Indira’s India: Through the cracks

Few figures have commanded the kind of prolific attention Indira Gandhi has. She remains, arguably, one of the most written-about individuals in the republic’s history. Yet, for all the textual abundance, our collective understanding of Indira’s India remains fractured. There exists an archive teeming with material, but still incapable of offering a cohesive account of the socio-political transformations that unfolded under her rule.

It is into this dense terrain that Srinath Raghavan ventures with his latest work, Indira Gandhi And The Years That Transformed India. “Four decades after her passing, the popular memory of Indira Gandhi is a bricolage of her ‘socialist’ policies and concern for the poor; her steely handling of the Bangladesh crisis; her dictatorial rule during the Emergency; and her courage all the way through, including in the face of her eventual assassination.” What emerges, through this new work, is a studied reckoning of a figure whom both critics and admirers have long viewed through a “Machiavellian lens.”

Raghavan identifies the period of her rule as a fulcrum in India’s transformation from a postcolonial polity into the complex, often contradictory democracy we inhabit today. His lens is wide-angled, scrutinising the granular detail of her policymaking while keeping sight of the shifting tectonics of global politics, Cold War alignments, economic upheaval, and the urgent questions of nationalism and statehood. By the time of Nehru’s death, the old order, sustained by the symbolic capital of the nationalist movement and the temporary patience of a newly decolonised citizenry, stood increasingly exposed to the harsh realities of political fragmentation, economic inertia, and social impatience. And it is against this backdrop of growing public restlessness and institutional fragility that Indira Gandhi assumed power.

Nearly two and a half decades into Congress’ dominance, the architecture of the Indian state remained astonishingly brittle. Beyond the symbolic heft of the railways and a handful of state monopolies in certain sectors, the state was skeletal — a bureaucracy thin on both capacity and reach, and a welfare system more aspirational than operational. The Nehruvian dream of planning and redistribution was increasingly at odds. Touted as a panacea for food insecurity, the Green Revolution radically reshaped Indian agriculture, but not without cost. While yields improved and national grain stocks grew, the uneven benefits of this transformation entrenched new hierarchies.

The power structures were indispensable to the political consolidation of Indira Gandhi, especially in the post-1967 era when she embarked on a systematic purge of her intra-party rivals and reconfigured the Congress into a personalised vehicle of centralised authority. By the mid-1970s, the cumulative effects of dirigiste overreach were unmistakable.

The Indian economy was already in the throes of crisis. The international oil shock of 1973, compounded by pervasive shortages, crippling inflation, and administrative paralysis, had spilled over into the political sphere, creating a perfect storm of economic anxiety and political vulnerability. The Congress party, too, was in turmoil. She severed ties with the Syndicate and deployed the rhetoric of socialism. The spectre of insurgency loomed large in the countryside, with Naxalite uprisings laying bare the cracks in the postcolonial developmental consensus. As Parliament moved to enshrine the term “socialist” into the Constitution during the Emergency, Gandhi’s government was simultaneously pushing regressive fiscal measures. Her final term in office, from 1980 until her assassination in 1984, was marked by a decisive shift away from redistributive politics.

Among the book’s most compelling parts is its engagement with the policy debates that animated the Indian state during a period of ideological flux, particularly those surrounding inequality, redistribution, and the architecture of planned development.

Of particular importance are the Planning Commission’s internal documents from the 1960s and early 1970s, which reveal a state apparatus deeply engaged with the structural questions of poverty and distribution. Haksar, in particular, emerges as a key architect of this ideological reframing. Drawing from Nehruvian socialism but far less hesitant in the use of state coercion, he saw redistribution as not merely a developmental necessity but a political imperative.

Raghavan anchors this period in the deeper constitutional drama unfolding between the three branches of government — executive, legislature, and judiciary. It was under Indira’s shadow that this subterranean tension erupted into open conflict. The transformation, he notes, occurred at two interlinked levels. First, the institutional arrangements that determined the distribution of power and function among political agents, whether Parliament, the Prime Minister’s Office, or the judiciary, were fundamentally altered. Second, and perhaps more consequentially, the normative fabric that underpinned democratic governance — the rules, procedures, and unwritten codes of restraint — was frayed.

Eschewing the reductionism of personality-centric history or linear cause-and-effect logics, Raghavan reconstructs a multi-layered matrix. There are, to be sure, minor quibbles, particularly towards the book’s closing chapters. But these are faint ripples on the surface of an otherwise commanding and lucid work, hardly enough to dull the force of its insights or the elegance of its execution.