Interview: Srinath Raghavan on what we get wrong about the 1970s and Indira Gandhi

A conversation about Raghavan's new book that looks back at the 'long 1970s,' which he calls the hinge on which the contemporary history of India turned."

Note: I started this newsletter way back in 2022, after leaving Scroll.in to take up a post as diplomatic spouse and full-time dad in Egypt. We still have a year to go in Cairo – if you’re coming through anytime soon please do give me a shout – before we move to Europe in the summer of 2026.

For now, India Inside Out remains a personal project rather than a monetised publication attached to a newsroom or think tank (although I’m always open to ideas!). And it is taking another break, courtesy Baby #2, who came early in July.

I’m still on paternity leave over some of August (still attempting to stay away from the headlines, even as Trump decided to blow up the US-India relationship), and so this week I’m sending out another interview I’ve conducted for the Center for the Advanced Study of India at the University of Pennsylvania, where I’m Managing Editor and a Non-Resident Visiting Scholar. It’s a long one this time, but worth clicking through to the end, given the subject and the interviewee…

How well do we understand Indira Gandhi’s legacy? The former prime minister’s momentous years in power carved deep lines into India’s political landscape—but what shape did they leave behind?

In Indira Gandhi and the Years that Transformed India (Yale University Press, 2025), historian Srinath Raghavan reexamines this turbulent era through a wide lens—challenging entrenched narratives with new archival material. Raghavan, a Professor of History and International Relations at Ashoka University, focuses on what he calls the “long 1970s”—a pivotal stretch from Gandhi’s rise in the mid-1960s to her assassination in 1984. The “long 1970s,” he writes, “were the hinge on which the contemporary history of India turned, transforming the young postcolonial country into today’s India.”

The book reframes major events—bank nationalization, the 1971 war and the birth of Bangladesh, the Emergency, and its aftermath—within the context of global economic shocks and shifting political norms. Rather than fixating on Gandhi’s motives, Raghavan foregrounds the outcomes: how her attempt to move leftward on the economy paradoxically opened the path to liberalization, and how the authoritarian turn of the Emergency was enabled by a deeper institutional breakdown that the Janata government ultimately failed to reverse.

I spoke to Raghavan about the lessons of the “long 1970s,” his Caesarist reading of Gandhi’s rule, why the Emergency didn’t turn into a lifelong dictatorship, and what he’s working on next.

Rohan: You write in the acknowledgements that Ramachandra Guha encouraged you to turn toward contemporary political history, but I wanted to just ask about where this book came from and whether you saw it as a different challenge than your previous work or an extension of some of the research you were doing on 1971?

Srinath: It's really a bit of both. When I was working on the book on the creation of Bangladesh in 1971, which was a project I was researching toward the end of the 2000s, it became clear to me that there were private papers, various kinds of documentary collections at the Nehru Memorial Library (as it then used to be called) which were becoming available. So, the P.N. Haksar papers had come on stream. I was perhaps among the first to access those for my doctoral work, but there were other things as well. For instance, the Charan Singh papers were becoming available to scholars.

At that point, my work on the Bangladesh crisis in 1971 was to write a global history of the creation of Bangladesh. I wanted to situate the creation of Bangladesh and the emergence of a new country there in 1971 in the context of the global currents of the time, and to show how those shaped what was usually seen as a subcontinental event. While I was working on that, it became clear to me that there were many more sets of materials available even on Indian politics, on political economy, and other things, but that it was also important to rethink the Indian political history of the 1970s in a similar global framework.

Over the last decade, there has been quite a lot of new, interesting work that has helped us understand that period. Somewhere around 2011-12, I decided that when I was done with my work on the international history of South Asia, on which I had at least two or three more projects lined up, I would turn to working on Indian political history and political economy in the 1970s.

Interestingly enough, that project actually took its first concrete shape at CASI when I was a visiting scholar in spring 2012. Devesh Kapur was then director, and I had long discussions with him, and got to access the phenomenal library services at Penn Van Pelt-Dietrich and others. Devesh also pointed me to some archival collections, available in the Penn archives, which were actually quite interesting. He also very kindly gave me a chance to see many documentary collections from the World Bank, which he had worked on as the official historian of the bank. I actually wrote a chapter while I was at CASI for a book that Ramachandra Guha was editing called Makers of Modern Asia, in which I have a chapter on Indira Gandhi. That was the down payment on this book. It took me a long time to cash out the whole project, but I think I owe both Devesh and CASI a debt as well as to Ram Guha.

But as I said, it took me a while because I had at least another three books to get done before I could turn to this. In 2013, the National Archives in India started making various kinds of papers available from the 1970s. That declassification made available a very wide range and interesting set of materials, which allowed me to rethink many of the assumptions I had even when I was working on the paper at CASI.

Rohan: Outside of the materials that become available, you mention in the book that while there has been lots written on Indira Gandhi, more of the recent work is concentrated on the Emergency, and you sought to expand the frame beyond that…

Srinath: The Emergency naturally tends to attract a lot of attention, partly because it's this dramatic, traumatic interlude in Indian political history, in the history of Indian democracy. So, there ongoing debates on what the Emergency meant, how it shaped us, what came after and so on. But I felt that an excessive focus on the Emergency was distorting our larger understanding of the period because there was a sense that everything that happened before the Emergency was in some ways leading up to the Emergency. The Emergency then becomes a terminal point of a range of things—which is true, but also distorting.

What I wanted to do was get a grip on the larger period, both before the Emergency and after it; to try and understand what I call the “long 1970s”—a period in not just Indian history, but global history, running from 1967-68, all the way through to the mid-1980s. If you think about it in global terms, this is the period that begins with worldwide student and youth revolts and also a generational conflict and the Cultural Revolution in China. Then, in the early to mid-1970s, you have a series of interlinked economic crises. You could think of the Nixon administration's decision to get off the gold standard in 1971, which unhinged the entire framework within which exchange rates used to operate in international economy, and then the oil shocks of 1973 and another oil shock in 1979.

What we do know is that by the end of this period, the late 1970s to the mid-1980s, most historians tell you that even in advanced economies, we were moving away from the Keynesian consensus about economic management, to what came to be called neoliberal ideas. That is the broad arc within which all of this is playing out.

I wanted to situate Indian history in that arc and try and understand how this global context shapes the things that happen in India. Of course, Indian history in this period has its own specificities, but we must first place these dynamics in the context of those global currents, and then try and get a grip on India. The idea was to both bring to bear new materials and to craft new sets of questions and embrace new ways of thinking about what seemed like a familiar period in our history.

Rohan: Do you feel like you're addressing a gap on the academic side or on the lay understanding of this period, or some combination of both?

Srinath: I've asked myself that quite a few times as I was working through this book. Let me put it this way. My own intellectual, and to some degree professional identity—at least half of my professional identity—is that of a historian. I have a joint appointment between IR and history, so my instinctive tendency is to think like a historian. I think the questions that historians are most interested in are about change over time. But if you look at some of the best secondary scholarship available on this period, most of it is by political scientists, by people who studied constitutional law, and by economists. We have materials from the social sciences which are much stronger as opposed to materials by historians, partly because this is a new period, and Indian history, despite Ram Guha's example, still finds it difficult to move beyond 1947.

Postcolonial history is still a very nascent field, but you do have some historians like Gyan Prakash who wrote about the Emergency and brought to bear a longer-term historical perspective. So, there isn't much by way of what we would, in our trade, call historiography of the 1970s. There is a historiography of the Emergency, perhaps, but I didn't think that there was much more. There were some older biographies of Indira Gandhi, there were other kinds of studies—especially one I thought was very useful by P.N. Dhar, who was her principal secretary, and wrote a very reflective book.

This was the landscape of existing scholarly works. In a real sense, I had to transpose many of those things into terms a historian would try and understand the question, which is to say, "How did we get to this point? How do we explain significant change?" To me, that was at least as important as getting into debates about what is the nature of a certain political regime that the Emergency became. I don't deal with those questions, and I think it's fair to say that much of my thinking is very influenced by the existing materials. But I was trying to set it in a longer timeframe, and then try and explain what changed over this period and why.

Rohan: You mentioned that even when working on the chapter about Indira Gandhi, there were some assumptions that you found yourself rethinking. What were those assumptions?

Srinath: From the very beginning, I had a certain idea about how the global context of the 1970s impacted the Indian economy and a sense that the terms of how we understand the economic history of this period needs to be rethought considerably. For instance, there is a sense that the Indira Gandhi period in economic history reflects much higher levels of state control of the economy, dirigisme, socialism, call it what you will. But even as I was getting into this project, I had a sense that the impetus toward a much more state-driven, state-controlled economic order peters out by 1974, partly out of the pressures of the global economy. India has to resort to more conservative macroeconomic policies and some deregulation—which slowly start coming into play. You see that even before the Emergency, but during the Emergency it starts accelerating.

A lot of economists, like Dani Rodrik, Arvind Subramanian, and others, have written about how the 1980s reflect a pro-business turn in Indira Gandhi's thinking and policies adopted. I actually feel that you can see a lot of that working out even around the Emergency. When she comes back to power in 1980, there is a public reception in The Ashok Hotel in New Delhi, and the host there is Dhirubhai Ambani. You can actually see a photograph of them—and that tells you that the relationship between business and politics was changing. It's not a broad brushstroke story of saying that Indira Gandhi became pro-business altogether. There were still lingering concerns about existing big businesses and how to deal with them, but certainly there is a change, not just in terms of attitudes, but policies and approaches, which you can see from the mid-1970s itself.

Rohan: That takes us, naturally, to the idea of the “long 1970s.” My generation thinks of the 1990s—with liberalization and the Babri Masjid demolition—as the turning point that led to modern India, but you describe the long 1970s as the “hinge” that leads to the India of today. Tell us about that framing.

Srinath: There are many things that go into the making of any moment in history. Frankly, our vantage points change, so we tend to look for different points of origin. That is how history as a discipline develops. My view of the whole spectrum of post-colonial history of India would be that between approximately 1937-67, you had a 30-year period when you had the making of a certain kind of political system, a certain form of political economy, and a certain global orientation.

What is that political system? The period of Congress Raj, the complete dominance of the Congress Party at all levels of Indian politics, especially post-Partition. That continues until the fourth general elections of 1967, which is where my book really begins.

In terms of political economy, from the late 1930s onward, there is a move toward thinking about what postcolonial development will look like. A certain idea—planned economic development—comes into play. Again, I would caution against assuming this is socialism. In fact, this is very much capitalism. The Indian constitution aims to create a capitalist economy. I think it's very important to just say that flat out. Property rights are a fundamental right; that's as far from socialism as you can get. Regardless of the rhetoric of the times, the fact was that you wanted state-led capitalist growth. How do you create the conditions for that against the backdrop of a stagnant agrarian economy that has been underdeveloped through the colonial period? Planning was seen as the framework within which all of this would operate.

The third dimension is India's international orientation. I have worked on the Indian role in the Second World War, and I see that very much as the precursor to the international role that independent India comes to have—which is that even when you are a relatively weak player, you are looking to play an outsized role. The Second World War is the last of the phases when India operates as a sub-imperial power. Thereafter, it wants to get out of imperial control, it wants to be non-aligned—which is to say it doesn't want to commit itself to any alliances precisely because of this sub-imperial experience that it has had where you are conscripted for all kinds of causes you have not signed up for. Of course, there are new things happening like decolonization—India is amongst the vanguard countries—but there are others, like the Cold War. So, you have a certain political system, Congress dominance; you had a political economy of a mixed economy to be achieved via planning; and an international orientation, where pursuit of non-alignment is seen as a very important objective.

If you shift to the period from the 1990s, what you have is a political system which is much more fractured, where there is no single dominant party, let alone of the Congress variety. You have an economic political economy which is tilted very decisively toward liberalization, giving the private sector a more leading role, and embracing globalization. It's the opposite of what you were trying in the context of the first phase. Then you have an international order, where India still prizes strategic autonomy, but is nevertheless now much closer to the United States than it is to Russia or other kinds of powers.

The intermediate phase is where we must explain how we went from phase one to phase three. Now, of course, somebody coming to this question from an entirely different perspective, say, of social history, would look at a different periodization. But as a political historian, I think this is a good starting point for me.

Rohan: Turning to Indira Gandhi herself, you choose to engage with her through the frame of “Caesarism.” Why is that?

Srinath: I don't think that's the only frame to analyze Indira Gandhi. It is a conceptual framework that I found useful to get a fix on the particular style of politics that she inaugurates at a certain moment—approximately 1969 when she decides to break the Congress Party andcraft a different popular appeal.

Let’s talk about Caesarism as a concept and then we'll come to the Indian context. The idea of Caesarism refers to a certain kind of popular rule, where the ruler or the leader tries to bypass existing structures of the party, which is seen as an important mediating institution in 19th century thought particularly, or of various kinds of institutional checks and balances, parliaments, etc.—and tries to forge a direct appeal to the population and then claims to rule on the basis of what is called popular acclamation, or popular admiration for the ruler as the person who leads.

The idea of Caesarism in terms of modern political theory comes to the forefront in the mid to late 19th century. There's a lot of writing around this concept in different ways in the early 20th century as well. The reason I think this becomes important at that moment is because, in western countries particularly, democracy goes from being something only reserved for a few people who have the eligibility to vote to becoming something that is extended to the entire male adult population. It is about the massification of democracy.

What you then have is the emergence of new political figures who are charismatic, who want to use new modes of reaching directly across to the people—whether it's technology, new forms of organization, political style—and who claim power on the basis of public acclamation rather than that of parliamentary processes empowering them. Caesar himself was historically seen as a dictator, but a popular dictator. The first serious study of Caesarism is Marx's The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, which is in the mid-19th centuries, at the moment when universal adult franchise actually comes to start to work in the context of France.

In the first couple of decades of the 20th century, you see writers from across the political spectrum—Antonio Gramsci on the left, Max Weber in the center, and Carl Schmitt on the right—all of them think that electoral parliamentary democracy of the 19th century variety is giving way under pressures of democratic deepening or massification to something that looks very different. You have the emergence of leaders who can break the impasse that parties face when having to aggregate so many disparate constituencies with various kinds of interests. In fact, Weber, if you look at his writings even before the first World War, says that there is a constant thrust toward a leader who can command the confidence of a party. It's not so much the party who makes a leader, but the leader who makes a party. That’s the thumbnail history of the concept of Caesarism.

I found that entire literature a useful way of thinking about what is happening with the Congress Party post-1967, because what the Congress Party faces in 1967 is a similar crisis of representation. Because we've had universal adult franchise in India from 1951, we tend to think that Indian democracy is born fully formed. It isn't. If you look at the levels of electoral participation, the kinds of electoral literacy that existed at that point of time, it is something that people are learning as they go along.It's only really in the 1967 election that, for the first time, we see that significant social groups capable of mobilizing electoral bases pull away from the Congress Party.

That makes it much more difficult for the Congress Party to claim that it speaks for the entire nation. Its very poor performance in the 1967 election leads to a crisis within the Congress Party. After a turbulent couple of years, what you have is a decision by Indira Gandhi to actually break the Congress Party. But she then decides that what will have to work is her own personal appeal to the people, and the willingness to reach out to the people rather than relying purely on the party machinery, which in any case has been disaggregated under the impact of her own decisions.

What you have, therefore, is a move toward a Ceasarist model. There are two alternatives in the literature, and we can think about them. One is to simply think of it as charismatic politics, and the other is to use the term “populism,” which is a very common term these days. Neither of these really appeal to me.

The first is that charisma in modern politics is actually an ironic quality, because when we say somebody is a charismatic individual, I mean in the Webarian sense, typically you tend to assume that these people are seen as being endowed with some special qualities. But in democratic politics, charisma doesn't operate like that at all. Weber makes this very important point, that in democratic politics, charisma itself gets rationalized. When you have a highly competitive and fractured political system, once in a while you have this political leader who's actually capable of mastering that system and delivering extraordinary victories, and then people start attributing a degree of charisma to them. It's not as if people vote because they see you as charismatic, but they come to see you as charismatic because you've won those votes for whatever reasons. Charisma is a retrospectively endowed attribute rather than something people directly perceive. Charisma is therefore only one aspect of a Caesarist regime, it's not the sum and substance of it.

The reason I don't use the word populist is because I just felt it was too broad. It tends to be applied to a variety of regimes left, right, center, whatever you want. In any case, I just felt that democratic politics is, by definition, populist. It is based on the idea of popular sovereignty. At the core of democratic politics, the idea of populism—the people—is very much there, so it's not very clear to me that calling someone a populist is giving us that much more analytic specification on what we are talking about. Whereas, invoking this older idea of Caesarism, even if it seems somewhat unfamiliar to modern readers, I think was a more useful way for me of trying to specify what was distinctive about the style of politics that Indira Gandhi inaugurates from about 1969.

Rohan: How much of this distinctive style of politics do you think of as being deliberate from Indira Gandhi? One of the things the book does very well is to point out that whether it is bank nationalism, the Emergency, the 1971 war, there is a lot of improvisation in Indira Gandhi’s responses. It’s not all carefully planned out. Would the same be true for this Caesarist shift?

Srinath: There is a tendency when we think about political leaders, particularly political leaders who have wielded as much power as she did, to believe they are powerful political actors. The task of historical or political explanation is then restricted to understanding what they were thinking about. What was Indira Gandhi thinking about when she broke the Congress Party? What was Indira Gandhi thinking about when she went for bank nationalization? What was Indira Gandhi thinking about when she imposed the Emergency?

But the intentions of even the most powerful political actors in any system cannot explain what the outcomes were. As historians, outcomes are much more important. Even when we say a simple thing like “Indira Gandhi did this,” there are two ways in which we can understand what that word means: that she wanted to do this and did this, or that she actually accomplished something else.

The example of bank nationalization fixes this point very well. Much of the literature on bank nationalization repeatedly tells us that it was done for political reasons, and that it was because she wanted to show that she has progressive leftist credentials, and it was a way of outranking the more conservative aspects of the Congress Party. It is true that her intentions were political in making the decision, but what we learned from all the materials that are now available is that, having done that, they then moved toward constructing what I call a fiscal-monetary machine. It's a phrase and a concept that I borrow from the work of Anush Kapadia.

The construction of that machine was an extraordinary rewiring of the entire Indian state. In fact, the entire substructure of the Indian political economy undergoes a dramatic shift. The Reserve Bank's official history of that period, which is written by the bank's historians, quite rightly says that this is the single most important economic decision taken in independent India's economic history. Now, the decision to undertake bank nationalization was not taken for economic reasons, but it ended up having consequences that were so long-term and so important that right down to the present, we are dealing with the consequences of that particular move.

We are only doing half the work if we try and understand what the intentions were. We also have to understand how they interacted with broader structural contingent forces of the time in order to produce outcomes, which actually matter a lot more. So, mine is at least as much a consequentialist as an intentionalist reading of Indira Gandhi.

I want to foreground that because too much of the debate tends to get personality-centric, precisely because we misunderstand what a personality-centric reading means. If you're going to only focus on what she thought that she wanted to do, then we are never going to get beyond her particular intentions to the extent that they are transparent—and often they are not. For me, therefore, the important things were the consequences, and the consequences of what she did at the timewere absolutely important in shaping the longer-term trajectory of the Indian political system. She wanted to have more of what she thought a state-led socialist economy would look like, but ended up producing something very different.

It was a combination of something like half-hearted liberalization with a turn toward targeted welfare schemes, both of which are very much a part of the Indian landscape today, and a certain kind of political style where the party apparatus becomes secondary to the leader. As a recent example, Boris Johnson in Britain was ousted by members of the Conservative Parliamentary Party. The Parliamentary Party is supposed to act as a subtle check on the prime minister and the executive. But when you go into the Caesarist world, that entire relationship gets overturned—and that was important. It’s important not just to understand national politics in India as it were today.

A lot of people keep trying to make comparisons between Mr. Modi and Indira Gandhi and so on. Actually, look at the states. You will see that political parties after political parties are operating in this mold, where you use various appeals by the leader in order to give the party greater footing rather than the other way around. All of these were changes, which I don't think she necessarily intended quite this way. But when they got assimilated into the context of the time then produced outcomes, which I think were quite orthogonal to her intentions, had lasting consequences. It's a classic story of how agency and structure comes together to produce outcomes in ways that are quite unpredictable.

Rohan: You have said that what is interesting is not necessarily that Indira Gandhi set out for the Emergency to happen, but what conditions permitted it to happen. I think especially in light of what happened in South Korea just a few months ago, to take one example…

Srinath: Much of the discussion on the Emergency, even today, tends to be centered on why Indira Gandhi chose to impose the Emergency. What were her considerations? Was she looking to protect her own office after it had been brought into question by the Allahabad High Court verdict? Or was it that the popular protests against her took a certain turn with leaders like Jayaprakash Narayan calling for the Armed Forces not to obey orders, etc.? So, is it Indira Gandhi doing it to protect herself? Is she doing it to defang an Opposition, which was going after her? Or how much should we give credence to what she says—that there was a serious internal threat to India?

Those debates will continue because they are about the intentions of an individual. New evidence will hopefully come to light, or it may not. But I think that doesn't get us very far to understanding how the Emergency came about because, as I said, the intentions of Indira Gandhi are not the only way we have to understand how the Emergency happened. At the end of the day, however powerful a prime minister is, she was supposedly operating within a system that had various centers of power, of responsibility, of authority—from her party to parliament, to the judiciary, to democratic accountability by the press, etc. How did all of that crumble so quickly, and allow this authoritarian moment to emerge?

If you want to understand what caused the Emergency, rather than why Indira Gandhi declared the Emergency, then we should bear in mind that those are two different analytical questions. I want us to make the distinction because when we take a causal explanation saying, “what conditions permitted the Emergency, or rather the absence of what conditions allowed the Emergency to happen?” then we see that the game is to be understood in a somewhat different way. That's where I come up with a structural explanation,to which we need to tack on certain other considerations.

What is the structural explanation? Every actor in a political system is shaped by at least two attributes of the system. The first is what you would think of as the differences in terms of roles and functions of various kinds of agencies which constitute that system. In the context of a parliamentary democracy like India, that would be the executive, the legislature, the judiciary. There is a differentiation of functions and there is a differentiation of capabilities or powers—a balance.

The second is what may be called the constituting rules of the game. Parliamentary democracy, like any other kind of collective activity, is structured by certain rules. Those rules are not only written down in constitutions, they also come up as a result of informal understandings, norms, principles, things that you develop over a period of time. If you want to play cricket, you have to play it by the rules. If you start changing the rules of the game, it will soon stop looking like cricket. The game may continue, but in other ways of playing.

If you take both of these attributes, my argument in the book is that the Indian political system underwent a systemic or structural change along both these system-wide components even before the Emergency was declared. You have a very strong accretion and shift of power toward the executive, away from the party, away from parliament, and away from the judiciary. There's a steep tilt in the balance of power, which happens between approximately 1969 to 1973. It happens with the party because Indira Gandhi breaks it up. But what really cements her hold over the party is the extraordinary rebound of Congress' political fortunes in the general elections of 1971, her handling of the Bangladesh crisis of 1971, and the massive victory over Pakistan, and the subsequent state elections in 1972 where the Congress Party has a clean sweep. All of this means that her hold over the party by 1972 is ironclad. The party is now beholden to her in a way that is inconceivable even during the Nehru era. That also means that the Congress commands extraordinary majorities in parliament, and it has control over the states—so various kinds of constitutional amendments can be done if they want to do it.

Then in the early 1970s, Indira Gandhi goes after the judiciary. There is a running battle between her and the judiciary going all the way back to 1967 around the powers the judiciary holds to review laws made by parliament. Indira Gandhi wants to insist that parliament is supreme, and in this context, parliamentary supremacy means executive supremacy, which in turn, means her own supremacy in the context of executive. She goes after them by effectively packing the Supreme Court of India. Two of the senior-most judges are superseded when a new chief justice has to be chosen. A more pliant candidate is put into place. You can see the effects of all of that during the Emergency, when the Supreme Court just rubber-stamps all kinds of rules that are made. This is the shift in balance of power, which is the first of those system-wide attributes.

The second is the rules of the game. Again, 1967 is the real turning point. With the emergence of various non-Congress governments in the states, there is a competitive abandonment of the rules of the game. You start poaching people left, right, and center. You use various kinds of powers that the center has to destabilize governments, put assemblies into suspension, into abeyance, and various things. That, in some ways, becomes even more acute by 1972, because in 1971 the opposition has a crushing defeat. Even in a state like Uttar Pradesh, where they had the elections against the backdrop of this provincial armed constabulary revolt, the UP Congress is actually a pretty ramshackle machinery, but they still managed to pull through.

The Opposition then decides that is not in the electoral arena that they can really get a grip on this particular political machine, but it has to be done other ways—which dovetails with the rise of popular protests. By the time Jayaprakash Narayan comes along, there are various movements calling for the dismissal of elected governments—in Gujarat, in Bihar. What you'll find is that both the Opposition party and the prime minister have, more or less, felt that the rules of the game are constraining rather than enabling, and we should just dispense with them. These two dynamics of structural change are absolutely important to understand what happens by the time we come to 1975.

By June 1975, the executive is extremely empowered, and both sides feels they don't need to play by the rules of the game—which then means that when Indira Gandhi decides to impose the Emergency, there are hardly any countervailing checks and balances within the system as a whole. One of the reasons the popular protests were happening before the Emergency is because of the global oil shocks and the huge inflationary impact it has on the Indian economy. India undergoes the most concentrated period of inflation during those months, and that means people are hitting the streets. Of course, economic grievances of this kind then get channeled in other political ways. You need to have both this explanation of structural change along with the popular movements, which is triggered by global currents. Then you have the actual event of June 12, 1974, when the prime minister's position is directly threatened, and it's only then that her intentionality really comes into place.

It's very important for us not to get mired in this discussion of “what was she thinking?” because by the time the Emergency is imposed, everything else that should have been in place to prevent it is no longer in place. That's where I think your analogy with South Korea is interesting, because there you had a president who actually tried and thought he could push it through, but then you suddenly found that you are constrained by a thicket of other forces, which may not be as empowered as the executive is, but are still willing to come in its way. That becomes a very important distinction. The conditions that should have been obtained in order to prevent a slide toward outright authoritarianism were not obtained because those conditions had changed even prior to the Allahabad High Court decision.

Rohan: Given how the Emergency’s legacy remains potent politically in India, was it tricky to write the portions about the Opposition choosing to go the extra-constitutional route? Did it risk playing into Indira Gandhi’s explanations?

Srinath: For me, it was not so much about saying it's tricky territory, but about how to use those as levels of explanation. The fact is that various opposition parties—as I cite by 1974 and 1975—think that extra constitutional agitations, in order to get elected governments out of power, is somehow legitimate, that it is a way of proceeding which is acceptable by the rules of the game, when it's clearly not. But at the same time, I cite this extraordinary letter that Indira Gandhi writes to the great musician Yehudi Menuhin saying, “Democracy is not an end. It is merely a system by which one proceeds toward the goal.” She doesn't even believe that there is an importance, a procedural value, to democracy in India. She just says that democracy is a means to an end, and the end is more important—that is safeguarding this country, making it developed.

She is the most powerful person in the land, so the abdication of any set of norms by the powerful is what matters rather than those who would have lesser power. But it doesn't mean that others do not share some collective responsibility for having abandoned these rules. As I see it, Indira Gandhi is directly culpable for having imposed the Emergency and brought all the various kinds of havoc that it created in its way. There is no taking away from her culpability, but just focusing on her intentions is not enough. We had a political system that was supposed to operate on very different principles and prevent such a lurch toward outright authoritarianism. Yet, we actually slid into it. That slide happens because there is a shift in both the balance of the power, but also an abandonment of the rules of the game. So, I do think there is an element of collective responsibility.

As I see it, there are some truths that are truths of the surface, and there are some deeper truths. One of the truths is that Indira Gandhi was very much culpable for imposing the Emergency, she is directly responsible for it. But a deeper truth is that the entire Indian political elite also bears some degree of responsibility for having abandoned the rules of the game and brought the system to such a pass that this kind of an action would actually be taken, and taken successfully. This is why the best historical verdict seems to be, to borrow the famous line from Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, "All are punished." That is exactly what happens. Ultimately every one of these people is punished.Nobody seems to realize how complicit they all are in terms of changing and disregarding these rules of the game. I believe no game can continue to be played when you continually disregard the constitutive rules of a practice.

Rohan: Within that framework, you have these moments when Indira Gandhi's coterie is contemplating a second republic—some are saying "make her prime minister for life," and calling for a new constituent assembly. Is there also a systemic answer for why India doesn’t get a second republic, a prime minister for life, and Indira ultimately calls for elections?

Srinath: There definitely was a push on the part of Indira Gandhi's close advisors, important voices, and leaders within the Congress Party, that having taken this very momentous decision to impose the Emergency, they should bring about broader, important systemic changes to the way that the political system was structured, which would ensure these kinds of situations never came about again. That was the starting point of much of this discussion. What exactly should be the nature of those changes was what came to be debated in various ways.

My own feeling is that Indira Gandhi, throughout all of this, was very much focused on the short and medium term. In the short term, she wanted her own office to be protected against any kind of legal challenge in the future. So, there were all the important amendments, which had tried to encase or protect the prime ministerial office from legal challenge, particularly on election cases and so on. But at the same time, she also got P.N. Haksar, her former principal secretary, to go and individually meet every judge who was sitting on her case. She got everything done in order to make sure there was no legal challenge. That was the trauma of the June 12, 1975 judgment. She focused very much on that in the short-term.

In the medium-term, she was focused on ensuring that the shift in the balance of power that had happened in practice already, would then be immune to various challenges from the courts. That is what the 42nd amendment to the constitution really attempts to do—entrench this imbalance of power. Some of the more ambitious measures that were initially mooted, like trying to convert India into a presidential system on the French Fifth Republic model, peter out partly because, in their enthusiasm to be more royalist than the queen, some of the leading figures of the Congress Party leaked out drafts to the press, which immediately creates a lot of bad publicity, even in the context of the Emergency.

There are meetings held. There are statements issued by prominent public figures saying that this is unambiguous authoritarianism, that the Emergency is supposed to be a temporary measure. Some of it is dropped. But even while that is happening, the 42nd amendment is pushed through. As I see it, Indira Gandhi's vision during the Emergency was pretty much a short-term one, of protecting her own office, and the medium-term one of making sure that the differentials in power that had been put into place would remain in place. I don't think she thought much more about moving toward a presidential system or other forms of curbing the judiciary, which some of her advisors wanted. Yes, in a sense, her choice was important, but it was also partly because she felt that this would suffice in order to secure her key objectives.

This is why the Janata regime, when they come in, their most important concern is to undo all of these very controversial amendments. And of course, they themselves are not able to undo them entirely. For instance, when the Maintenance of Internal Security Act (MISA), which is the most despised, reviled,and misused act of the Emergency, under which so many people were detained preemptively without any recourse to legal help—when the act to repeal MISA repealing is brought, the Janata government actually wants to introduce another bill for preventive detention.

This is where the broader question around the orientation of the Indian political elite comes. Because many of the senior figures of the Janata government have been people in politics for a while. If you are a politician in power, then preventive detention is a good tool to have. Why would you dispense with it? Morarji Desai, in fact, writes—and I cite the letter—where he correctly says the Constitution provides for preventive detention.

One very interesting fact I learned while doing this research is that when one of the attempts to repeal the pernicious effects of the 42nd Amendment are conceived of, and the draft bill is legislated, Shanti Bhushan—the law minister in the Janata government—actually suggests that maybe we should have a provision where certain kinds of constitutional amendments require a public referendum. It's worth recalling that even the original Indian Constitution was not put to a referendum. It was just adopted by the Constituent Assembly. Now, this was potentially a move to democratize the political system in interesting ways, and it's shot down by pretty much everybody in the Janata Party, and by the Congress Party as well.

The overarching conservatism of the Indian political elite, and their orientation toward these things, remains the same. And that, to me, is the tragedy of the Janata period. They saved Indian democracy in some ways. The emergence of the Janata regime showed for the first time that transfer of power is possible, that people can get rulers out of office when they overextend their powers, and that the regime could actually come back and unroll some of the very negative dimensions of what happened in the Emergency. But at the same time, there were no commitments to rethinking the rules of the game or to shoring up those rules on a new basis. I don't think you could've gone back to what was there before, but you could have at least made a new start saying, "What kind of politics do we want?" There, I think the Janata government failed to deliver the goods.

In fact, they continued to ignore the rules of the game in certain ways. For instance, soon after the general elections of 1977, they decided to dismiss all the Congress state governments, saying they don't have any legitimacy. Those governments go to the Supreme Court, and the Supreme Court rubber-stamps the move of the Janata government. So, what happens? In 1980, when Indira Gandhi comes back, her line is, “You did this to me, I'm going to do the same thing to you.” So, she dismisses all the Janata state governments saying they don't have any legitimacy left, and lo and behold, the Supreme Court upholds that also. This is the consequence of a continual disregard of all kinds of systemic framing rules of the game, and I think that was something that the Janata government never recognized as a problem.

In fact, I would say that even senior leaders like Jayaprakash Narayan, who led the Janata Party to victory in 1977 and were important moral voices, simply did not understand this dimension of their own actions and what they were doing. That kind of collective self-reflection was very much in short supply in the Janata period, and they focused very much on the culpability of Indira Gandhi, and on bringing her to book. They just overplayed their hand in foolish ways and ended up ceding the ground to her once again.

Rohan: It’s interesting that the Emergency neither turns into a second republic and a lifelong prime minister, nor does it end up crushing the Opposition—and once it is over, the Opposition doesn’t end up crushing Indira Gandhi either. What a contrast from India’s neighborhood and other post-colonial countries…

Srinath: What the 1977 elections really do is bring the importance of elections to the center stage of Indian democratic imagination. It's a process of collective political education that we undergo as a country. We see the first stirrings of it in 1967, but 1977 is very important because for the first time, an extremely powerful leader and her party are voted out of office in the center, against the backdrop of a period of straightforward authoritarian rule, and of institutional failure. The victory of 1977 is an important affirmation of popular sovereignty because it tells you that the vote is perhaps the best way to express it.

Of course, I don't want to minimize what happens after the Emergency. There is a lot of efflorescence of what you would think of as “civil society.” There's a lot of new media. The Emergency unleashed that huge energy. Robin Jeffrey has written a very important book on that subject

. But you also have various kinds of civil society organizations. There is a lot of thinking about non-party politics. Nevertheless, in the long run, I think what we are still left with—and I think this is the legacy of the long 1970s—is the centrality of elections to Indian democratic imagination. I think this is both empowering, especially for the poor and the powerless, but it's also debilitating because it means we can hardly think of other modes of collective action outside of the one time we vote.

It reminds me a bit of what Rousseau used to say, that the British people were free once every five years, that's the only time. In a sense, it has both deepened democracy in India, and one of the salient facts of India is this extraordinary deepening of democratic participation throughout this period. But effectively, the entire story of our democratic existence turns on elections, and I think that is the central weakness, as well as the central strength, of the Indian political system today.

Rohan: On to our final few questions. What misconceptions about this period, about Indira, about what you've been working on do you find yourself frequently combating, not just from the lay public, but from students or from fellow scholars?

Srinath: One meta framework which shapes a lot of the scholarship, particularly the social science and political science scholarship on this period, is the kind that seeks to explain what happened in the 1970s, whether it's the Emergency or other things, by recourse to a combination of institutional decline and a surge in popular participation. That's a framework that Samuel Huntington first laid out in his book on political development, and that has been extensively used by various scholars to explain various aspects of what was happening here. Again, the institutional decline story is something I agree with, though I characterize it in very different ways from what the social science literature typically tends to do. But I think the idea that the problem in the 1970s was a surge from below is, I think, a serious misconception of what was happening. As I see it, the problem in the 1970s was not increasing democratic demands from below, but the abdication of certain kinds of democratic processes by those who are sitting above the system: the political elite.

That tends to mischaracterize what is happening, and I hope we will have an opportunity to revisit the idea because those frameworks are still very prevalent in most of the readings that students will pick up. The other kinds of misconceptions, as I said, have more to do with how we characterize this period and the policies. Thinking of Indira Gandhi as a person very much on the left or a socialist, I think, is just to take her own rhetoric at face value. I think it does no justice to what the facts of the case were. It's extremely incorrect to just assume that those labels will do the work of analysis and understanding, which I think can only be done if we get into the nitty-gritty of what is happening at that time.

The third thing is that when we tend to think of what happened with the Congress Party, much of the scholarship is very correct to say that Indira Gandhi's decision to break the Party then meant that it became quite weak, and then it became slowly dominated by her, and then became something of a family firm. Let's assume the existing reading is correct. But it still misleads us by suggesting that the older Congress Party, which came unstuck in the 1967 elections, could somehow have continued on the course if only Indira Gandhi had not come along and wrecked it. That it was somehow this perfect machinery, which was aggregating various kinds of local preferences. I think that was not even true by the time of the general elections of 1962.

One of the things Indira Gandhi writes to her father about in the late 1950s is to say, listen, your party has this federalist structure, where chief ministers are important because they aggregate power through their local networks. You have this machinery which is constructed. It's what is called the Congress System by Rajni Kothari. But that system was already coming unstuck by the late 1950s and 1960s. Indira Gandhi's own view was that, far from it being a perfectly working machine, it had become on oligarchy, which was controlled by various kinds of regional grandees, and that is what the syndicate then comes to symbolize for her. I actually think that we have to take a hard look at what the Congress Party's situation was before 1967, because we have this idea that it was a fairly well-oiled machine, and this lady came along and just wrecked it. She did wreck it, but I don't think it could have continued on its own course either.

Those are the kinds of broader misconceptions I hope we will deal with. It's not so much about facts of this or that thing, but these interpretive questions that interest me.

Rohan: Are there specific areas or tools of research or analysis that you would point to for younger scholars looking into this period, or things you didn’t have time to get to that you wish others would?

Srinath: I've had a lot of time with this book, I think my publishers will bear that out, so I don't think time was the issue, but space definitely was the issue. As I said, there is now so much more archival material available, which is not important for its own sake, but it raises new questions. The thing with new archival material typically is that it helps you reframe the questions with which you think you want to approach the matter, and that is what I found myself doing. At every turn, practically in every chapter, every section, I just felt I had not done justice because there was so much more to be said. There is so much more material. Even from Morarji Desai's own prime ministerial papers, which are deposited at the National Archives. I had some 2,000 pages of photocopies, and I could cite less than 1 percent of that.

So, there are so many more avenues of research that have been opened up by this new material, not in the empirical sense of saying, "Oh, we can just learn more," but you can ask new questions. I think that's what I'm hoping that others who will work on this period and be able to do more intensive work can do. For instance, on bank nationalization, there is not just one book, but multiple books waiting to be written on that particular episode and what it meant. Similarly, the whole question of how this imagination of poverty comes into being. Even as I was finishing this book, I read a book written by my former colleague and friend at King's College London, Louise Tillin, who again has an interesting, but somewhat different story to tell about that. I think that's the way we want the literature to develop. That we have questions that are somewhat common, but approaches and perspectives and explanations that are different.

Similarly, on 1971, I have written an entire book, but I think there are things to be done by younger scholars. I think the entire period of economic policymaking around the Monopolies and Restrictive Trade Practices Act from 1970 to 1975 is worth looking at. There is a huge amount to be written about the nationalization projects because, again, we are working on fairly high-level assumptions based on materials that were available previously, but now we can get a much greater handle on these questions. I really think there is a range of things now opening up for scholars of the 1970s to work on, especially on aspects of political economy, which, at least in my discipline of history, tends to be neglected.

I think historians are doing a great disservice by neglecting the economic history of the postcolonial period. That's partly because of the way the discipline is developed. Other kinds of aspects of history—cultural history, environmental history—have much larger cachet. But it's interesting to see how some younger scholars are now coming to the economic crisis of the 1970s through an environmental lens, the Green Revolution through an energy lens—all of which, I think, opens up a new range of things. This is fertile territory for future work, and I have only scratched the surface in a very literal sense.

Rohan: Can I ask what you're working on next?

Srinath: Well, first of all—to take a break from writing on politics, foreign policy, and those kinds of things—I've been working on a biography of the astrophysicist and Nobel laureate, Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar. It is far afield from what my previous work was, but in a sense, for me, it is an intellectual homecoming because I started out as an undergraduate studying physics. I wanted to be a theoretical physicist. I actually wanted to do a PhD in theoretical astrophysics, which is the reason I first got interested in Chandrasekhar as a teenager. Fortunately for me and for theoretical physics, that did not work out, but I think this is a nice opportunity to come back and look at it from a different perspective, both from the history of science, but also as a biographer.

Even though this book is about Indira Gandhi, this is not really a traditional biography of hers. It's a study of her years in power situated against this broader contextual backdrop. Here, I'm hoping to write what will be a biography of this individual, which I hope will also be an exploration of various kinds of questions around what the pursuit of science meant for people who were born in colonial India and then had to pursue those ambitions in very different sites—whether in the UK or in the United States, and even the constitution of certain disciplines like astrophysics, which is very much a 20th century phenomenon. I'm quite excited—and relieved!—to move away from politics and political history to work on something else.

Rohan: Very exciting! Finally, do you have three recommendations for our readers?

Srinath: The first is a book which came out a few months before mine called The Great Transformation: China’s Road from Revolution to Reform by Odd Arne Westad and Chen Jian, two great historians of China. That book is a history of China's long 1970s, and it's interesting to read having written this book. It is an instructive and interesting read, simply because it tells you the story of another country through the same period, and then perhaps forces us to rethink some of the standard assumptions that we have about, "Oh, China began reforming its economy a decade before India did, etc.” It challenges some of those ideas, and I would highly recommend that people take a look at the book.

The second are a couple of books that were particularly useful to me. They have been around for a while, but haven't gotten the kind of attention, at least amongst scholars, that I think they deserve. These are a collections of essays by Sudipta Kaviraj, one titled, The Trajectories of the Indian State: Politics and Ideas, the other, The Enchantment of Democracy and India: Politics and Ideas. Those are a set of essays that Kaviraj has been writing and publishing over at least 15-20 years. I think they raise many interesting analytical questions about how we even think about Indian politics in this period in which I was working and how we understand the specificities of those trajectories. These are analytical, theoretical reflections, but I found them to be very useful, and I've been pressing them upon every young and impressionable student I can find because I think those are exactly the kind of works that force you to think anew.

A third book recommendation, not pertaining directly to Indira Gandhi but to the broader period—and not a new book, but one I thought important because it still has not been replaced by anything comparable—is The Economics of Global Turbulence: The Advanced Capitalist Economies from Long Boom to Long Downturn, 1945-2005 by Robert Brenner, a great economic historian. It’s about the onset of the long economic slowdown in the West from the 1970s. I think that book still merits careful study by students of South Asia and others. In terms of analytical rigor and the way in which he's able to lay out the exact nature of the problem with the global economy, it’s still a very important book to me.