Indira Gandhi, the "Emergency", and Indian Democracy PDF Download

Author: P. N. Dhar
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 448

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Book Description
As head of the prime minister's secretariat under Indira Gandhi, P. N. Dhar witnessed and participated in some of the major decisions made by Mrs. Gandhi, most notably the controversial 'Emergency', the merger of Sikkim with India, the Bangladesh war of 1971, and the Simla Agreement between India and Pakistan. Exceptionally well written, this book combines an insider's account of these years and a compelling analysis of the changing contours of India democracy.

Author: Gyan Prakash
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691186723
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 452

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Book Description
The gripping story of an explosive turning point in the history of modern India On the night of June 25, 1975, Indira Gandhi declared a state of emergency in India, suspending constitutional rights and rounding up her political opponents in midnight raids across the country. In the twenty-one harrowing months that followed, her regime unleashed a brutal campaign of coercion and intimidation, arresting and torturing people by the tens of thousands, razing slums, and imposing compulsory sterilization on the poor. Emergency Chronicles provides the first comprehensive account of this understudied episode in India’s modern history. Gyan Prakash strips away the comfortable myth that the Emergency was an isolated event brought on solely by Gandhi’s desire to cling to power, arguing that it was as much the product of Indian democracy’s troubled relationship with popular politics. Drawing on archival records, private papers and letters, published sources, film and literary materials, and interviews with victims and perpetrators, Prakash traces the Emergency’s origins to the moment of India’s independence in 1947, revealing how the unfulfilled promise of democratic transformation upset the fine balance between state power and civil rights. He vividly depicts the unfolding of a political crisis that culminated in widespread popular unrest, which Gandhi sought to crush by paradoxically using the law to suspend lawful rights. Her failure to preserve the existing political order had lasting and unforeseen repercussions, opening the door for caste politics and Hindu nationalism. Placing the Emergency within the broader global history of democracy, this gripping book offers invaluable lessons for us today as the world once again confronts the dangers of rising authoritarianism and populist nationalism.

Author: Christophe Jaffrelot
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0197580556
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 534

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Book Description
In June 1975 Prime Minister Indira Gandhi imposed a 'State of Emergency', resulting in a 21-month suspension of democracy. Jaffrelot and Anil explore this black page in India's history, a constitutional dictatorship of unequal impact, with South India largely spared thanks to the resilience of Indian federalism. India's First Dictatorship focuses on Mrs Gandhi and her son, Sanjay, who was largely responsible for the mass sterilisation programmes and deportation of urban slum-dwellers. However, it equally exposes the facilitation of authoritarian rule by Congressmen, Communists, trade unions, businessmen and the urban middle class, as well as the complacency of the judiciary and media. While opposition leaders eventually closed ranks in jail, many of them collaborated with the new regime--including the RSS. Those who resisted the Emergency, in the media or on the streets, were few in number. This episode was an acid test for India's political culture. While a tiny minority of citizens fought for democracy during the Emergency, in large numbers the people bowed to a strong woman, even worshipped her. Equally importantly, Hindu nationalists were endowed with a new legitimacy. The Emergency was not a parenthesis, but a turning point; its legacy is very much alive today.

Author: Gyan Prakash
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 069121736X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 452

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Book Description
The gripping story of an explosive turning point in the history of modern India On the night of June 25, 1975, Indira Gandhi declared a state of emergency in India, suspending constitutional rights and rounding up her political opponents in midnight raids across the country. In the twenty-one harrowing months that followed, her regime unleashed a brutal campaign of coercion and intimidation, arresting and torturing people by the tens of thousands, razing slums, and imposing compulsory sterilization on the poor. Emergency Chronicles provides the first comprehensive account of this understudied episode in India’s modern history. Gyan Prakash strips away the comfortable myth that the Emergency was an isolated event brought on solely by Gandhi’s desire to cling to power, arguing that it was as much the product of Indian democracy’s troubled relationship with popular politics. Drawing on archival records, private papers and letters, published sources, film and literary materials, and interviews with victims and perpetrators, Prakash traces the Emergency’s origins to the moment of India’s independence in 1947, revealing how the unfulfilled promise of democratic transformation upset the fine balance between state power and civil rights. He vividly depicts the unfolding of a political crisis that culminated in widespread popular unrest, which Gandhi sought to crush by paradoxically using the law to suspend lawful rights. Her failure to preserve the existing political order had lasting and unforeseen repercussions, opening the door for caste politics and Hindu nationalism. Placing the Emergency within the broader global history of democracy, this gripping book offers invaluable lessons for us today as the world once again confronts the dangers of rising authoritarianism and populist nationalism.

Author: Ramachandra Guha
Publisher: Pan Macmillan
ISBN: 1509883282
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 100

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Book Description
Ramachandra Guha’s India after Gandhi is a magisterial account of the pains, struggles, humiliations and glories of the world’s largest and least likely democracy. A riveting chronicle of the often brutal conflicts that have rocked a giant nation, and of the extraordinary individuals and institutions who held it together, it established itself as a classic when it was first published in 2007. In the last decade, India has witnessed, among other things, two general elections; the fall of the Congress and the rise of Narendra Modi; a major anti-corruption movement; more violence against women, Dalits, and religious minorities; a wave of prosperity for some but the persistence of poverty for others; comparative peace in Nagaland but greater discontent in Kashmir than ever before. This tenth anniversary edition, updated and expanded, brings the narrative up to the present. Published to coincide with seventy years of the country’s independence, this definitive history of modern India is the work of one of the world’s finest scholars at the height of his powers.

Author: Coomi Kapoor
Publisher: Penguin UK
ISBN: 9352141199
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 400

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Book Description
A searing indictment of the suspension of democracy In June 1975, a state of Emergency was declared, where civil liberties were suspended and the press muzzled. In the dark days that followed, Coomi Kapoor, then a young journalist, personally experienced the full fury of the establishment. Meanwhile, Indira Gandhi, her son Sanjay and his coterie unleashed a reign of terror that saw forced sterilizations, brutal evictions in the thousands, and wanton imprisonment of many, including Opposition leaders. This gripping eyewitness account vividly recreates the drama, the horror, as well as the heroism of a few during those nineteen months when democracy was derailed.

Author: Bipan Chandra
Publisher: Penguin UK
ISBN: 9351188930
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 384

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Book Description
‘When Jayaprakash Narayan, the leader of the JP movement in north India, pressed for the resignation of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, it prompted her to impose internal Emergency. In this fascinating account, Bipan Chandra traces the events that led up to this moment and makes some startling revelations. He finds that there was a real danger of the JP movement turning fascist, given the fuzzy ideology of Total Revolution, its confused leadership and dependence on the RSS for its organization. At the same time, despite the authoritarianism inherent in the Emergency, particularly with the rising power of Sanjay Gandhi and his Youth Congress brigade, Indira Gandhi did end it and call for elections. Finely argued, incisive and original, this book offers significant insight into those turbulent years and joins the ever-relevant debate on the acceptable limits of popular protest in a democracy.

Author: Bilal A. Baloch
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009032461
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 351

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Book Description
Comparativist scholarship conventionally gives unbridled primacy to external, material interests–chiefly votes and rents–as proximately shaping political behaviour. These logics tend to explicate elite decision-making around elections and pork barrel politics but fall short in explaining political conduct during credibility crises, such as democratic governments facing anti-corruption movements. In these instances, Baloch shows, elite ideas, for example concepts of the nation or technical diagnoses of socioeconomic development, dominate policymaking. Scholars leverage these arguments in the fields of international relations, American politics, and the political economy of development. But an account of ideas activating or constraining executive action in developing democracies, where material pressures are high, is found wanting. Resting on fresh archival research and over 120 original elite interviews, When Ideas Matter traces where ideas come from, how they are chosen, and when they are most salient for explaining political behaviour in India and similar contexts.

Author: Arvind Narrain
Publisher: Context
ISBN: 9789395073042
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
About the Book A SHARP AND NECESSARY ANALYSIS OF THE NATURE OF THE CONSTITUTIONAL CRISIS INDIA FACES TODAY In 1975, the Indira Gandhi government declared Emergency in India, unveiling an era of State excesses, human rights violations, the centralisation of power and the dismantling of democracy. Nearly half a century later, the phrase 'undeclared emergency' gathers currency as citizens and analysts struggle to define the nature of India's present crisis. In Undeclared Emergency, Arvind Narrain presents a devastatingly thorough examination of the nature of this emergency-a systematic attack on the rule of law that hits at the foundation of a democracy, its Constitution. This clear-eyed legal analysis of its implications also documents an ongoing history of constitutional subversion, one that predates the Narendra Modi-led NDA government-a lineage of curtailed freedoms, censorship, preventive detention laws and diluted executive accountability. Is history repeating itself then? Not quite. This book is an account of an inaugural era in Indian history. Narrain shows that the Modi government, unlike the Congress government of 1975, draws on popular support and this raises the dangerous possibility that today's authoritarian regime could become tomorrow's totalitarian state. A lament, Undeclared Emergency is also a war cry. It charts an alternative inheritance of resistance, acts big and small from the Emergency of 1975, the current day and times long gone. Dissent, Narrain says, is an Indian tradition. The Second Coming is at hand, and Narrain reckons that we have a responsibility to determine what it will look like. About the Author Arvind Narrain is a lawyer and writer based in Bangalore. He is a visiting faculty at the School of Policy and Governance, Azim Premji University. He is the co-editor of Law Like Love: Queer Perspectives on Law and co-author of Breathing Life into the Constitution: Human Rights Lawyering in India and The Preamble: A Brief Introduction. He was part of the team of lawyers that challenged Section 377 of the IPC right from the High Court in 2009 to the Supreme Court in 2018.

Author: Diego Maiorano
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 9351774716
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
Indira Gandhi's last years in office as India's prime minister ran from January 1980 to her assassination in October 1984, but until now no book has been devoted to her final term. Among the principal themes discussed in this innovative volume are how Indian politics and society changed in the 1970s, including the Emergency (1975-77), Congress's response to insurgency in Punjab, Assam and Kashmir, the rise of new forms of political mobilization in the early 1980s and the prime minister's relationship with the key institutions of state. Maiorano also reveals how Mrs Gandhi's policies in the 1980s impacted on the big industrialists, the middle class, the rich peasantry and the poor, thereby crucially re-orienting India's economic strategy. Autumn of the Matriarch is the first major study of Mrs Gandhi's last years in power, an important juncture in India's recent history, as it saw the emergence of trends that influenced the country for the next three decades.