Indira Gandhi and the Years that Transformed India

Today is the 50th anniversary of the Emergency. The author of this book was born in 1977, the year the 20-month Emergency, imposed by Indira Gandhi on June 26, 1975, was lifted. After his graduation he served in the Indian army for seven years before going off to get a PhD in history.

Raghavan, who is no relation to this reviewer, didn’t have to live through it, and that gives him the distinct advantage of greater objectivity than those who remember it. It was nasty as nasty gets because the police was given a free hand. There were a lot of forced sterilisation of men.

But these are well known facts and it is good that Raghavan avoids that much travelled road. Instead, his book is a detached historian’s view of the years that Indira Gandhi was prime minister. That also makes it a book for professional historians, not lay people who are used to racier accounts.

The period from 1969 to 1977 saw Indira Gandhi rise from being a ‘goongi gudiya’ (dumb doll, as a prominent opposition leader called her in 1967), to Empress of India as The Economist magazine called her in 1972, to ’Indira is India and India is India’, which is how the Congress president described her in 1975, and then to being flung out of power in 1977 and then, amazingly, becoming prime minister once again in 1980 to, hold your breath, being assassinated in 1984 — that too by her own bodyguards.

By any reckoning, it was a remarkable career and Raghavan does very well to describe it calmly. The matter-of-fact tone of the book is a major attraction of the book. It is notable for the absence of excessive adjectives.

Raghavan describes the politics of the 1970s in the only way it should be understood, namely, the struggle for supremacy between the executive, legislature and judiciary. This struggle had been going on quietly since 1951 but in the 1970s it erupted violently.

Crux of the problem

The book also brings out the crux of the problem, albeit indirectly. This is that a market-friendly economy needs to use a certain amount of coercion. The Emergency with its excessive use of it pushed India far into the other side, in an equivalent of no sex please, we are British, to no coercion please, we are Indian. It raised the consciousness about rights disproportionately.

Like lava that engulfs everything in its way, the eruptions of the 1970s permanently altered the constitutional landscape of India. Harassed by the opposition and told to be a good girl by the courts, Mrs Gandhi simply annihilated the lot of them on June 26, 1975. The backdrop was that on June 12, the Allahabad High Court had voided her 1971 election to Parliament.

Raghavan does well to remind us that it was none other than Nani Palkhiwala who appeared on her behalf saying there was no legal or constitutional reason for her to resign.

His comment on this is laconic: “Palkhiwala was a curious choice.” That’s all. Palkhiwala was, as it happens, one of Mrs Gandhi’s fiercest critics on constitutional matters.

Equally strangely, Raghavan doesn’t have very much to say about Mrs Gandhi as a person. Her personality had a huge impact on governance processes.

He also lets Sanjay Gandhi, her younger son and heir apparent, off very lightly.

Raghavan has also neglected to discuss her administrative changes, possibly because these were at the instance of Sanjay.

But they did change India because he had little time for process and was focused on outcomes. Legality was a nuisance for him.

Two major changes

There were two other enormous changes Mrs Gandhi brought about. One was her embrace of the Left in the ’70s, which has been adopted by all parties. The other was her politically strategic embrace of secularism in the ’80s, which, too, has been adopted by all parties, even if definitions differ.

Raghavan discusses the first very adequately, putting the blame almost entirely on her eminence grise, PN Haksar. But he almost entirely avoids the second. Even here it’s her officials who are made to bear the cross.

Overall, Raghavan has done meticulous research into the record, which is where the real value of this book lies. The referencing is exhaustive and, reading through, all the old dramatis personae come back to life.

How many people, for example, remember Mohan Dharia or NG Goray or AN Ray? Or, for that matter, even Sanjay Gandhi?

Lastly, a word to the publishers. They should remove all the ‘advance praise’ for the book because these blurbs are embarrassingly fulsome. The book stands on its own and Raghavan’s scholarship scarcely needs these hosannas.

The author of this review translated Volume One of BN Tandon’s personal diaries, which were in Hindi, into English. Mr Tandon served in the PMO from 1969 to 1976. The book is called ‘Prelude to the Emergency: PMO Diaries, Vol 1’

Title: Indira Gandhi and the Years That Transformed India

Author: Srinath Raghavan

Publisher: Penguin Random House

Price: ₹900

Published on May 23, 2025