These new developments ultimately led to the split in the Congress. Gandhi, restrained by the growing power of the opposition in Parliament and the organisational men within the party, brought on to the national stage under the Kamaraj Plan, dispensed with the established norms of political behaviour. Consensus, which had provided the framework for the resolution of conflicts, became a casualty in the contest for the organisational machinery of the Congress party. Bihar suffered the most, witnessing nine governments, three spells of President’s rule and a mid-term election between 19. Coalitions and defections or floor-crossing became a key mechanism for seating and unseating governments. The attenuation of Congress dominance at the Centre and in states created conditions of countrywide political instability. The 1967 elections signalled the end of what Rajni Kothari said was the ‘Congress system’, a polity preponderantly dominated by one party. The book concludes that the subversion happened only after the Emergency was imposed, with Indira Gandhi concentrating powers in her hands and that the years preceding it were a period of political change within ‘normal’ contours.Īccording to the author, the two events that shaped the politics of this period were the 1967 elections and the split in the Congress party in 1969. The book seeks to examine the proposition that Gandhi subverted constitutional democracy by undermining institutions like Parliament and the Cabinet and established authoritarian control over both the government and the party after its split in 1969, making one recall Deb Kant Barooah’s remark, ‘Indira is India’. The defeat in the 1977 elections, humility and quiet dignity in wilderness and her comeback in 1980, showed she was made of sterner stuff, a glimpse of which was to be had during the 1971 War to liberate Bangladesh.
Her quest to assert herself culminated in the Emergency and its excesses the democratic functioning of a party based on consensus was relegated to personality cult and reliance on a select group of advisers invited the charge of depending on a clique. She had to break free from the stranglehold of the old guard and carve her own path.
A woman in the rough and tumble of electoral politics, she came into her own after her share of struggle, her being Jawaharlal Nehru’s daughter notwithstanding. Indira Gandhi is among the strongest leaders of independent India.
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