Indira Gandhi & the Years that Transformed India - by Srinath Raghavan - A Review

Comments on the book

"Indira Gandhi and the Years that Transformed India" - by Srinath Raghavan.

The book is a deep and well done analysis of the rise to power by Indira Gandhi in India and its lasting impact on that nation and world politics too.

Hers was an ascent marked by a disdain for the oligarchic control of the old guard on the Executive through the party machinery and resources, a total disregard for conventions and sometimes even the law of the land and its Constitution, and an unfettered power grab that could only be described as Caesarism. It was enabled by important socio-political factors that include: larger number of voters, particularly the poor and the labor class, participating in the elections; larger number of the previously ignorant middle and lower classes becoming aware of what the rich enjoy and how they, the poor, are exploited, fooled with false promises, and kept poor; social unrest induced by overall economic decline and lowering standards of living for the milddle and lower classes.

Even reading through the prologue of the book should give one a better understanding of the crisis that has dawned on the US, crisis being defined beautifully right at the start through a quote that describes it as consisting "precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born."

The old order of party driven politics and control by party bosses may have come to an end here in the USA thereby marking the ongoing death of the old, but the new cannot be born at least as a normal child unless law and order prevails and the state returns to Constitutional democracy true to the promises of its founders with power returning to the people from the new oligarchs and the super rich and the bigots backing them. The parallels between Indira Gandhi's rule and what obtains today in the US permeate the entire book, although the author makes no attempt whasoever to draw any such parallel and that optic is of this reader. Here is a great example of a sentence: "the price of surmounting this crisis [caused by trying to stack the Parliament, Cabinet, and Supreme Court with loyalists] via a Caesarist style was the thinning out of serious political talent, and the emergence of a sycophantic symphony that accompanied the prime minister's imperial rule."

The saving grace for India was that the courts by and large fought for their independence curbing what could have turned into a dictatorship. Also, Indira Gandhi's commitment to help the poor was genuine; she also saw them to be her real power base. What goes on here in the US, however, appears to be a curse on us for the laughs US had on India and Indira's emergency.The motives are not to uplift the poor and with that the nation, but to line pockets of vested interests.. Thus, whether this dying of the old engenders the birth of a healthy baby or of a totally grotesque one for the long haul depends heavily on democracy being reasserted along with the rule of law as administered impartially and fearlessly by our courts. And, it depends most importantly in the electorate becoming more knowledgeable and not being driven by demogoguery, false promises, and racist scapegoating. There are indeed some lessons for USA coming from the experience (details of which from the book I have omitted) of the largest democracy of the world which stood by the democratic form government despite the serious challenges it faced. India's status as a major economic power is testimony to the wisdom of that choice.