Podcast: Indira Gandhi’s disastrous legacy that defined Indian democracy

Fifty years ago, India was in the early throes of the Emergency, declared by Prime Minister Indira Gandhi on June 25, 1975. A thoroughly Orwellian moment by any standard, the Emergency – the suspension of democracy – was justified by Gandhi as the only way to save democracy.

It was both deadly and farcical: as prisons filled to their cyclone-wire-topped brims with opposition politicians and the state inflicted brutal violence on dissenting forces, Gandhi’s government ensured that even parliamentary discussion of censorship was censored.

The Emergency constitutes only one part of Srinath Raghavan’s definitive work on India’s only female prime minister, Indira Gandhi and the Years that Transformed India. As Raghavan discusses in this episode of Past Imperfect, this authoritarian interlude was the product of broader trends: Gandhi’s inexorable concentration of executive power and the dismantling of political norms. The prime minister hardly acted alone in these processes. As Raghavan makes it clear, it is possible to understand events like the Emergency only by taking into account the unscrupulous, self-serving, and flagrantly illegal actions of a whole host of political actors, both in the Congress Party and in the opposition. When democracy died in India, it died from a thousand cuts, many inflicted by its avowed supporters and sworn protectors.

Was Gandhi a populist, an authoritarian, or something else? Raghavan invites us to see her regime as Caesarist, a mode of politics where a leader concentrates power by trying to forge a direct connection with the people, trampling over the norms and niceties of parliamentary democracy. She was no committed democrat: writing to the violinist Yehudi Menuhin, Gandhi stated, “Democracy is not an end. It is merely a system by which one proceeds towards the goal” (her words are eerily similar to those offered by a modern-day autocrat, Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, who once quipped that democracy was a tram which one disembarked after reaching one’s destination). Nor can she be classified as a socialist. While she certainly sympathised with the poor, Gandhi’s policies, like the nationalisation of banks and industries, had much more to do with interparty struggles in the Congress. She could be thuggishly brutal against organised labour.

Gandhi was a force to reckon with, but she was also a product of her times. Raghavan portrays her as the central character in India’s long 1970s, a period of voluble economic and political crises – and one which was joined at the hip to global events. Gandhi adopted Caesarism as a way to confront the diminishing hegemony of the Congress Party and the fast-accelerating competitiveness of Indian democracy. International crises, like the two oil shocks of the 1970s, shaped her economic policies.

Raghavan’s analysis of those economic policies is particularly innovative. Gandhi began her prime ministership with a stillborn policy of liberalisation, switching tracks to full-throated socialist rhetoric and the tightening of regulatory infrastructure. But the sheer economic malaise of the early 1970s, spiraling inflation, and the disastrous results of certain nationalisation projects – like that of the wheat trade – gave her pause. Gandhi let her economic advisors, including Manmohan Singh, carefully dial back regulation and tackle inflation. Others, like BK Nehru, pointedly asked her if the Indian government’s quest for social justice had simply resulted in “equality in poverty.” By the end of her life, she warmed up to industrialists like Dhirubhai Ambani. While cautioning that Gandhi was hardly a neoliberal, Raghavan does see her prime ministership as an important precursor to India’s tryst with economic liberalisation.

Gandhi’s political legacy was far darker. From an early age, when she served as president of the Congress Party, she displayed “disregard bordering on disdain for the rules and norms of parliamentary government”. Once she became prime minister, she helped scatter those rules and norms like so many leaves in the wind. She had no qualms about discarding established precedents, turbo-charging briefcase politics, and intimidating rivals. This was most apparent in her long-running feud with the judiciary, which she perceived as the biggest obstacle towards her consolidation of executive authority. With Gandhi’s approval, lackeys suborned judges and unhesitatingly committed perjury. Gandhi, meanwhile, darkly hinted of a “foreign hand” at work amongst those who opposed her, either through the courts or the ballot box.

When the Allahabad High Court invalidated her election in June 1975, Gandhi’s fear and paranoia compelled her to completely dispense with rules, norms, and democracy itself. Even before declaring the Emergency, she began planning to round up and imprison opposition leaders. The president, Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed, coolly signed off on Gandhi’s ordinance for the Emergency without written approval from the cabinet, as required by the Constitution. It was a fitting prelude to a period of lawlessness, violent coercion, and executive overreach. During the Emergency, Gandhi toyed with the idea of a presidential system for India, one modeled on Charles de Gaulle’s Fifth Republic in France. Congress sycophants went further: one advocated doing away with “all this election nonsense” and simply appointing Gandhi “President for life”.

After the Emergency was lifted, opposition leaders eventually mounted a successful rout of the Congress under the banner of the Janata Party. Raghavan highlights the divisions and delusions of Janata leaders, factors which eventually enabled Gandhi’s comeback. Jayaprakash Narayan was hardly alone in expressing disillusion with democracy and a striking disregard for elected legislative bodies. As the JP Movement grew, he deceived himself into believing that Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and Jana Sangh allies had shed their communalist and majoritarian instincts.

Under the fragile Janata tent, secular forces mostly kept their misgivings against the Sangh under wraps; when those misgivings burst into the open, they helped hammer the final nails into the coffin of India’s first non-Congress government. Indira Gandhi’s last term in power was marked by disastrous policy in Assam, Kashmir, and Punjab and her violent end on the lawns of 1 Safdarjung Road.

Raghavan’s book makes for sobering reading. Written in a measured and thoroughly even-handed way, it nevertheless pronounces a severe verdict on a prime minister who, today, remains wildly popular and revered in some quarters. Moreover, Raghavan points to how the short-sightedness, personal ambitions, and blind loyalties of so many other leaders accelerated the breakdown of political norms in the long 1970s – and the rise of new political forces. Janata leaders like Morarji Desai, Charan Singh, and Jagjivan Ram exhibited “the grotesque ambition of elderly men who saw a belated opportunity to shin up the greasy pole”. Shielded by Jayaprakash Narayan, the Jana Sangh, the predecessor of the BJP, skillfully widened its pan-Indian appeal and helped bring majoritarian politics in from the cold. In this podcast episode, Raghavan turns to one of the concluding lines of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet to sum up this collective disfigurement of Indian democracy: “All are punished.”

Indira Gandhi and the Years that Transformed India is part of a broader crop of recent books on democratic crises around the world, past and present. Raghavan is careful to note dissimilarities between the long 1970s and post-2014 India. Nevertheless, his book is essential reading for all Indians who worry about the health of Indian democracy today.

Dinyar Patel is an associate professor of history at the SP Jain Institute of Management and Research in Mumbai. His award-winning biography of Dadabhai Naoroji, Naoroji: Pioneer of Indian Nationalism, was published by Harvard University Press in May 2020.

Past Imperfect is sponsored and produced by the Centre for Wisdom and Leadership at the SP Jain Institute of Management and Research.