The World

In 1962, Franco invited Prince Juan and his wife to move into the Zarzuela Palace; seven years later, he asked Juan to swear loyalty to the Movimiento Nacional and declared him the heir, advising him to take the name Juan Carlos. Franco had another condition: the prince must raise his daughter Carmen to duchess. Juan agreed. Courtiers warned Franco that the prince was a secret liberal and louche libertine, but Juan Carlos treated Franco like an old king; the Caudillo trusted him. In 1968, the dictator, ageing and controlled by his daughter and her husband, handed over Spain’s last possession, tiny Equatorial Guinea, to Macías Nguema, a Fang witchdoctor’s son, who had seen his father murder his brother before being bludgeoned to death by a Spanish colonial official; his mother committed suicide; and he himself was mentally ill, a drug user, who had sought treatment in Spanish mental hospitals. At a meeting in Madrid to discuss the country’s future, he claimed that Hitler had meant to liberate Africa but had conquered the wrong continent. He often lost his thoughts during speeches, which voters interpreted as charming feyness, but soon after winning the first presidential election, he threw his foreign minister out of a window and embarked on a reign of terror of astonishing intensity. Seeing himself as the Unique Miracle and glorified with the motto ‘No other God than Macías Nguema’, he organized mass executions of around 50,000 victims, sometimes drowned out by loud English pop music. He kept the entire treasury in suitcases in his house, looting the tiny oil-rich country and killing or exiling a third of the population. Equatorial Guinea was so tiny that Nguema ruled with the help of his family, who were the only people strong enough to destroy him.^*

The Spanish succession went more smoothly. On 20 November 1975, Franco died, and Juan Carlos succeeded him as king, promising ‘I swear to God and on the holy Gospels to … remain loyal to the principles of the Movimiento Nacional’ and making the dictator’s daughter Carmen the duchess of Franco.

No monarch in Europe had enjoyed such power since 1918. Far from being a Francoist, the thirty-seven-year-old Juan Carlos, a compulsive hunter of big game and blonde women, was a democrat. For six years, he carefully guided Spain to democracy, sacking the Francoist premier, appointing in his place an ex-Francoist turned democrat, Adolfo Suárez, who in June 1977 won the first real elections for forty years. Suárez’s new constitution converted Juan Carlos into a constitutional monarch. But the king’s achievement would be tested: in November 1978, a military coup – Operation Galaxia – was foiled, but the officers, believing that Juan Carlos could be controlled, planned another putsch to restore the dictatorship.

In India, it was Indira Gandhi who launched a coup.

INDIRA AND SON

The world’s biggest democracy was becoming a hereditary dynasty: Indira Gandhi now promoted her favourite son, Sanjay, for the third generation of Nehrus.^*

While her elder son Rajiv was a serene Indian Airlines pilot with an Italian wife, Indira adored her haughty second son Sanjay, an impulsive, spoilt and authoritarian princeling with a will to power that equalled Indira’s own. A playboy who raced cars and piloted planes, he wanted to be an Indian industrialist, founding a car factory that survived on government favours. Indira worried about him and was fascinated by him. ‘Rajiv has a job,’ she wrote, ‘but Sanjay doesn’t … He’s so like I was at that age – rough edges and all – that my heart aches for the suffering he may have to bear.’

Indira’s imperious style, the rise of Sanjay, Congress’s corruption and the oil crisis provoked strikes and riots in the country. By 1975, all these crises had converged. Court cases exposed the seamy cash payments of Indira’s henchmen and used technicalities to challenge her own election victory. Morbid and suspicious, trusting no one, seeing a ‘deep and widespread conspiracy … forces of disintegration … in full play’, Indira now overtrusted Sanjay, to whom this ice-cold potentate wrote preposterous ditties: ‘Sanjay, ferocious being / … Whose judgements almost always bite.’

In June 1975, a legal challenge citing electoral corruption invalidated her election. Sanjay warned her of a ‘conspiracy’ and told her not to resign. ‘You know the state the country was in,’ she said. ‘What would have happened if I hadn’t been there to lead it? I was the only one who could, you know.’