Dinyar Patel is a donkey

Are all Indian history Professors donkeys? Perhaps. But, surely, Dinyar Patel is a class of his own. He writes in Scroll.in-

Fifty years ago, India was in the early throes of the Emergency, declared by Prime Minister Indira Gandhi on June 25, 1975.

Sri Lanka had had Emergency since 1971. In Bangladesh, Mujib had gone further and declared a one party state of a totalitarian type. Pakistan had always had a 'doctrine of necessity' by which anything at all could be done to anyone. India of course preferred extra-judicial killing as a way of dealing with insurgents or Naxals.  

A thoroughly Orwellian moment by any standard,

Orwell had lived through two Emergency periods in England. The thing was legalistic, dull & wholly Anglo-Saxon. But it was thorough. Prominent people like Bertrand Russell & Oswald Moseley had been sent to jail.

Ted Heath had used Emergency powers a couple of years previously in England. Canada too had had an Emergency. The thing was quite the fad back then. The unusual aspect of India's Emergency was the cult of the cretin Sanju and the hilarious forced sterilization program. The Indian masses were being treated as Cities treat stray dogs. Maneka, Sanju's widow, is a great champion of such bow-wows.  

the Emergency – the suspension of democracy

there was no 'suspension of democracy'. There was a suspension or limitation of fundamental rights. Patel is an ignorant buffoon.  

– was justified by Gandhi as the only way to save democracy.

No. The justification given was that it was for the purpose of combatting a threat to national stability and the rule of law. 

It was both deadly and farcical:

It was efficient. Heath's Emergency was farcical. The head of his Civil Service stripped off all his clothes and rolled around on the carpet of Number 10 screaming about a Communist conspiracy. Where Heath failed, Indira succeeded. To be fair she had already crushed the Railway strike- considered the biggest industrial action in history.  

as prisons filled to their cyclone-wire-topped brims with opposition politicians and the state inflicted brutal violence on dissenting forces,

It had been doing so since time began.  The Brits had bequeathed India a relatively humane penal system. Moreover, the dynasty, whatever its other faults is quite British in an old fashioned sense. Compare Indira with Zulfikhar. Both enlisted a Leftist diplomat to help them move in a Socialist direction. Indira may have pumped and dumped Haksar. But only Zulfi got the shit beaten out of his equivalent of Haksar. What was the fellow's crime? He had been invited to dinner but Zulfi couldn't be bothered to come downstairs. Finally, the diplomat got fed up and left. For this he was arrested and beaten and thrown in jail for a bit. Perhaps, if Sanju had lived, the Dynasty would have gone in this direction. Luckily, he crashed his glider and perished. 

Gandhi’s government ensured that even parliamentary discussion of censorship was censored.

That's how censorship works. That's why there are so few films in which the Censor board is shown sucking cock and taking it up the ass.  

The Emergency constitutes only one part of Srinath Raghavan’s definitive work on India’s only female prime minister, Indira Gandhi and the Years that Transformed India.

The rest is equally shit. Why was Indira so cautious when compared to Bandarnaike, Mujib & Zulfikhar? The answer is that, like her Daddy, she was a Fabian of the Public School type. Why cripple the Judiciary when you can encourage it to get delusions of grandeur and fuck up the Economy of its own bat? Politicians may be stupid. Judges are stupider.  

This authoritarian interlude was the product of broader trends:

Why didn't Indira uphold Parliamentary Privilege and force the Bench to accept a capacious doctrine of political question? The fact is,  whether an MP can sit in the House or vote is a matter for the President as advised by the Election Commission. Still, if Parliament sleeps on its right- we may say that the matter has been delegated to the Courts. In any case, her conviction was unsound. 

Gandhi’s inexorable concentration of executive power

The problem was that Sanju & his cronies were becoming an alternative centre of power. At Guwahati, Indira felt she was like a doll being dressed up in different costumes. How soon before the doll was thrown out of the pram?

and the dismantling of political norms.

machinery is dismantled. Norms are discarded.  

The prime minister hardly acted alone in these processes. As Raghavan makes it clear, it is possible to understand events like the Emergency only by taking into account the unscrupulous, self-serving, and flagrantly illegal actions of a whole host of political actors, both in the Congress Party and in the opposition.

No. If lots of countries are having Emergencies at the same time it is because of an exogenous factor affecting them all. What was that factor? It was Economic in nature and linked to the Stagflation which characterised that decade.  The 'cost-push' element reflected 'stasis'- a sort of class struggle paralysing progress of any type. 

When democracy died in India, it died from a thousand cuts, many inflicted by its avowed supporters and sworn protectors.

When it revived it did so because one elderly lady made a phone call.  

Was Gandhi a populist, an authoritarian, or something else?

She was a mediocre politician but a nice enough lady. There were people back then who kept banging on about 'Total Revolution'. The Emergency showed them what would happen after the Revolution. There would be a beloved leader & a beloved spouse & a beloved child & a beloved puppy dog of the beloved leader all of whom would have a ten point or five point or one point program of startling imbecility to cure all the nation's ills. Not that the country was not, now, more advanced than everywhere else. It's just that one must keep struggling to live up to the beloved leader's expectations so that a day might come when you too could be the proud owner of a turnip. 

Raghavan invites us to see her regime as Caesarist,

 Because she was actually General Peron.

a mode of politics where a leader concentrates power by trying to forge a direct connection with the people,

She married a prostitute by the name of Evita. Evita forged a direct connection with the people by singing 'Don't cry for me, Bharat Mata'.  

trampling over the norms and niceties of parliamentary democracy.

No. It was the Allahabad High Court which did so. If the Bench decides it alone can say what the 'Basic Structure' of the Constitution is, then the Constitution can be suspended any time a Judge makes a particularly foolish decision. 

She was no committed democrat:

She was a Socialist. D'uh!  

writing to the violinist Yehudi Menuhin, Gandhi stated, “Democracy is not an end. It is merely a system by which one proceeds towards the goal”

This is true of any Socio-Political arrangement. Incidentally, Marxists believe that the State will wither away after the end of scarcity. 

(her words are eerily similar to those offered by a modern-day autocrat, Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, who once quipped that democracy was a tram which one disembarked after reaching one’s destination).

No system of government will endure for all time. Everybody- except pedants- accepts this.  

Nor can she be classified as a socialist.

Sure she can. She said she was a Socialist. She implemented Socialist policies. She amended the Constitution to say the country must be a Socialist Republic. That makes her a fucking Socialist.  

While she certainly sympathised with the poor, Gandhi’s policies, like the nationalisation of banks and industries, had much more to do with interparty struggles in the Congress.

 The non-Socialists in the Party did not want these Socialist measures. There was a brief struggle. Then they lost and cried and cried.  

She could be thuggishly brutal against organised labour.

Every Railway strike since Independence had been suppressed in a brutal manner.  The alternative to suppressing 'organized labour' is to simply let the industry disappear. Then there is no fucking jobs and thus no 'organized labour'. 

Gandhi was a force to reckon with, but she was also a product of her times.

Like everybody else in every age.  

Raghavan portrays her as the central character in India’s long 1970s,

Amazing! Raghavan portrays the person who ruled the country for more than 70 per cent of the time as a 'central character'. What's next? Will he find Stalin was a central character in the Soviet Union during the Thirties and Forties? No. He probably thinks it was Julius Caesar.  

a period of voluble economic and political crises – and one which was joined at the hip to global events.

as in the Sixties and Fifties and Forties and so forth.  

Gandhi adopted Caesarism as a way to confront the diminishing hegemony of the Congress Party and the fast-accelerating competitiveness of Indian democracy.

No. She got rid of the gerontocrats (actually, they expelled her) and lurched to the Left. Her branch of Congress gained hegemony because the Opposition was shit. What was more significant was disillusionment with politics. Smart people emigrated. Politics became criminalized.  

International crises, like the two oil shocks of the 1970s, shaped her economic policies.

All economic policies were affected, not shaped, by them.  

Raghavan’s analysis of those economic policies is particularly innovative.

It is stupider than any other- that's for certain.  

Gandhi began her prime ministership with a stillborn policy of liberalisation,

Fuck off! There was a Balance of Payments crisis and so within 6 months of her taking office, the IMF forced India to devalue and 'liberalize'. But, the private sector was hooked on 'rent seeking' import-substitution. Thus, once the deficit had narrowed a little, tariffs were brought back in '68. The quid pro quo would be Bank Nationalization, getting rid of Privy Purses & Managing Agencies, etc. What this meant was Business became Politics. 

switching tracks to full-throated socialist rhetoric and the tightening of regulatory infrastructure.

Which was cool if you knew whom to bribe.  

But the sheer economic malaise of the early 1970s, spiraling inflation, and the disastrous results of certain nationalisation projects – like that of the wheat trade – gave her pause. Gandhi let her economic advisors, including Manmohan Singh, carefully dial back regulation and tackle inflation.

There was 'repressed inflation'- i.e. longer queues. Regulations increased.  

Others, like BK Nehru, pointedly asked her if the Indian government’s quest for social justice had simply resulted in “equality in poverty.” By the end of her life, she warmed up to industrialists like Dhirubhai Ambani.

Who knew whom to bribe.  

While cautioning that Gandhi was hardly a neoliberal, Raghavan does see her prime ministership as an important precursor to India’s tryst with economic liberalisation.

Because Raghavan has shit for brains. Sanju & Rajiv weren't ideological and had no truck with Socialism. Indira was worried about how to provide for her kids at the beginning of the decade. She had no such worries by its end. The kids of politicians- including Morarji's son- understood well how to feather their own nests.  

Gandhi’s political legacy was far darker. From an early age, when she served as president of the Congress Party, she displayed “disregard bordering on disdain for the rules and norms of parliamentary government”.

Nonsense! Anyway, at the time she was the tool of Govind Vallabh Pant & Debar. It must be said, this gave her credibility. Back then there were gin soaked chaps at the Club who considered everybody who went to Cambridge to be a Commie. They were reminded that Indira hadn't taken a degree. Also, she was a lady and ran the PM's household efficiently and, more to the point, economically. If you are to dine at Teen Murti, better tell the khansama to have a kilo of biryani ready for you to eat when you get home. Also, Whiskey lao futt a futt! 

Once she became prime minister, she helped scatter those rules and norms like so many leaves in the wind.

Nope. She kept her head down. She inherited L.K Jha, as Secretary, from Sastri but needed her own man. That was Haksar who came in '67.  Once the 'Kashmiri Mafia' had spread its tentacles, she was in a position to break with Morarji.  

She had no qualms about discarding established precedents, turbo-charging briefcase politics, and intimidating rivals.

Who had such qualms? Anybody who said they did, had a son (or in George Fernandes's case a girl friend) who was on the take. Also, all parties had goons of their own. 

This was most apparent in her long-running feud with the judiciary, which she perceived as the biggest obstacle towards her consolidation of executive authority.

A couple of judges may pick a fight with the Executive. They lose. The fact is, the Indian Justice system has only nuisance value.  

With Gandhi’s approval, lackeys suborned judges and unhesitatingly committed perjury.

There was little need.  

Gandhi, meanwhile, darkly hinted of a “foreign hand” at work amongst those who opposed her, either through the courts or the ballot box.

This reminded people that the Soviet Union supported her. It had a heavy hand and was foreign. By comparison, the CIA was a joke.  

When the Allahabad High Court invalidated her election in June 1975, Gandhi’s fear and paranoia compelled her to completely dispense with rules, norms, and democracy itself.

Is what those who obeyed her slavishly during that period later said. It wasn't true. What Nehru had said about his Cabinet, in 1952, was true of almost all Indians in 'public service'. They were 'hollow, pusillanimous creatures' who dared not express any 'qualms' they might have. There were exceptions- like Bagicha Singh Minhas. Manmohan, however, was 'Maun Singh' even back then. 

This is not to say that she wasn't superstitious and a bit paranoid. To be truthful, most upper-class Indian women were back then. It came of not having proper jobs. 

Even before declaring the Emergency, she began planning to round up and imprison opposition leaders. The president, Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed, coolly signed off on Gandhi’s ordinance for the Emergency without written approval from the cabinet, as required by the Constitution.

Not at that time. The 44th Amendment was passed in 1978, three years later. This was because Jagjivan was pretending he'd have been against it, if asked. 

It was a fitting prelude to a period of lawlessness, violent coercion, and executive overreach. During the Emergency, Gandhi toyed with the idea of a presidential system for India, one modeled on Charles de Gaulle’s Fifth Republic in France.

Fuck that. What her sycophants wanted was what Mujib had given himself. Then Mujib and his family were massacred and there was coup and counter-coup and counter-counter coup. Unwilling to admit that India had gained nothing from the Bangladesh war- except lots more refugees- people pretended it was the CIA, not some Commie nutters, who had killed 'Banglabandhu'.  

Congress sycophants went further: one advocated doing away with “all this election nonsense” and simply appointing Gandhi “President for life”.

It was the 'for life' part which was problematic. Look at Mujib! 

After the Emergency was lifted, opposition leaders eventually mounted a successful rout of the Congress under the banner of the Janata Party. Raghavan highlights the divisions and delusions of Janata leaders, factors which eventually enabled Gandhi’s comeback. Jayaprakash Narayan

who tried to depose the first and only Muslim to become CM of Bihar after Independence 

was hardly alone in expressing disillusion with democracy and a striking disregard for elected legislative bodies. As the JP Movement grew, he deceived himself into believing that Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and Jana Sangh allies had shed their communalist and majoritarian instincts.

Dinyar is a Parsi. He doesn't get that if Hindus don't show 'communalist and majoritarian instincts' then they meet the same fate as the Zoroastrians. Still, the 'dual membership' (i.e. RSS members should not be part of the Morcha) issue was a great gift to the Dynasty. Sadly, assassination tempers autocracy. Just the other day we heard the RSS being praised by Modi in his Independence Day speech. Nitish didn't turn a hair.  

Under the fragile Janata tent, secular forces

shitty impotent cunts- unless they were merely Casteists capable of creating dynasties of their own 

mostly kept their misgivings against the Sangh under wraps; when those misgivings burst into the open, they helped hammer the final nails into the coffin of India’s first non-Congress government.

It began as a coffin because Morarji had been made PM.  Had Jagjivan been put in, Indira couldn't have made hay out of the Belchhi massacre and thus begun her come-back.  

Indira Gandhi’s last term in power was marked by disastrous policy in Assam,

she got the Assamese students to stop killing Muslims. Dinyar may be on to something here.  

Kashmir, and Punjab and her violent end on the lawns of 1 Safdarjung Road.

Easily avoidable. Just get rid of Sikhs in the security detail and put in Dogras or Madrasis or whatever.  The truth is, had Sanju lived, Bhrindinwale would have been helpful in splitting the Jat vote. Once Sanju was dead, Zail (Ramgarhia) and Buta (Mazhabi) were bound to mess things up. 

Raghavan’s book makes for sobering reading.

 Dinyar is normally drunk off his head. Maybe, not such a bad chap after all. 

Written in a measured and thoroughly even-handed way, it nevertheless pronounces a severe verdict on a prime minister who, today, remains wildly popular and revered in some quarters.

Fuck off! She was stupid. If your troops have just stormed the Golden Temple, don't let anyone wearing a turban within a mile of you. Simples. 

Still, like Nehru, we have to admit she was less shit than her rivals.  

Moreover, Raghavan points to how the short-sightedness, personal ambitions, and blind loyalties of so many other leaders accelerated the breakdown of political norms in the long 1970s – and the rise of new political forces.

There were no fucking 'norms'. It genuinely isn't normal for the daughter of a PM being made PM for that sole reason. Also, there were no 'new political forces'. Everybody who mattered in the Seventies already mattered by the end of the Fifties.  

Janata leaders like Morarji Desai,

who was in Congress till '69. 

Charan Singh,

who left in '67 

and Jagjivan Ram

who left in '77  

exhibited “the grotesque ambition of elderly men who saw a belated opportunity to shin up the greasy pole”.

Nanaji Deshmukh declined a Cabinet post. Atal, took one and did well. It was important that Moscow put its imprimatur on the Sangh. Subhramanyam Swamy alleges that Atal drank a lot of Vodka to get in tight with the Brezhnev's men. This paid off.  

Shielded by Jayaprakash Narayan, the Jana Sangh, the predecessor of the BJP, skillfully widened its pan-Indian appeal and helped bring majoritarian politics in from the cold.

Dinyar doesn't understand that it was Nehru who presided over the ethnic cleansing of Muslims. In Delhi their population share went from 33 percent to 5 percent. If Shastri had lost the '65 war and Kashmir Valley had been surrendered. 100 millions in India would have paid the price.  

In this podcast episode, Raghavan turns to one of the concluding lines of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet to sum up this collective disfigurement of Indian democracy: “All are punished.”

Atal wasn't. His Cabinet experience gave him the edge in the mid to late Nineties. But it was Modi whose 'underground' work during the Emergency paid off most handsomely. Apparently he wrote a book in Gujarati about the period. That's what put him on the path to three terms as Prime Minister. Others who benefited directly from the JP movement were Lalu, Mulayam & Sharad Yadav. True, being Yadavs, they or others like them would have risen in any case. So would Ram Vilas Paswan. But, it should also be remembered, key-henchmen of Sanju's during the Emergency gained greatly by it. Look at Kamal Nath. 

Is there a lesson to be learnt from the Emergency? Yes. If you have to have it, lift it quickly. Otherwise, there is 'error accumulation'. Checks and balances have a place. Not a very exalted place, but a place nonetheless.