Appreciation: India After Gandhi

The centerpiece of Ramachandra Guha’s long, thick, dense chronicle India After Gandhi (2007) (or as Larry says, “After Gandhi after Gandhi after Gandhi”) is Guha’s account of Indira (Gandhi #2)’s declaration of a “State of Emergency” in 1975, more or less halfway from Independence (in 1947) to the present. The immediate motivation was an unfavorable judicial verdict (students of current events in Pakistan will savor the comparison).

But the broader issue was, by her own account, the “increasing violence” prompted by “a campaign of hate and calumny.” A particular focus of tension was one Jayaprakash Narayan, “a veteran” (as Guha describes him) “of a hundred mostly worthy causes.” By Guha’s account, Narayan was a sometime associate/ally/crony of Indira’s father, the first prime minister, Jawarhalal Nehru. As Guha tells it, Narayan had got in over his head with a gang of mischief-makers who really did represent some sort of threat to good order.

Still, the ironies were too thick to miss. Here was Nehru’s own daughter squashing democracy by looking up Nehru’s old ally. Famously Nehru, in a British jail in the 30s, had written a series of letters to his daughter (then 13) outlining his hopes for a liberated India. A. M. Rosenthal, the New York Times correspondent during the emergency, speculated on what would happen had her father still been alive. He imagined: “Indira is in the Prime Minister’s house, and Jawaharlal is back to writing letters to her from jail again.”

The emergency was a rude conclusion to an era of idealism, but in the end it wasn’t itself as damaging to Indian democracy as one might have expected—Indira ended it in 1977, just as unexpectedly as she had begun it 18 months before. Far worse than the emergency itself was, perhaps, her restructuring of the Congress party—her father’s old vehicle, which emerged in her hands as in institution with no more reason for being other than to preserve the family name. This is why we have been treated to the spectacle of a reluctant airline pilot (her son, Rajiv) and an even more reluctant Italian housewife (her daughter-in-law, Sonia) wrestled against their will into elective politics, with the prospect of another generation yet to come.

The decline of Congress is one aspect of the progressive coarsening and vulgarization of Indian politics; another is the rise of the BJP, the Hindu nationalist party which seeks to replace the secular vision of the founder with a kind of populist ruffianism, predicated on the provocation of ethnic hostility. Guha shrewdly quotes Max Weber saying that “there are two ways of making politics one’s vocation: Either one lives ‘for’ politics or one lives ‘off’ it.” India seems to have settled into a world of two dominant parties who live off politics. As my friend Ray says, each seems to espouse populist redistribution (when out of power) and privatizing despoliation (when in).

In this respect, India may not be much worse off than many other of the world’s democracies, but is a far cry from the vision of the founder. Indeed, one of the strongest messages that comes through from Guha’s account is how lucky we were to have Nehru at all. He certainly wasn’t perfect: he was a patrician and a snob and he made bad decisions (e.g., concerning the allocation of resources for education) that hinder India yet today. But the Chinese got Mao and the Indonesians got Surkano: by comparison Nehru looks like a virtual saint.

Guha tells the story comprehensively, if somewhat ploddingly. It’s pretty clear that he is an old Nehru man himself, but he is largely fair-minded and clear-eyed. He doesn’t always seem to master the conceptual or analytical structure necessary to make sense out of his story: I would still like to know just how the nascent state fended off the peril of fragmentation. And there is much more to be said as to how old socialist India veered so far down the road to the free market. There is also one scandalous oversight: the utter lack of a bibliography (although the footnotes are pretty thorough). Still, it will be a long time before we have a more comprehensive or reliable account of this momentous chapter in the history of a great nation.