Srinath Raghavan’s Indira Gandhi and the Years That Transformed India, unpacks the crises and compulsions that shaped Indira Gandhi, and reshaped India in the turbulent 1970s
As the innocence, idealism, and expectations of the formative years gave way to the cynicism, grim realism, and inevitable disappointments of the subsequent decades — amid creeping domestic disarray and an increasingly unfavourable international situation for India — Indira Gandhi found herself at the centre of a political whirlpool. Srinath Raghavan’s Indira Gandhi and the Years That Transformed India (Penguin Random House India) seeks to understand the forces and factors she was up against and how she attempted to cope with these challenges.
According to Raghavan, it is in this interaction that one finds the nub of what would go on to shape India’s political culture, institutional trajectory, political economy, and the very project of nation-building. Neither hagiographic nor hamartographic, the book draws largely on secondary sources and presents its subject with a tone of detached objectivity.
The crisis of the old order
Antonio Gramsci is perhaps the most frequently quoted thinker when it comes to periods of transition and their attendant ambiguities and dislocations. While quoting him — “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born” — Raghavan underscores the threefold crises afflicting the old order after Nehru: a crisis of hegemony, a crisis of representation, and a crisis of governance.
The new idea of hegemony, premised on popular consent rather than coercion, soon faced a reality check, as coercion came to be used to suppress secessionist insurgencies in the Northeast and the spread of Naxalism closer to the mainland. This dynamic operated in tandem with the crisis of representation: a new sociology of politics gave rise to new permutations and combinations that, in turn, steadily eroded the support base of the Congress, the grand old party.
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According to the author, these twin crises ultimately culminated in a full-blown crisis of governance, exacerbated by a floundering economy, looming starvation, and the humiliating reality of a ‘ship-to-mouth’ existence. Raghavan sums up the fallout of these crises succinctly: “The political and technocratic assurance of the Nehru era now seemed a mirage.” It is against this bleak backdrop of national despondency that the author seeks to understand the dynamics of the policies and programmes Indira Gandhi came to be associated with, as well as her own psychodynamics.
The Iron Lady: Myth or reality
Details about Indira Gandhi are widely known, and the book would not have suffered much had the author chosen to dispense with them. Be that as it may, the book does a fairly good job of analysing how she became what she became. Indira, especially after the 1971 War, was often hailed as decisiveness personified. However, Raghavan presents copious examples to show how tentative she could be on many momentous occasions, how deeply insecure she often felt, and how incrementally her worldview evolved.
To begin with, although she was acutely aware of her special status within the Congress as Nehru’s daughter, there was nothing particularly decisive about the battles she fought with the Syndicate to emerge as the party’s undisputed supremo, even if the party under her came to look very different from what it once was. Her self-doubt, vulnerabilities, and fear of defeat at the hands of powerful Congress leaders — manifest vividly in her epistolary exchanges with friends and well-wishers — enhance the book’s readability. Similarly, in relation to the 1971 War, Raghavan underlines her ‘tentative and improvisatory’ handling of the developing situation, notwithstanding the fact that “in the aftermath of the war, she would be credited with exceptional foresight, impeccable timing, and unerring judgement.”
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In fact, opposition parties at the time criticised her stance as vacillating and complacent, equating it with her father’s alleged pusillanimity in acquiescing to the Chinese occupation of Tibet in 1950. Furthermore, her decisions regarding the abolition of the privy purses, the nationalisation of banks, and her leftward turn stemmed less from ideological conviction and more from circumstantial compulsion. But there is no gainsaying the fact that the military victory over Pakistan in 1971 endowed her with a sense of charisma, and her electoral triumph in 1972 gave her a sense of invincibility.
Her charisma, and the countdown to Emergency
German sociologist, historian and jurist Max Weber argued that charisma — in order to be sustainable — needs to be institutionalised. Quite to the contrary, after her bruising battles with the old guard of the Congress, in which she emerged victorious but in a Pyrrhic sense, and following the creation of Bangladesh, Indira Gandhi found herself in a position to win the popular mandate on her own.
This had significant implications for both the Congress party and the institutions of governance. The party became an extension of her larger-than-life persona. She sought to connect directly with the people, and to that extent, she was able to undermine the party’s relevance and its instrumentality.
Institutionally, Raghavan shows how the shift from the Cabinet Secretariat to the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) led to a concentration of power. This shift also entailed the erosion of parliamentary norms and conventions, with fewer checks and balances in place. With the opposition having been defeated decisively in the 1972 elections, Raghavan details how she then attempted to take on the judiciary.
Under normal circumstances, these developments may not have posed major problems. However, when viewed in relation to the triple crises mentioned earlier — and compounded by an unfavourable international environment, including the oil shocks and spiralling inflation, along with widespread strikes, protests, and an vociferous clamour for change — these pressures culminated in the imposition of the Emergency.
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In analysing her persona, Raghavan argues that Indira Gandhi found herself up against an entrenched order that was patriarchal, patronising, and gendered — challenges that were not easy to overcome. That she was able to overcome them must be credited to her. And the fact that she made a victorious political comeback in 1980, after a brief interlude, remains a momentous episode in Indian political history.
The years that transformed India
Raghavan argues that the decade of the 1970s had a transformational impact on the way India evolved. First, the evolving and still-fledgling political culture — informed by the rules of political fair play — tended to become rough, brazen, and hostile as electoral democracy became more competitive. Second, Indira Gandhi reasserted the powers of the central executive, especially in relation to the states. Third, her personal aggrandisement at the expense of the party led to a loss of its vitality and resilience.
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Fourth, a new governmental rationality — shaped by expert knowledge on poverty and population, enabled by deficit financing through the financial and banking system, and resulting in targeted programmes and policies for poverty alleviation — began to replace Nehru’s broader developmental paradigm. Fifth, dynastic politics, once taboo, came to be lapped up with glee by other political parties as well. Sixth, her advocacy of anti-poverty policies majorly shaped the Indian state’s policy imagination. Seventh, Raghavan takes pains to stress that the economic reforms of 1991 did not represent a fresh beginning on a clean slate. Indira Gandhi had indeed tried to liberalise the economy. It’s a different matter that her efforts fell short.
Raghavan is impressive when he steps away from detailing events and instead takes readers on an analytical journey. He is no sucker for myths, hearsay, or anecdotes, and in fact delights in debunking them. His writing is crisp and sharp, with no wasted words. His fondness for uncommon and not-so-common vocabulary might occasionally send readers to a dictionary, but all told, this is an engaging book that relies on sources, develops its arguments at a thoughtful and unhurried pace, and draws connections across themes to understand India during some of its most challenging decades.
