Sulla was a successful general who marched on Rome and took power as a Dictator. Though the forms of the Republic were kept up, henceforth it was military power which would decide political outcomes. Sulla eventually resigned so as to devote himself to debauchery and died shortly thereafter. But Pompey, a successful general, could take over his role. He helped put down the rebellion which aimed to restore the power of the Tribunate. He allied with the wealthy Crassus and, later, the aristocratic Caesar who turned out to be an even better general. He defeated Pompey and was set to take over Rome when he was assassinated. There was more war till Augustus prevailed. It is said that the wife of Augustus intrigued in the background so that ultimately her descendants became an Imperial dynasty. Nero was the last of her life. After that, some general or other took the throne. Some were able to pass it on to their descendants for a generation or two. But then the pattern repeated itself.
Caesarism was about generals usurping power. Sometimes this resulted in a dynasty. Sometimes the general was killed by some other general. Then, the Roman Army- once a successful method of 'colonization' in the literal sense of capturing territory and then settling ex-soldiers on conquered land- was no longer capable of fending off war-like tribes and the Roman Empire, in the West, collapsed.
Srinath Raghavan takes a different view. In an interview with Rohan Venkat he says-
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,
like Gandhi when he forced Bose out of the Congress Presidency or when he imposed stupid shit like khaddar and Nai Tailim on it? Or like Nehru who said to JP that this Cabinet was full of 'hollow pusillanimous men; who, whatever their inner qualms, dared not give voice to their misgivings.'? What he didn't add was that anybody who was not pusillanimous soon resigned.
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.
This is Bonapartism. Napoleon, it is true, was a successful general. He usurped power and made himself an Emperor. But he was defeated. His nephew Napoleon III was not a general. One may say that he subverted the Second Republic by using plebiscites and thus crowning himself Emperor. He too was defeated and lost his Crown in the field of battle. At a later point, Trotsky- who was a successful general- was considered a possible Caesar. That's one reason Stalin could outmanoeuvre him. The idea of Caesarism corresponded to nothing in reality. It was merely a term of abuse- like 'Fascism'- used by silly people.
Charismatic populism can be the basis of power. Gandhi was charismatic. He was populist. But he did not wield power in the conventional sense. Khomeini and Khameni, had religious prestige rather than military success, but their rule was based on the fanatical devotion of 'basiji' fighters.
In India, the armed forces have been apolitical and obedient to civilian authority. The police serve which ever party takes control of a Province. There is no real need for a Party militia to gain countervailing power.
Factionalism in political parties militates for dynastic ownership because this reduces conflict over succession. There is an 'uncorrelated asymmetry'- i.e. who is or isn't the biological heir of the incumbent- which dictates a 'bourgeois strategy'- e.g. the son inherits in preference to the nephew. However, where siblings quarrel or there is an ambitious cousin, a dynastic party may grow weaker or suffer eclipse.
The idea of Caesarism in terms of modern political theory comes to the forefront in the mid to late 19th century.
Why? Because of Napoleon III. Sadly, it turned out he was no Caesar. Martial prowess is not inherited. The term 'Caesarean' or 'plebiscitary' President was used by Max Weber to describe the type of Head of State he wanted for the Weimar Republic. Directly elected by the people, he could choose whether to leave the administration to a Chancellor selected by the Legislature or whether to use directly by ordinance or even take on emergency powers. Once Weimar elected Hindenburg- a soldier- as President and Parliament became too divided to provide a Chancellor- the President became the arbiter of Germany's destiny. The moment Hindenburg appointed Hitler, the country was doomed. In Italy, it was the King who appointed Mussolini and the King who dismissed him. Caesars arent too different to Kings. Indeed, both 'Kaiser' and 'Tzar' means 'Emperor'. Queen Victoria was the 'kaiser-e-Hind'. If Indira was an Empress, it was because her father had become Prime Minister thanks to elections held by the British. The House of Nehru had succeeded the House of Windsor.
There's a lot of writing around this concept in different ways in the early 20th century as well.
Would the Bolshevik revolution throw up a Napoleon? In Turkey, a General had taken power and gotten rid of the Caliphate. He had no children, so his power could not be inherited. In Iran, a crappy general had declared himself Emperor. He had a son whom it was convenient for US/UK to keep in power till he was swept away by a Revolution.
Mussolini had been a soldier in the Great War and did pose as a great warrior. But he didn't get rid of the King and crown himself. Also, his army was shit at fighting.
The modern world does not feature Caesarism because Generals don't fight other generals so as to decide who will rule.
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
the silly man means 'restricted franchise'. But the notion of universal manhood suffrage, if not its reality, had been around since the American and French revolution. However, in the UK, the word democracy had a pejorative meaning. Dicey uses it as such in 1886. But, by 1900, he admitted that the UK constitution had been transformed into 'something like' a democracy because of repeated extensions of the franchise. Still, it wasn't till after the Great War that all men and most women got the vote. France didn't give the vote to women till after the Second World War. Ceylon, however, got universal franchise in 1931. India too could have had it but non-Congress parties preferred a complicated scheme of quotas on a restricted franchise.
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.
No. It is about the franchise. An Emperor or a Dictator can have universal franchise. The US was a democracy. One may say that General Washington, a successful general, belonged to the upper class and that initially the Republic had an element of elitism. This changed when Andrew Jackson, another successful general, came to power. His regime was considered populist. But America was colonizing its own vast hinterland. It was sui generis- a case apart- because the colonizers became the majority.
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.
There have always been such people- unless they are killed or incarcerated. They lead movements which bring pressure upon the administration so as to advance a particular agenda. If they succeed, they may be co-opted by the Government. But, there is also the danger that they will be executed or exiled.
Caesar himself was historically seen as a dictator, but a popular dictator.
He was seen as a great General- like Sulla and Pompey. Traditionally, the Roman Dictator was a military commander who held power for 6 months to deal with a specific external threat.
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 other words, Caesarism is a silly Marxist word used for Napoleon III, Boulanger, De Gaulle etc. It is meaningless in the Indian context. No general has taken power. The Army is completely non-political.
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
three worthless shitheads who were completely wrong about everything.
—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.
After the Bolshevik Revolution, some European countries were vulnerable to a Communist takeover and thus had Dictators- like Admiral Horthy in Hungary or Mussolini in Italy and, later on, Franco in Spain. But in countries where Communists could be incarcerated if they got up to mischief, there was no need for a Dictator or a 'Fascist' type of political party. The British Union of Fascists was a joke.
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.
Corporatism can be pushed through by any sort of regime. All that matters is whether the police can handle Commie nutters on their own. Only if they can't do you need brownshirts or black-shirts to fight them in the streets.
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.
Weber was a cretin. In a parliamentary democracy, the Prime Minister and his Cabinet must command the confidence of Parliament. Otherwise they lose a 'no confidence' vote and have to resign. Germany was rather different. It was possible for the Kaiser, or later on the President, to ignore Parliament- up to a point. It must be said Weber and his Professorial pals- e.g. Hugo Preuss who wrote the Weimar Constitution- had shit for brains.
It's not so much the party who makes a leader, but the leader who makes a party.
Particular leaders have reconfigured parties. But this also happened in Eighteenth century England. Sir Robert Walpole changed the nature of the Whig party and his long tenure laid the foundations of party discipline and the Cabinet system. In France a leader can make his own party. But, India is nothing like France.
That’s the thumbnail history of the concept of Caesarism.
It is a wholly false and foolish concept. Caesarism is about the Army taking over. Pakistan has it. Look at 'Field Marshall' Munir! Egypt has it. Look at El-Sisi. India doesn't. The army is wholly unpolitical.
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.
Nanaji Deshmukh, the RSS chief in U.P had allied with Lohia thus enabling the formation of the first non-Congress administration in India's largest state. Shastri & Morarji & Gadgil were sceptical of the Nehruvian Planning Commission. Morarji, as Finance Minister, thought he could do what he liked and that Indira was stupid and ignorant. But he himself was even more so. There had to be a Congress split because Morarji was shit. Everybody hated him. Then Kamaraj lost his own native Tamil Nadu over the Hindi issue. Indira sent a clear signal to the deep South that she would not impose Hindi. But she would also have no truck with the Mahalanobis strategy. She would back the Green Revolution. Equally important, she was ready to move to the Left at a time when all countries were doing so.
Because we've had universal adult franchise in India from 1951, we tend to think that Indian democracy is born fully formed.
We think the 1946 election led to Partition. For Democracy to function, Muslims must be a cowed minority. Otherwise they run amok.
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.
Ceylon got universal franchise 20 years before India. Why? Indians (i.e. the Muslim League) could not agree to have it. The Brits imposed whatever was convenient for them in a unilateral manner. But the outcome of the 1937 election would not have been very different under universal franchise.
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.
By then, it was clear that Congress was shit. This wasn't clear in 1957. The other problem was that even if Congress was shit, its rivals were shittier.
That makes it much more difficult for the Congress Party to claim that it speaks for the entire nation.
It kept claiming that in the Thirties and Forties but no one believed it. That's why there was Partition.
Its very poor performance in the 1967 election leads to a crisis within the Congress Party.
There had been umpteen crises. The worst was the 'Garam-Naram' split before the Great War. By contrast the Swaraj/Congress split in the Twenties was temporary. What changed during the Fifties was the cult of Nehru. Congress might be shit but its leader was almost as civilized as an Englishman. Indira seemed nice, just as Rajiv or Sonia seemed nice. Not being politicians, they might be less shite than the clowns in Parliament.
After a turbulent couple of years, what you have is a decision by Indira Gandhi to actually break the Congress Party.
The fact is Indira initially played nice. Morarji would humiliate her in Cabinet and she would take it on the chin. The fact is, she needed loyalists in the administration before she could take on the Old Congress. She relied on Kashmiri Brahmins, Haksar, Dhar, Kao etc., and, quite soon, the rest of the Civil Service fell into line. It must be said, some very capable people came into politics under her wing during the 'garibi hatao' campaign. The current Congress President is an example.
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.
The 'Brahmin-Harijan-Muslim' formula worked for her. JP looked a fool for trying to topple the only Muslim to have been CM of Bihar after Independence. I recall people telling me, back in 1975, that Atal Behari was actually a Kayastha. Apparently some Kayastha dynasty had the Vajpayea ceremony performed for them and took that surname in the same way that Lal Bahadur took the surname Shastri because he had received that educational credential. In other words, Brahmins should vote for Congress. So should Dalits. Jagjivan hated and was hated by both Morarji and Charan.
What you have, therefore, is a move toward a Ceasarist model.
No. What you have is a move towards the Srimao Bandarnaike model- i.e. dynasticism plus populist Socialism. Zulfiqar in Pakistan and Mujib in Bangladesh followed this recipe. It worked best in North Korea. Elsewhere 'assassination tempers autocracy' though hanging works too.
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.
Just say 'dynasticism' and be done with it. India was a 'rent-seeking' Raj. Patrimonialism in a segmentary society favours factionalism disguised by protestations of loyalty to a particular dynast. A Pakistani politician put it best when he said he was very poor when he entered politics. The great wealth he had amassed was entirely through the favour of his dynastic master- i.e. he would remain 'true to his salt'. He was lying. So what? That was how the game was played.
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.
Rahul is very special because he is his Mummy and Daddy's only son.
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.
What didn't get 'rationalized' was Sociology. It is a joke subject.
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.
People like winners. This is because they assume they will keep winning. However, in any democracy, there will be very charismatic personalities who are perpetual losers. JP was one such. Rahul is trying to be like JP because JP wasn't shot. Granny was. Daddy was blown up. Safer to be a loser, yaar.
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.
People vote for you if you think you are better than the other guy.
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.
Like 'Caesarism', 'Charisma', is a term used by ignorant and useless people. When Rajiv became PM, it was decided that 'charisma' meant 'karishma'- a miracle. Rajiv looked a bit like Lord Ram. Sonia turned out to be a pativrata Sita. But the miracle of not getting assassinated involved not taking the top job.
The reason I don't use the word populist is because I just felt it was too broad.
A 'populist' leader is the opposite of a party apparatchik. She may attract votes from the other side though a lot of what she says may disturb the rank and file.
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 may be. It may not be.
It is based on the idea of popular sovereignty.
Nothing is based on nonsense.
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.
Indira was doing the same thing every other leader around the world was doing. Nixon was the most Keynesian POTUS ever. Even the reaction against the Far Left took leaders further to the Left. The 'neo-con' backlash had to wait till the end of the Stagflationary Seventies.
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,
UK and Canada declared Emergency before Indira did. Bandarnaike's Emergency was similar to Indira's. Mujib went further. He declared a 'Second Revolution' and the creation of one-party state, with himself as President, in January of 1975. He was killed in August. Still, at the time when Siddharth Shankar Ray- CM of West Bengal- advised Indira to impose Emergency it was very much the fashion in South Asia. True Socialists had to show they would have no truck with the 'bourgeois' free-for-all which is Parliamentary democracy.
the 1971 war, there is a lot of improvisation in Indira Gandhi’s responses.
All leaders have to improvise responses to unexpected events.
It’s not all carefully planned out. Would the same be true for this Caesarist shift?
Indira had been offered the top job after her daddy died. She refused. But she did become a Minister because otherwise Shastri would have appointed her aunty- whom she hated. Sonia probably only let Rajiv join politics so as to block Maneka. This is not the stuff Caesars are made off.
One may say Indira- like everybody else- could see populist Socialism of the Bandarnaike or Mujib brand was economic poison. But that could be an excuse of getting rid of Democracy, Free Speech etc in the manner that Burma had done.
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?
Morarji kept telling her to shut the fuck up in Cabinet meetings. Fine, if the guy really was smart. He wasn't. He was stupid and ignorant. The Brits had been right to push him out of the provincial civil service after he mishandled a riot in Godhra.
What was Indira Gandhi thinking about when she went for bank nationalization?
Ensuring her enemies got no fucking money.
What was Indira Gandhi thinking about when she imposed the Emergency?
She remembered that 'Quit India' had failed. Jail 50,000 people and there is no fucking agitation. The masses are happy that a nuisance has been curbed. Sadly, the problem with being Empress of Delhi is that your son's cronies will want to arrange a nice little 'accident' for you. Indira called elections before this happened. Sonny boy needed to understand that without Mummy to protect him, his buddies would eat him alive.
But the intentions of even the most powerful political actors in any system cannot explain what the outcomes were.
I've just explained them. The thing isn't rocket science. Still, Indira couldn't have been sure that JP & Kripalani (neither of whom, like Max Weber, were able to fuck their own wives) wouldn't appoint Morarji as PM. That doomed the Janata Morcha. Afterwards, it was a case of 'Dynasty or let the country die nasty'- at least for Hindus. Then the Soviet Union collapsed. Why not let Atal & Advani have a chance? Unlike Rao, they aren't in thrall to some bogus Swami. Hindutva is better than Hinduism of a casteist, superstitious, dynastic, sort.
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.
She accomplished what she wanted- viz. dynastic succession. Sanju was a very special boy. The only profession he was fit for was politics.
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.
It was a way of distributing credit to shore up political support. The Banks were forced to open branches in rural areas and lend money to those with political clout. This is called 'patrimonialism'.
The construction of that machine was an extraordinary rewiring of the entire Indian state.
No. Nehru mentions INC's lobbying to get government soft loans to the Tatas when they hit a spot of bother. But the EIC had been funding certain projects- e.g. a steel plant in South India set up by an ex-employee- more than a century previously.
In fact, the entire substructure of the Indian political economy undergoes a dramatic shift.
Because of the Green Revolution and the rise of 'dominant castes'.
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.
Had there been no Planning Commission- or, if it had been sensible, like that of Malaysia- then the Finance Ministry would have driven the expansion of Banking with Post Offices initially playing a big role. One reason this did not happen was because there was some theory that the expansion of the Etawah scheme would spontaneously create co-operative credit unions which might deal directly with the Planning Commission or the National Development Council or some other such mythological creature. Sadly, the scheme proved useless. Interestingly, the founder of the Congress party, A.O. Hume, had done a lot for Etawah when he was the District Collector there in the mid Nineteenth Century. He was foolish enough to think that educated Indians would want to raise agricultural productivity and to solve collective action problems rather than talk bollocks.
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.
It is nonsense. Indira's daddy was PM. She ensured her son would be PM. This was because her rivals were stupider and crazier than she was. Morarji would let slip nuclear secrets to the Pakistani dictator who phoned him for tips on health and longevity.
I want to foreground that because too much of the debate tends to get personality-centric,
Nothing wrong with that. Indira genuinely was a Socialist. Also, she genuinely believed that Sanju was unemployable and thus must join the family business.
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.
She didn't go around saying 'I called elections coz I was afraid Sanju's chums would bump me off.' Why? Mums are like that only.
For me, therefore, the important things were the consequences, and the consequences of what she did at the time were absolutely important in shaping the longer-term trajectory of the Indian political system.
Not really. Only if Sanju had actually become a successful car manufacturer would Congress not have become dynastic. Even then, the family would have chosen the Party's PM candidate.
She wanted to have more of what she thought a state-led socialist economy would look like, but ended up producing something very different.
Nonsense! Everyone knew the thing was a shitshow. Still, Indira accepted the conventional wisdom that getting rid of 'hoarders' and 'speculators' by nationalising the wholesale grain trade would enable the government to get food to the hungry. Minhas, the son of a poor farmer, resigned from the Planning Commission over the issue. To her credit, she asked him to return once his prediction came true.
One might ask whether successive Prime Ministers were aware that Indian economic policy was a paradise for rent-seekers. The answer is- yes. Everybody knew. But politics- for true freedom fighters who have spent time in jail- is about fucking over the country because only if it remains as poor as shit will politicians matter.
It was a combination of something like half-hearted liberalization
Indira had experienced the toxic fallout of devaluation early in her career and thus paid attention to the Balance of Payments constraint. Otherwise, there was no constituency for 'liberalization'. The IMF had imposed devaluation and free trade for a couple of years. This generated so much resentment that the country was bound to go in the opposite direction.
with a turn toward targeted welfare schemes,
which, as Minhas pointed out, were as corrupt as fuck- which was the whole fucking point.
both of which are very much a part of the Indian landscape today,
If you aren't cornering a rent, you are figuring out a way to emigrate.
and a certain kind of political style where the party apparatus becomes secondary to the leader.
Which happened in 1920/21 when the Maha-crackpot took over the Congress party.
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.
No. It is a highly unsubtle check. If the Cabinet puts down a bill and their own members vote against it, the next step is a no-confidence motion. Either they appease their backbenchers or they resign.
But when you go into the Caesarist world,
where your colleagues stab you in the back with actual daggers
that entire relationship gets overturned—and that was important.
Sheikh Hasina had to run when her Army chief refused to support her. I suppose, he said there was a risk the soldiers would refuse shoot to kill orders. In a 'Caesarist' world, what matters is the support of the Army.
It’s important not just to understand national politics in India as it were today.
It is important to understand that Professors at Ashoka University are cretins.
A lot of people keep trying to make comparisons between Mr. Modi and Indira Gandhi and so on.
Because both wear Sari- no?
Actually, look at the states. You will see
dynastic parties- or parties on the way to becoming dynastic (like the TMC)- save in Kerala. The BJP is the exception to this rule. Why? Some RSS people take the vow of celibacy for national service. Since they don't have kids, they can't be dynastic.
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.
Fuck is the nutter talking about? Leaders ask that their party (whether or not it be their own ancestral property) work hard so as to get more seats in Parliament. They don't ask their backbenchers to lead them because, if they did, they themselves would be followers not leaders.
All of these were changes, which I don't think she necessarily intended quite this way.
The one big change Indira introduced was to make Congress openly dynastic. The Crown Prince's coterie counted for more than the Cabinet. There were a number of Congress splinter groups some of which became dynastic parties or are going in that direction. It must be said, having an heir by blood can be useful for a leader. Maybe if Naveen had a son, his party would still be in power in Orissa. Perhaps the same will be true for Nitish. Mamta, fortunately, has a nephew she can bequeath power to.
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.
Sanju's death was not predicted. Sonia's ascent was not predicted. But that was because Sanju and Rajiv were stupider than seemed possible. The former crashed a glider- how fuckwitted do you have to be to do that? The other was asked on camera whether he'd consider sending troops back to Sri Lanka. He said yes. Why? Stupidity. But then Mummy hadn't even gotten rid of her Sikh bodyguards though, previously, when her cook died, she would only eat food prepared by Sonia because she feared being poisoned.
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.
The UK and Canada had Emergencies. Why not India? It was what the cool kids were doing. It must be said, Indira's Emergency was a success. Ted Heath's was a fucking disaster.
I think especially in light of what happened in South Korea just a few months ago, to take one example…
Would the Army shoot to kill? Nope. That was the end of martial law and the guy who sought to impose it.
Srinath: Much of the discussion on the Emergency, even today, tends to be centered on why Indira Gandhi chose to impose the Emergency.
The obvious answer is that she had closely observed the great mass protests of the Thirties culminating in 'Quit India'. They all failed. Locking up nutters is easy. The only question was the loyalty of the Army. But they liked her. She was safe.
It must also be said that Kashmiri Brahmins in the administration were loyal to her and not too corrupt or overbearing. However, she was aware that they would want to entrench their own power by making her a President-for-life on the usual Third World pattern. Sadly, the lives of such Presidents may be swiftly curtailed.
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?
There was a serious nuisance. JP had previously been useful to the administration precisely because he was outside politics. But now he appeared to want back in. With RSS backing, this was feasible. But it was also an existential threat to the CPI- and thus the Kremlin. She had their blessings to go ahead with the clampdown. The other thing is that she knew that though she could survive politically, Sanju & Sonia would be dragged into various court cases- some as trivial as the one Raj Narain brought against her, but others, involving unjust enrichment, could do lasting damage. The problem was that almost everybody who was anybody could be brought down by similar cases. That is one reason why Janata found it so difficult to prosecute Indira after they took power.
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.
This is false. The Constitutional position was this. The Prime Minister informs the President that a state of Emergency exists. He may immediately agree to issue such a proclamation or, if he suspects that the PM is acting precipitately or in an ultra vires fashion, he may require a statement of support from the Cabinet or even the Ruling Parliamentary Party. In the event, entirely correctly, the President issued the proclamation. Anyway, if a Tory PM in UK had instituted Emergency to deal with industrial unrest, then it was kosher for India to do so when the demand was for the overthrow of elected governments.
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—
all of those 'centres' concurred. Her Cabinet did not resign. Her Parliamentary Party did not cross over to the opposition benches. The Supreme Court raised no objection. More importantly, the Police obeyed orders. The jails quickly filled up and suddenly no mobs were to be found prowling the streets and setting fire to whatever they liked.
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?
These stupid cunts don't get that every country has a Constitution which stipulates that crazy mobs should be machine gunned to death. Those who wage war against the state should be hanged- after suitably invasive interrogation. If the head of Government doesn't have the stomach to preside over such things, he may be rudely pushed aside. He who establishes order by killing or incarcerating agents of disorder is, de facto, the Government. The laws can always be changed so that, even retrospectively, this is also de jure the case.
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.
No. Indira declared the cause which was also the actual fucking cause when she advised the President to proclaim a state of Emergency. Professors at Ashoka may be too stupid to understand this but, hopefully, students there aren't- unless they are foolish enough to take a course with this shithead.
True, there are fuckwits who say 'true cause of Emergency was Neo-Liberalism' but if you beat them saying 'true cause of your being beaten is Neo-Liberalism' they may give you a wide berth in future.
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?”
The Constitution, as it then stood, permitted- indeed, required- it. That's all that can be said about the issue.
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,
I suppose one could say, with Carl Schmitt, that the 'state of exception' is built into the basic structure of a political constitution.
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.
Indira was the most important actor. She was shaped by just one attribute of the Indian system- viz. the exercise of Executive power at the highest level. Also, her Daddy had been PM and she didn't have a brother. Her position was like that of Queen Elizabeth II. If she'd had a baby brother, she and her sister, Margaret, would have been excluded from the succession.
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.
No. At that time, India was like the UK. Parliament was sovereign. The Judiciary wasn't. Since Indira, in proprio persona, commanded the votes of the majority in Parliament, she was sovereign in all but name. The President was a rubber-stamp. So, it turned out, was the Judiciary.
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.
Indira played by the rules. She didn't herself proclaim a State of Emergency. The President did.
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.
So did every political system over the same period. Thus all this cunt is saying is 'things change over time'. That doesn't explain shit. Still, maybe Ashoka students don't know this.
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 was never a time in India when this wasn't the case. The Viceroy was the executive. Judges didn't fuck with him. Congress tried to fuck with him but he fucked it up so thoroughly that it became sweet and nice. The last Viceroy was persuaded to stay on and be Independent India's first Governor General.
I suppose one might say that though Nehru took over from Gandhi as the dictator of Congress, Shastri and Indira in her first four years as PM was weak by comparison. Why? She needed time to build up a network of loyalists in the administration. Once she did so, Indira became more powerful than her daddy. Sadly 'autocracy is tempered by assassination' which is why Rahul works so hard to render his party unelectable.
There's a steep tilt in the balance of power, which happens between approximately 1969
Indira was expelled from Congress in November of that year. But she kept 221 members of the Parliamentary party. For 16 months, Indira led a minority government with the help of the DMK (which was angry with Kamaraj and Bhaktavatsalam for trying to impose Hindi) and the Communists. Thanks to her lurch to the left, she won handily with 352 seats in March 1971. Old Congress got 16.
Thus, the truth was, there was no fucking balance of power. Indira held all the cards. The Soviets backed her to the hilt and everyone agreed that India needed the Soviet nuclear umbrella to ward off crazy Kissinger and naughty Nixon. Then Indira won a war and achieved mythological status as the incarnation of Goddess Durga. Still, the economy was going down the crapper and so she looked vulnerable. The problem was that she could do with greater expedition and thoroughness what the Viceroys used to do but without having to worry about what was said in Westminster or what was written in the Manchester Guardian. The fly in the ointment was that her son's cronies might want to dispense with elections altogether. In that case, Sanju wouldn't need Mummy. She should receive some help in making a speedy exit from this world. A true patriot should not hesitate in sacrificing even his Mummy's life so as to gain money or power- which means even more money.
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,
Indira attacked the old guard and said she would remove poverty. Her stock went up. Would it go up yet further if she didn't just shit on them politically, but also shove them into smelly jail cells? Not really. India is very poor. Kill the fuckers. Don't waste money feeding them.
Sadly, North Indians did not like 'forced sterilization' and voted against Indira. This meant that Sanju's chums had no incentive to poison her aloo-paratha.
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.
No. Congress needed Nehru which is why they persuaded him not to retire at 70. They did this by saying they would make Indira PM if he slyly fucked off. Nehru did not want to become King Lear. He stuck to his post with disastrous results.
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.
This cretin doesn't get that you can get anything passed by Parliament if you have the power to jail any MPs who might vote the wrong way.
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.
Nehru had set the trend. But, in the early Fifties, the threat of a resignation en masse of Senior Judges would have had political ramifications. After March 1971, any such move would have been welcomed by Indira. The Bench would be packed with 'committed' Judges.
Indira Gandhi wants to insist that parliament is supreme,
It was and is. Whatever powers the Judiciary has usurped is by way of delegation.
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.
Nehru couldn't do it in the early Fifties because the Princely States had not been fully integrated. The Brits had conceived of India as being Federal. It would take time to make it unitary. I should explain, the Judiciary has greater salience in a Federal Republic because of dual sovereignty. Nehru had set his face against this back in the mid Thirties. India became more and more unitary on his watch.
The second is the rules of the game. Again, 1967 is the real turning point.
No. The country had already turned. The Old Guard didn't see which way the wind was blowing. They came a cropper soon enough.
With the emergence of various non-Congress governments in the states, there is a competitive abandonment of the rules of the game.
The rule of the game had been 'lick Nehru's ass. It is so yummy.' There was a period when netalog were confused as to which ass to lick. Then everything became clear. Madam's ass is very yummy. So is Sanju's.
You start poaching people left, right, and center.
This cretin is talking about 'aaya Ram, gaya Ram'- i.e. defections from evanescent coalitions and the need to make every Tom, Dick or Harry a Minister. That was certainly a feature of post 1967 UP politics.
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,
that was in May of 1973. The CM panicked and called in the Army who thought it great fun to shoot the PAC strikers. Indira dropped Tripathi and brought in Bahaguna. Why? I think it was because he was actually from outside the state. Let the UP Brahmin see her as their leader.
the UP Congress is actually a pretty ramshackle machinery,
because UP was pretty fucking ramshackle.
but they still managed to pull through.
What was the alternative? Either Madam picks the CM or we just have one CM after another and everybody conspiring against each other.
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.
Political parties, when in opposition, realize the need to muscle in on any agitation and use it to recruit able young organizers.
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
which one? There were many- but each contained its own opposition and opposition to that opposition and so forth. I recall some Hindi journalist cracking a joke about a Tamil politician who was the only member of his own party. Would he split from himself? Oddly, the answer was no. He went on to become a very successful CM.
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.
There were no rules of the game. It was only under Rajiv that the anti-defection bill was brought in.
These two dynamics of structural change are absolutely important to understand what happens by the time we come to 1975.
They don't matter at all. Opposition parties were welcome to keep splitting. There was no point splitting off from Indira's Congress. You'd end up partying with yourself.
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.
This stupid cunt doesn't get that the Unlawful Activities Act was mooted in '63 and passed in '67. Moreover, extrajudicial killing had been used against Naxals and various insurgencies without any fucking checks and balances. The problem with jailing the Opposition was that they might develop esprit de corps in jail and thus unite- at least for a bit.
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.
They stop if they get shot. The UP PAC stopped rebelling after the Army shot a few of them. The rail strike collapsed in 20 days because the Govt. had already given itself plenty of powers to fuck over agitators.
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,
1975- a High Court Judge was foolish enough to think he could remove a sitting PM.
when the prime minister's position is directly threatened, and it's only then that her intentionality really comes into place.
She had poor legal representation. Still, as Siddharth Shankar Ray said, the Constitution was on her side.
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.
Because such things have never had any place in ruling India. The question was whether to just go in for extra-judicial killing- like the Brits did in '43- or settle for arrest without trial.
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,
if the Army was willing to shoot to kill- then there is martial law. If soldiers don't want to shoot there is nothing martial about them and thus civil law prevails.
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
very true. This happened in the reign of Emperor Bharata ten gazillion years ago.
even prior to the Allahabad High Court decision.
Which was bad in law- or so the Supreme Court said- because Indira only became a candidate after the civil servant who became her Election Agent had resigned.
It would be fair to say the stupidity of a High Court Judge caused the Emergency.
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?
It would false to say that the Opposition took an 'extra-constitutional route' either before or after the Emergency. The fact that you break the law- e.g. by stealing- doesn't mean you are doing something unconstitutional. Equally, it is not unconstitutional to punish Civil Disobedience with a fine or a jail sentence.
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,
Agitations aren't 'extra-constitutional'. It is illegal to try to get soldiers not to obey orders but it is also illegal to steal.
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.
No. It really is acceptable. You are welcome to demand that Trump resign because he is a disgusting piece of shit. However, if you break the law during the course of your agitation, you may have to pay a fine or go to jail.
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.”
Everybody was saying that India needed to feed its people. Don't expect a pat on the back just because you run British style institutions while your people are starving.
She doesn't even believe that there is an importance, a procedural value, to democracy in India.
There isn't. What is valuable is avoiding Civil War.
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.
Which is what everybody believed. It was only later on, during the Nineties, that some fools like Amartya Sen started claiming that Democracy and Freedom and saying 'boo to Fascism!' is inherently valuable or itself part of 'Development'.
She is the most powerful person in the land, so
her job was to curb nuisances.
the abdication of any set of norms by the powerful is what matters rather than those who would have lesser power.
Norms don't matter in themselves. In a particular context, they may promote a better correlated equilibria and thus are worth subscribing to. But, in a different context, they are either irrelevant or mischievous.
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.
It didn't create much havoc. But it didn't do much good either.
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.
No. The Indian system was supposed to operate such that there was a strong unitary state which could do a better job than a Viceroy with little knowledge of, and less of a stake in, the country.
Yet, we actually slid into it.
Like the UK and Canada? We had an Emergency a little after they had theirs. The thing didn't greatly matter.
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.
Fuck off. By the middle of 1978, it was obvious that the same game was being played. What wasn't obvious was that Indira would win once again.
So, I do think there is an element of collective responsibility.
Because you are a cretin.
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
not being Swedish saxophone player rather than the Indian Prime Minister.
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.
The contrary argument is that Indira should followed up victory in the Bangladesh war by scrapping the Constitution and creating a Presidential system. Why didn't she do it? The answer was given by her advise to Sheikh Mujib. Don't become President. Some General will think he would make a better President. Soldiers are simple souls. They don't understand what a Prime Minister is. Does it have something to do with prime numbers? I was never very good at mathematics.
This is why the best historical verdict seems to be, to borrow the famous line from Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, "All are punished."
Don't be silly. Those who did a bit of porridge during the Emergency- or even those who 'went underground' (like NaMo)- did well out of it. But, so did the Dynasty. If they could do it once, they can do it again- and, more to the point, get away with it again.
My own feeling is that Indira Gandhi, throughout all of this, was very much focused on the short and medium term.
Why? She didn't have an economic plan for India. She knew there were lots of very smart economists who kept advising India but she also knew that India was a shithole. The British had the long term plan of ruling the place from far far away. Living in a shithole gets you down. Also, you keep bumping into darkies. Lots of darkies. Way too many darkies.
... the Janata regime, when they come in, their most important concern is to undo all of these very controversial amendments.
This was foolish. They should have used the existing machinery to jail Indira and all her cronies and their families and their financiers and their cooks and gardeners. Within a month, almost everybody would have implicated almost everybody else. The Shah Commission could have finished its job in two months. Within three months, you could get convictions which would stand up on appeal.
The overarching conservatism of the Indian political elite,
stupidity, not conservatism. Agitators had become legislators and had passed lots of stupid laws. Meanwhile, life in the Capitalist West had become nicer and nicer. Consider the case of George Fernandes's wife- the daughter of Humayun Kabir. She managed to escape to America to spread the word about Indira's tyranny. Then she decided she liked the place. Her son settled there just as her brother had done.
and their orientation toward these things, remains the same. And that, to me, is the tragedy of the Janata period.
The tragedy is that Morarji became PM. With Jagjivan, Janata might have stood a chance. He was considered 'lucky'. Any Ministry given to him tended to do well. Also, a Dalit PM would deprive the Dynasty of a vote-bank. As things were, Indira was able to relaunch her career in the North by riding an elephant to Belchi to condole with Dalits massacred there. This was in August of 1977. She didn't stay long but the point was made. Brahmins like her and Jagannath Mishra would listen to Dalits & Paswans. Kurmis, Jats & Yadavs would not.
They saved Indian democracy in some ways.
By ensuring Indira & Sanju- the 'cow & the calf'- would return in 1980?
The emergence of the Janata regime showed for the first time that transfer of power is possible,
but pointless. As Atal put it, in a speech he delivered at the London Indian YMCA in 1983, he could not become PM because neither his father nor his mother had been PM. It was meant to be a joke. Nobody laughed. His party got only 2 seats in 1984. Rajiv got 414. Sadly, he was shit at politics.
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.
The game was cobbling together a caste coalition. It had been going on since the Second Round Table Conference. It goes on still though from time to time there may be 'Hindu consolidation'.
Srinath: What the 1977 elections really do is bring the importance of elections to the center stage of Indian democratic imagination.
No. That happened in 1937. But the most consequential election of all was that of 1946. It led to Partition.
It's a process of collective political education that we undergo as a country. We see the first stirrings of it in 1967,
No. By the end of the Fifties, the 'dominant castes' are asserting themselves. That's why 'collectivization' of agricultural land had to be abandoned. Still in the early Sixties, it was thought that the natural leaders of dominant classes would be princes financed by industrialists under Rajaji's leadership.
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.
Very true. Indira's decision to hold elections before Sanju's chums could poison her aloo-paratha was definitely an affirmation of popular sovereignty not to mention the divinity of the depressed classes.
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.”
After Indira returned to power, Buta Singh put the boot into the Gandhi Peace foundation and other such organizations.
There's a lot of new media. The Emergency unleashed that huge energy. Robin Jeffrey has written a very important book on that subject
No he hasn't. Anything important about the subject can be related in a single paragraph.
. 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.
the legacy of elections is democracy and vice versa. This has been the case since the time of Pericles.
I think this is both empowering, especially for the poor and the powerless,
because they feel very happy when they see that the grandson of the PM has inherited his Mummy's job.
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.
This cretin can't. We can.
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.
He didn't say that. He said- 'The people of England regards itself as free; but it is grossly mistaken; it is free only during the election of members of parliament. As soon as they are elected, slavery overtakes it, and it is nothing.' He was wrong. The English were free because they could only be taxed by the elected lower house though there were plenty of 'rotten boroughs'. Still, a Budget had to be passed every year and MPs knew that they would face a rough reception if they increased the burden on their constituents without bringing them some corresponding benefit.
Indian Democracy is a bit shit because most people pay little in tax. The 'collective action problem' is to raise productivity rather than gas on about 'norms'.
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.
With the result that the INC, founded by Alan Octavian Hume, became the dynastic property of a family which had been kotwals to the Mughals and vakils to the British.
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.
Today, the central strength is that a chaiwallah can become PM. Rahul is welcome to be the Greta Thurnberg of India.
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.
How does this explain the British or Canadian Emergencies?
That's a framework that Samuel Huntington first laid out in his book on political development,
White man said it. So it must be true. Indians must not use their brains.
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.
The problem in the early Seventies was Economic. There was no fiscal headroom. The food position in 1974 was pretty dire.
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.
Students will become more stupid and ignorant if they go in for such 'readings'.
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.
That is in fact what she was- just like her daddy.
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.
Very true. If Indira nationalized Banks, coal mines, etc. it was because she was a devotee of Milton Friedman. It wasn't because she, like her Daddy, was a Socialist of the then British type.
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
she was expelled. The truth is Morarji overplayed his hand. He didn't get that everybody hated him. Also he was shit. That too was not clear to him. The odd thing is that JP & Kripalani couldn't see what was blindingly obvious.
then meant that it became quite weak, and then it became slowly dominated by her, and then became something of a family firm.
Nobody thinks that. What is true is that she moved cautiously when she first became PM. Why? The answer is that she had only been in Parliament for a couple of years. Moreover, it would take time for her to recruit Civil Servants and Savants she could trust. As I said before, she was fortunate because plenty of Kashmiri Brahmins held high positions or were respected savants and they in turn could recruit smart people. In this way, she could dispense with Morarji & Gadgil and so forth. Kamaraj had destroyed himself in his native Tamil Nadu over the Hindi issue. This meant Indira could ally with the DMK. There's a reason Stalin used to call Rahul 'sir' even though he himself was tortured during the Emergency. To spell it out, Indira, unlike Shastri, was against imposing Hindi on anybody. This is the reason I expelled Indira from the Indian National Congress (Iyer) party. My view is that all cows should be forced to speak Hindi. What's more they should quote the poet Dinkar while shitting copiously. Sadly, Indira refused to amend the Constitution to enforce this outcome.
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.
It was. The country had done well under a British dynasty. The swadeshi substitute was a dynasty which had been vakils to the British and could spick Inglis gud.
I think that was not even true by the time of the general elections of 1962.
It looked like a swing to the Right. JP's party lost seats. The Chinese debacle meant that the stock of the RSS rose.
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,
she was its President for a year. She did a good job. She gets the credit for toppling the Commies in Kerala. It is said that she was the tool of Pant & Debar. But it made her look like the protector of minorities. The Commies had wanted to take over Christian schools and ruin them. Hindus have a great love for 'Convent schools'.
Indira's own view- as recounted by her cousin Nayantara Sahgal- was that she quit as INC President because she wasn't permitted to push through a radical program. She had said in 1959- '“It must be made clear that the persons who do not see eye to eye with the objectives of the Congress and its economic programme,” she declared in 1959, “and are not in a mood to keep pace with the progressive section, who are determined to work for the establishment of democratic socialism, should have no place in the organisation'. In other words, she had been working towards the outcome she achieved in 1969- viz. ridding her own party of the right-wingers. What was clever was that it looked as though it was the old guard who had expelled her rather than the other way around.
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
described correctly by Churchill, in 1931, as a tool of the upper caste Hindus and their wealthy backers. He suggested that the Brahmin, Nehru, would soon get rid of the saintly Mahatma.
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,
It had been a 'barristocracy'.
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 had been its President in '59. She had been working for it since she was a child.
She did wreck it, but I don't think it could have continued on its own course either.
If Nehru hadn't been made PM, he'd have split Congress and won by a landslide. Would the same be true of his daughter? Yes. But, she does not have penis! Surely, lack-of-penis is a handicap? No. Look at Sirimavo Bandarnaike. She became PM in 1960. She too lurched to the left at about the same time as Indira and lost office at about the same time. When her daughter became president in 1994 she returned as PM.
The correct comparator for Indira is a woman who became PM before her and who, because nobody troubled to assassinate her, retired as PM in 2000. She died 2 months later at the age of 84.
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.
You are as stupid as shit. There was nothing unconstitutional about what was happening in Delhi during the Seventies. Bangladesh had shenanigans of that sort- party militias running amok, coups, counter-coups, counter-counter coups- India did not. Still, Sirimavo, like Indira was guilty of some excesses committed during the Emergency she imposed in 1971, and thus suffered a ban for a few years after 1977. Indira didn't because Janata could not get its act together.
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?
Point them to this blog. They might learn something.
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