Srinath Raghavan unpacks Indira Gandhi's controversial legacy during the Emergency years

Mint

20-07-2025

I am a child of the Indira Gandhi era. Through my formative years, she was Prime Minister. Until 1977, it never occurred to me that men could aspire to this position. Consider what an amazing reversal this is in a patriarchal, misogynistic society—that a little girl thought that only women could lead her country. Of course, this was always with the chorus of Indian male voices saying derisively, 'That woman (this or that) …" Even back then, I knew that tone was reserved for women—women drivers, women managers, women entrepreneurs and, of course, women Prime Ministers. No matter, as that little girl, I still wanted to be 'that woman."
This book is not about 'that woman." The title, Indira Gandhi and the Years that Transformed India, is misleading. What it is, is a history of India from 1966-84.
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The prologue sets the stage, moving between Indira Gandhi's biography and a potted history of the first one-and-a-half decades after independence. In the first chapter, Srinath Raghavan traces the simultaneous decline of the Congress party's dominance and Gandhi's attempt to consolidate her position. It accounts for the economic crises of the mid-1960s and narrates the backstage machinations within the Congress, when Gandhi proved to be not such a 'gungi gudiya" (or 'dumb doll," as the socialist leader, Ram Manohar Lohia, called her) after all. The fractured mandate of 1967, the split in the Congress party and the 1972 election move the story forward. The detailed reconstruction of all of the attendant intrigue and controversy is quite remarkable.
The outstanding chapter in the book—no surprise, given that Raghavan is a military historian—is the one on the 1971 war. The chapter weaves together the emerging story from East Pakistan, the international context and Gandhi's domestic challenges. If you had not read about this critical year in Indian history, these pages would be the place to start. It segues from the end of the war to the growing power of the Prime Minister and the way the argument began to build for the important constitutional amendment that was passed in 1977—the 42nd Amendment—and remains contentious. This Amendment added the words 'Socialist" and 'Secular" to the Preamble; added a part on Fundamental Duties of citizens; strengthened the Concurrent List at the expense of the State List; limited judicial review of laws; extended the duration of President's Rule to one year and that of the Lok Sabha to six years. Some of this was rolled back in subsequent amendments.
Raghavan pays a great deal of attention to economic policy in this period, including bank nationalisation and the constitutional debates on property rights. It is interesting that the only mention of India's first nuclear tests in Pokharan in 1974 is this: '…the prime minister even burnished her Caesarist credentials by testing a nuclear device to rapturous applause." Given the way in which Raghavan reconstructs policy debates and decision-making, it would have been interesting to read more but perhaps, he chose to leave this out because others, such as Itty Abraham, George Perkovich, Kanti Bajpai and Bharat Karnad, have written extensively on this.
The next chapter is devoted to Jayaprakash Narayan's movement that culminated in the Janata Party experiment. What came to be known as the JP movement was a mobilisation of student protests with the support of some opposition parties. They gained enough momentum to give the government pause and this became the pretext for the imposition of Emergency.
Raghavan reserves his most colourful descriptions for this period—'The polar night of the emergency" and 'The dark and gnarled stretches that led to this decision"—almost as if we might miss the point that these were bad times. To use Indian newspaper headline language, there is virtually no one that Raghavan does not 'slam" in the Emergency chapter—from Indira Gandhi to Nani Palkhivala ('Such are the vagaries of the liberal conscience that Palkhivala not only agreed to appear for Indira Gandhi…") to Justices Y.V. Chandrachud and P.N. Bhagwati. The chapter on the Emergency recounts in parallel the programmes that the government promoted vigorously, the manoeuvres of an imprisoned and underground but coalescing opposition and, also, what came to be called the 'excesses" of Sanjay Gandhi's Youth Congress.
Raghavan writes about the one-and-a-half years of the Janata Party government under Morarji Desai and Charan Singh just as unsparingly, making note of every intransigence, foible and egotistical assertion. The final chapter takes us from Gandhi's return to power in January 1980 to her assassination in October 1984. This is a period in which India was witness to growing unrest in three regions—Assam, over citizenship; Punjab, over the demand for a separate Sikh state; and Kashmir, where the push-pull of Centre-State relations was fomenting the conditions for the militancy that would come.
Describing the world in which Gandhi came of age politically, the author writes, '…a wilfully cultivated aura of ruthlessness—as distinct from a highly developed instinct for power—was apparently her shield in an arena of politics shot through with gendered mores: one in which a woman prime minister could casually be called a 'gungi gudiya'... or a 'chokri' (derisive term for girl)." For all this gender sensitivity, in a nod to other writings on these years, he mentions five male authors but misses Nayantara Sahgal and Sagarika Ghose's work. When one later reads sexist phrases (most likely inadvertently used) like '…she did succeed in molesting the constitution" and 'More pregnant was her claim" (about the Congress mandate in 1971), it is hard to overlook them.
That Raghavan is not a fan of Gandhi is made abundantly clear in the book, not just because the calculus of her political actions leads us to a critical appraisal but because his use of adjectives and adjectival clauses makes sure we know this. Writing about her first assumption of Prime Ministerial office, we are told about 'her shallow puddle of experience" and then the word 'Caesarist" appears over and over, sometimes as description and sometimes as explanation of other things. I would have enjoyed coming to a conclusion on my own based on the very detailed narrative he constructs, but then these were my formative years and perhaps unfamiliar readers need the signposts.
Raghavan writes in his Prologue, '…this book was written in a time when a new political configuration was crystallizing in Indian democracy. It would be idle to suggest that my political views on this recent turn have not shaded this historical account… I have sought to write a history that 'supplies the antidote to every generation's illusion that its own problems are uniquely oppressive.'" He is also writing at a time when chunks of Indian history are literally being erased from our textbooks. This is a good book for those trying to fill in the blanks about a period to which everyone now refers but ever-fewer people remember first-hand.
What we hear on official channels is a version where successive Indira Gandhi governments accomplished nothing but the oppression of today's rulers whose role in resisting the Emergency is lionised. Was Gandhi good or bad, the best or the worst? In our fact-free, nuance-free times, Raghavan's book makes an important contribution by writing in detail about the decision-making process on a number of policies—from the first stirrings of an idea or a crisis to the various points of view as they emerged and crystallised to the implementation and consequences of that idea. This lets us see that nothing about government is easy, even for 'Caesarist" Prime Ministers!
On economic and foreign policy, and even on the question of constitutional amendment, despite his own disapproval, Raghavan lets us see someone who asks for opinions and considers them thoughtfully even though she ultimately follows her instinct. In fact, one of the strengths of the book is the dispassionate reconstruction of policy processes and outcomes. On bank nationalisation, for example, Raghavan says that while later writing has judged this as a politically expedient decision by Indira Gandhi, he also writes about its actual impact in giving the state access to more funds and taking the reach of the banking sector into rural India.
Overall, I am not sure how accessible this book is for the general reader. Within the chapters, the narrative sometimes jumps around, almost requiring you to know this era to follow. The language is sometimes difficult and sometimes chatty. Reading about these years always feels personal to me. To encounter the years of one's life in another person's words is a strange experience because you want to jump in and say, 'I don't remember it like that" or 'I also remember this". Despite this personal connection, this book did not draw me in.
What I missed was more quotations from Gandhi's own letters and notes. In a book titled 'Indira Gandhi," I missed her voice. The writing has a personal quality because the author has such a strong opinion of the protagonist-who-isn't and yet, it is impersonal (not dispassionate) as a textbook would be. This may be to your reading taste or not. That diminishes neither the solid historical research nor the astounding detail in which historical events are described in the book.
Swarna Rajagopalan is a political scientist and peace educator.
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