traveled to France to raise an army, trading her teenage son in marriage in return for an army of mercenaries, and returned in 1326 to invade England, with Mortimer at the head of her troops. Drawing near London, she bombarded the city with slogans claiming she had come to end the tyranny of her husband the king, and, although a Frenchwoman born and bred, to champion the good old English freedoms of ancient days.
    Isabella played the battered-woman card to great effect in her campaign, declaring Edward had sworn “that if he had no other weapon, he would crush her to death with his teeth.” But, she loudly complained, “the King carried a knife in his hose to kill the Queen.” Reference to what Edward carried in his hose (i.e., in his pants) was a crude attempt to stir up hatred for him on the grounds of his homosexuality, and it