By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers

India And Democracy

The case of India shows that people do embrace the same country for entirely different reasons. In fact following the Beatles embracing an Indian Guru of some sorts, many scholars of that  generation got involved with India because they connected Hindu spirituality to the counterculture of the 1960’s and 1970’s, with as a result a serious setback for an uncritical history of the Indian subcontinents as a whole. Some of them even converted to what they saw to be Hinduism (that is one or more of the by then, already hundreds of variations thereof, which according to the latest statistics have grown to several thousands still counting, today July 1, 2007), and others followed Hindu gurus. Thus these students tend to focus on the mystical aspects of Indian culture and tradition. And some did produce outstanding work in Sanskrit, comparative religion, Indian literature, art, with often an emphasis on the sexual or pseudo-Tantra. These indeed hundreds of writers, instead of focusing the pre-WWII history of India followed by the arduous way of de-colonization, tended to focus on popular mystical aspects of Indian culture and tradition bereft of much if any reality even from a comparative-religious point of view. Others did indeed produce some respectable work in Sanskrit, comparative religion, Indian literature, and art with a in the USA, a special emphasis on sexuality in the form of a library full of books about mostly pseudo-Tantra.

In England the situation became somewhat different the past few years with a sort of ‘Renaissance’ of books that since the beginning of the 21th Century  started to re-investigate some more serious aspects of Indian History, just to take one recent example (never before reviewed to date!), but also the recent 'Great souled' Biography of Gandhi the man, plus of course the by now already a bestseller “India After Gandhi: The History of the World's Largest Democracy” by Ramachandra Guha, all three published within one months time.

The history of what is now called India (but only thanks to the British) is extremely complex, and there is no historical treatise that has been able to ad the whole of its history in a single be it also multivolume book. Tamerlane, or Timur Lenk (1336–1405). Timur Lenk means “Timur, the lame.” But the handicap did not stop Timur from becoming one of the fiercest and most successful of the conquerors to come out of Central Asia . For almost four decades, from the 1360s until his death, he and his nomad warriors conquered every territory from Mongolia in the east to the Mediterranean lands in the west and unwittingly became the founder of the British started to call India.

Quickly however the Ottoman Empire and Safavid Iran hasten to become both successor states of the short-lived world empire that Tamerlane had constructed between 1380 and his death in 1405. This except for Timurid its old imperial centre in Turan (Transoxiana or West Turkestan) had now fallen apart. And by 1500, because the shrivelled remnants of also Timurid could no longer defend it against the encroaching steppe nomads. Among its defeated Princes by now driven from Samarkand was Babur, who took refuge in what later became Kabul, in Afghanistan.1 In fact Babur’s instinct was strong. In 1519, with an army of some 1,500 men, he descended on to the North Indian plains like an Asian Pizarro to carve out a new kingdom for himself. He next entered Hindustan as was announced not as a Central Asian Barbarian, but as the representative of his advanced and cultivated family background.2 Thus the success of his conquistador regime built on his Timurid prestige and his control of the trade routes between North India and Central Asia, through which passed probably half of India 's most valuable exports.3 "Then in that harmless and disorderly Hind, plots of garden were ... laid out with order and symmetry ... and in every border, roses and narcissus in perfect arrangement" 4

It seems more than likely however that Babur's real intention from the beginning was, to use North India's resources to restore Timurid rule in Samarkand, Tamerlane's capital. It was his early death (significantly, he was buried in Kabul by his own command) and the policy of his son Humayun which ensured that the Timurid enterprise would be focused instead on ruling North India. In fact the North Indian world which Babur's successors would rule had been dominated since the eleventh century by Muslim warrior elites of Turkic or Afghan origins. By 1500, much of the Indian subcontinent was divided between the great conquest states they had founded: the sultanates of Delhi, Bengal, Gujarat, Deccan (splintering into five successor states by 1500), Khandesh, Multan and Kashmir. Only in Mewa (a Rajput state in North India) and in Vijayanagar (in the far south) had Hindu states withstood the deluge. The Muslim colonial elites, the ashraf, were anxious to safeguard their group solidarity. They maintained an intellectual 'Establishment' of theologians, preachers and judges as a way of preserving their distinctive culture against the risk of absorption by the Hindu milieu. To assert the permanence of their rule, they built mosques, colleges, shrines and emphatic monuments, like the impressive minar or tower at Chhota Pandua in Bengal.5 Within the sultanates their power was based on a system of semi-feudal land grants in exchange for military service, and rested ultimately upon the agrarian surpluses of Hindu cultivators, especially in the great North Indian 'fertile crescent' on the Indo-Gangetic plains.

This great revenue stream was the real foundation of Mughal imperial power. It paid for the army as well as a cultural programme that drew on the practice of Timurid Samarkand. In the Turko-Iranian tradition, followed by Tamerlane, Akbar projected himself not as a Muslim warrior-king, but as the absolute monarch of a diverse subject population. Since his official genealogy laid claim to descent from both Tamerlane and Genghis Khan, and thus to their legacy as 'world-conquerors'. Mughal court ritual - especially Akbar's daily appearance (darshan) on an elevated platform (jaroka) - emphasized the padshah's supreme authority over even the greatest and wealthiest of his subjects. The court was the centre of lavish literary patronage. It promoted the study of the Muslim 'rational sciences' and the writing of poetry, the main literary medium in the Islamic world. But Mughal court culture looked to Persian or Central Asian models for its art and literature. Persian was the language of intellectual life as well as of government. The life and landscape of Iran (not that of India) inspired the Mughal poets, who evoked a world far away 'from the polluting influences of the subject peoples'. Like Tamerlane before him, Akbar embarked upon a great building programme, of which the short-lived imperial capital at Fatehpur Sikri was the most astonishing product.

Akbar lived in unmatched opulence, at Fatehpur Sikri, in rooms done out in marble, sandalwood and mother-of pearl, cooled by the gentle fanning of peacock feathers. His hobbies were collecting emeralds hunting with cheetahs and inventing religions; he had as his plaything the Koh-i-Noor diamond, a gigantic, glittering rock weighing over 186 carats, then almost twice its present size. And according to Alex von Tutzelmann “Indians were accustomed to foreign rule. Since the death of the indigenous Emperor Asoka in 232 BC, large parts of the subcontinent had been conquered by Turks, Afghans, Persians and Tocharians Irians, as well as by Mongols. During a long and dramatic life, Akbar himself conquered and ruled over an area the size of Europe.6

In England, meanwhile, most of the population of around 2.5 million Jived in a state of misery and impoverishment. Politically and religiously, the country had spent much of the sixteenth century a t war with itself. Around 90 per cent of the population lived rurally and worked on the land, going hungry during the frequent food shortages. They were prevented from moving into industry by the protectionist racket of guild entry fees. Begging was common, and the nation's 10,000 vagabonds the terror of the land. The low standard of living endured by much of the population - two-fifths of which lived at subsistence levels - and squalid conditions in towns ensured that epidemics of disease were common. The Black Death still broke out periodically, as did pneumonia, smallpox, influenza and something unpleasant called 'the sweat'. Life expectancy stood at just thirty-eight years -less than modern Sudan, Afghanistan or the Congo, and about the same as Sierra Leone. This assessment of England in the 1570s has been drawn from: John Guy, Tudor England 7

Comparing Europe with other parts of Eurasia in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries requires (for European readers) however a certain mental adjustment. Our knowledge of Europe is so much more detailed that it is easy to see it as a cultural and political anthill that contrasts with the 'torpor' of 'oriental' societies. The existence of so many separate jurisdictions, with their own rulers, armies, laws and fiscal systems, all competing to survive, adds to the impression of a busy, energetic civilization. But we should not mistake all this activity (and the mass of paper it produced) for evidence that the European states had discovered the means to assert their predominance in the world at large.

Quite the contrary. The most dynamic elements in Europe 's early modern culture promised not so much a great transformation as a syndrome of destructive instability. The intellectual revolt against late medieval scholasticism and the 'rediscovery' of a much larger body of classical literature formed the main ingredients of 'Renaissance humanism'. The history, politics and rhetoric of republican Rome had a particular appeal for the urban, bureaucratic and class-conscious milieux of northern Italy and Flanders.8

But they also promoted a new conception of the secular state that undermined the claims of clerical privilege. They shaped a religious and intellectual climate in which the doctrines and institutions of the Catholic Church could be attacked far more systematically than by isolated heretics or social rebels. The astonishing success of the Protestant Reformation rested upon its rapid rise to intellectual respectability, its appeal to secular rulers (like the Elector of Saxony, whose protection was crucial to Luther's influence) and its association with the defense of urban or princely autonomy against the engrossing demands of dynasts and empire-builders. In fact religious dissent could easily be seen as posing a devastating threat to social, political and moral order at a time when population growth and price inflation were sharpening social conflict. Alarm at its spread prompted the papal programme of church reform enacted at the Council of Trent between 1545 and 1563, and the urgency with which Elizabeth I constructed the Anglican via media in England. But there was no let-up in the savage ideological warfare between Cath­olics and Protestants after 1560, vented in the French wars of religion and the revolt of Dutch Protestants against their Catholic Habsburg ruler. If Renaissance humanism had created a new social type - the self-conscious, competitive, calculating individualists imagined by Jacob Burckhardt (In his hugely influential The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, published in Basle in 1860. However, the book did not become widely known until the 1880s.)- and transformed the state from a conglomerate of custom into a 'work of art'.9

The Reformation had injected a spirit of rebellion, intolerance and dogmatism which threatened to make the jostling polities of the Occident ungovernable. Perhaps for this reason, the most attractive political idea of the age was indeed; dynasticism. The dynast was an ideal lawgiver, enjoying legitimacy through descent (by contrast with self-made despots) and commanding unstinting loyalty from his subjects. When fused with new notions of secular bureaucracy, and or the monarch as the glamorous patron of learning and the arts, dynastic rule was a powerful instrument for mobilizing social resources and imposing political order. In practice, European conditions sharply reduced dynasticism's potential. Local power still lay largely with aristocratic grandees and their networks of clientage. Their ambitions and rivalries were often more potent than royal decrees. They could evoke local patriotism and its attachment to custom against the centralizing schemes of the dynasts and call on the support of religious dissenters (or conservative resistance to a reformist regime). The grandest dynastic project of all, Charles V's plan for a universal empire uniting the Habsburg lands in Germany, Spain and the Low Countries under a single ruler, his son Philip, was wrecked by an alliance of German princes and Protestant reformers.

Dynasticism was also an unsettling force in a continent honey­combed with different jurisdictions. Dynastic prospects and policy turned on the accidents of birth and death, an endless source of claims and disputes. Dynastic 'logic' disregarded local autonomy or cultural identity. It ignored the balance of power. It provoked the bitter rivalry epitomized in the Valois-Habsburg wars in the first half of the six­teenth century. It also ruled out any united action against Ottoman imperialism in South East Europe or the Mediterranean. They would rather make peace with the Turks, declared the German princes in 1551, than accept the future Philip II as their ruler.l14 Horror at the infidel did not preclude a Franco-Turkish entente against the Habsburgs in 1536. Nor did it persuade Philip II to give up his struggle against the rebellious Dutch and concentrate Spanish power against the Turks in the Mediterranean after 1580.115 Far from imagining a common supremacy over the rest of Eurasia, European statecraft was obsessed with intramural conflicts. Symptomatically, the wealth of the New World was used to finance the dynastic ambitions of the Old. The huge increase in his income of American silver after 1580 allowed Philip II to pay for his W:HS of dynastic hegemony - though even this windfall did not save him from bankruptcy in 1596."

Dynasticism was also an unsettling force in a continent honey-combed with different jurisdictions. Dynastic prospects and policy turned on the accidents of birth and death, an endless source of claims and disputes. Dynastic 'logic' disregarded local autonomy or cultural identity. It ignored the balance of power. It provoked the bitter rivalry epitomized in the Valois-Habsburg wars in the first half of the six-teenth century. It also ruled out any united action against Ottoman imperialism in South East Europe or the Mediterranean. They world rather make peace with the Turks, declared the German princes in 1551, than accept the future Philip II as their ruler.10

Horror at the infidel did not preclude a Franco-Turkish entente against the Habsburgs in 1536. Nor did it persuade Philip II to give up his struggle against the rebellious Dutch and concentrate Spanish power against the Turks in the Mediterranean after 1580.11

Thus far from imagining a common supremacy over the rest of Eurasia, European statecraft was obsessed with intramural conflicts. Symptomatically, the wealth of the New World was used to finance the dynastic ambitions of the Old. The huge increase in his income of American silver after 1580 allowed Philip II to pay for his W:HS of dynastic hegemony - though even this windfall did not save him from bankruptcy in 1596." 12

We can in fact say that much of the intellectual and political energy of sixteenth-century Europe was consumed by the religious and dynastic warfare that racked the continent until the peace of exhaustion at the end of the century. Set against this background, it is easy to see why European expansion was  a  meager threat to the Islamic empires for example, or the great states in East Asia. European thought and scholarship seemed mainly absorbed by the pyrotechnics of theological argument. Scientific inquiry had yet to break free from the belief in witchcraft and astrological prediction to which most educated people subscribed. The great exception to this general rule of political and intellectual introversion was the spectacular growth of a maritime subculture.

Twenty-three years after she send Drake,in 1600, Elizabeth granted a charter to 'The Governor and Company of Merchants of London trading into the East Indies' for fifteen years. That expiry date was cancelled by her heir, James I, giving the East India Company exclusive trading rights in perpetuity. The only caveat: if it failed to turn a profit for three consecutive years, it voided all its rights. Thus a beast was created whose only object was money. It would pursue this object with unprecedented success. Over the following sixty years, the East India Company men's adventures in diplomacy brought them close to the Mughal emperors, and allowed them to gain precedence over their Dutch and Portuguese rivals. Despite their obvious superficial differences, the Indians and the British were to find that they shared many of the same values and tastes. Both societies functioned through rigid class structures, gloried in their strongly disciplined military cultures, and nurtured a bluff, unemotional secularism among their upper classes. Botb prized swaggering but ultimately gallant men, and spirited but ultimately demure women. Both enjoyed a sturdy sense of their own long histories and continual ascendancy. Complicated codes of etiquette were vital to their interaction; hunting on horseback and team sports dominated their social lives. As time went on, they would even discover a shared taste for punctilious and obstructive bureaucracy.

Famously, Akbar rejected the classic Islamic distinction between the Muslim faithful (the umma) and the unbelievers. He abolished the jizya (poll tax on non-Muslims) in 1579, and flirted with propagating a new religious synthesis of Islam and Hinduism.

See our former Sub-Indian Case Study for details on any and all aspects of the issues brought up in this article. Our July 2 and 3 articles are intended as updates to the extensive material we covered on each and every aspect, brought up in our July 2 and 3, 2007 article updates.

Returning from his visit to Stilwell's front on 7 March 1944, Mountbatten finally received his war injury. He drove his jeep over a bamboo stump and it flicked up into his face, hitting him in the left eye. Even the threat of blindness could not diminish his enthusiasm for action. Five days later, he was ignoring doctors, tearing off bandages and heading back to bother the real commanders.The battle of Imphal was beginning, with the large British garrison besieged by a smaller but effective force of Japanese. The Japanese were reinforced by the INA, which reached Imphal by May. The British garrison held them off until the monsoon rains came, literally dampening the efforts of Bose's men. The siege collapsed into retreat by 22 June, and the ragged remains of the INA, depleted by desertion and suicide, surrendered in Rangoon in May 1945. Whatever happened to Bose, the INA was finished as a political or military force.

Despite his disgust at Bose's totalitarian leanings however, Nehru was moved by the passion of his soldiers. The trial of INA officers at the Red Fort in December I945 would persuade him to swallow his long-held principle that, because he did not recognize the British regime, he could not participate in its legal system. He donned the wig and gown of a British barrister for the last time in his life to defend them.

With the WWII leaving Britain broke there was a very practical urgency to the desire to dump the Empire a.s.a.p., which had shown up most clearly during the Bengal Famine of 1943. During the war, the British had shipped grain and railway stocks out of India, weakening its domestic food supply network. At the beginning of 1943, Churchill ordered a cut of 60 per cent in sailings to the subcontinent, saying that the Indian people and the Allied forces there 'must live on their stocks'.13

But Bengal had been lashed by a massive cyclone in October 1942, and in the wake of that by three tidal waves.14 The rice harvest had been relatively poor during 1942 and 1943, prompting panic-buying in the market, stockpiling by producers, and a massive increase in the price of foodgrains that coincided unhappily with a fall in real-term agricultural wages.Around six million people were affected by the subsequent fatfiine, and between one and two million of them died.15 Hospitals filled up with wretched and emaciated peasants, suffering from dysentery, anaemia, cholera and smallpox; patients came in sweating from malarial fevers, and breaking out in the hard papules of scabies.16

Almost all of the dead were poor people in rural areas, excepting those few in the cities who contracted disease from the wandering sufferers. In the cool bungalows and elegant mansions of Calcutta, rich Europeans and Indians alike supped on plenty. Supplies were available, just at a price that the poor could not afford. Shameful fortunes were reaped from misery and hunger.

By 1946, the subcontinent was a mess, with British civil and military officers increasingly desperate to leave, and a growing hostility to their presence among Indians. In January British RAF servicemen mutinied in India and the Middle East, demanding to be sent home. Soon after, there were a couple of small anti-British rebellions in the Royal Indian Navy, but these were swiftly crushed and the officers court-martialled. Graffiti began to appear on Navy property in Bombay: 'Quit India', 'Revolt Now', 'Kill the British White Bastards'. In February, the crews of HMIS Talwar, Sutlej and Jumna refused to work or eat. HMIS Narbada turned its guns on the Bombay Yacht Club. The Congress flag was raised, and a riot broke out in the town. In Karachi, the crew of HMIS Hindustan shouted 'Jai Hind' - the old INA slogan, 'Victory to India ' - and opened fire on the town, but were quickly arrested. The next day, the Army fired on the mutineers at Bombay and crushed them swiftly too.17

The reaction to these mutinies had shown that the British could still put down dissent if they wished. That would not be the case for much longer. The granting of leave to civil and military officers after the war would mean that many parts of India had to be run by a skeleton staff. More importantly still, as one civil servant pointed out, to reassert British power physically after the war would have been politically impossible: "neither British opinion nor world opinion would have tolerated it." 18

And then when they finally did leave and allow the population to choose its own way, in what basically where two major camps, with the Sikhs and a few other groups in the middle. The reason for this effect can in part be traced to the British policy of 'divide and rule'. The British found it easier to understand their vast domain if they broke it down into manageable chunks. But by the 1930’s they had become anxious to ensure that each chunck was given a full and fair hearing. And it thus was also a choice of the population of India itself it it wanted to unity in a form of democracy clearly promoted by Gandhi, or be divided a decision they took upon themselves, and was in fact  a problem that plagued the whole of the former British Empire including Burma-- but also still India today. What subverts democracy, and what preserves it?

Case Study P.3:

 

What profit there could be to kill the only democrat in a country what unjustified calls itself the largest democracy in the world remains a mystery. But Nehru believed that the murder of Gandhi was part of a “fairly widespread conspiracy” on the part of the Hindu right to seize power; he saw the situation as analogous to that in Europe on the eve of the fascist takeovers. And he believed that the RSS was the power behind this conspiracy. In December 1947, he had already written to the provincial governors:

We have a great deal of evidence to show that the RSS is an organization which is in the nature of a private army and which is definitely proceeding on the strictest Nazi lines, even following the technique of organization…I have some knowledge of the way the Nazi movement developed in Germany. It attracted by its superficial trappings and strict discipline considerable numbers of lower middle class young men and women who are normally not too intelligent and for whom life appears to offer little to attract them.

(We can see here Nehru’s unfortunate tendency to condescend to the average citizen, which gave a great advantage to the RSS organizes, who never made this error.) After Gandhi’s murder, therefore, the RSS was banned, and some 20,000 of its leaders, including Golwalkar, were arrested. (The Hindu Mahasabha, which we now know to have been much more closely linked to the plot against Gandhi, was not treated this way and remained legal.) On his release from prison, Golwalkar tried to convince Nehru to lift the ban, arguing that the RSS was a valuable ally against communism. Eventually, after prolonged negotiation, and the adoption of a written constitution describing its purposes, RSS did win the lifting of the ban in 1949.

During the 1950’s, Nehru’s staunch insistence on state secularism and his watchfulness about the danger from the Hindu right, together with the lack of any issue favoring their rise, gave the organizations of the Hindu right a weak political presence. The Hindu Mahasabha adopted radical positions, including the disenfranchisement of Muslims, which leaders wanted to introduce as a change to the Constitution itself, and the annulment of Partition, by force if necessary. It combined these positions, however, with conservative pro-landowner positions, thus suggesting to many that it was an elitist group out of touch with popular sentiment. The party appeared to have no coherent agenda and exercised little influence. Meanwhile, the RSS worked away, at some remove from politics, organizing as a mass social movement.

In the 1960’s a new political party, the Jana Sangh, came to be closely identified with RSS. It adopted goals, such as a ban on cow slaughter, that had considerable traditional resonance and that began to garner some popularity. The RSS understood its role as that of an ongoing source of energy behind these political developments – in Golwalkar’s words, “the radiating centre of all the age-old cherished ideals of our society – just as the indescribable power which radiates through the sun.” The India-China war of 1962 gave Hindu nationalism an agenda against the dominant Congress Party – it had been to “soft” toward China – and the 1965 war between India and Pakistan helped the RSS to whip up fear and suspicion against Indian Muslims.

lndira Gandhi was thrust into the Premiership, in 1966, through the auspices of the Syndicate, who felt that Nehru' s daughter would be a significant asset in the upcoming elections. During the same period, communal forces in India sought to reassert themselves in the public realm, and were actively working with sympathetic Congress members toward this end. Thus the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (World Hindu Council- VHP) was established in 1964 by members of the RSS and other Hindu religious figures in order to promote the Hinduization of public life. Like their allies in the RSS, the VHP leadership believed that the political weakness of Hindus was rooted in their religious and cultural divisions, and that the strength of the community, therefore, could only be found through greater uniformity. This strategy of the VHP represented an effort to remodel Hinduism along the lines of the "Semitic" religions whose strength derived trom their greater unity and centralization of authority. One mechanism for promoting greater conformity was the targeting of minorities.

Although such activities were portrayed as cultural, they had political ramifications as well. This could be seen in the basic strategy of strengthening Hindu unity by stigmatizing various 'threats' to the nation, such as Christian proselytizing and Muslim separatism. A division of labor subsequently emerged, with the RSS and VHP taking the lead on religious mobilization, and leaving the more overt political activity to the Jana Sangh. Religious agitations by the former, though, were clearly intended to benefit the latter.

One such effort was the cow protection mobilization of 1966-7. While ostensibly aimed at eliminating the slaughter of a symbol of Hindu identity, this issue had historically been used as a means of stigmatizing Muslims. Due in part, to the fact that Muslims have long been involved in the leather industry and that some cows are slaughtered by Muslims for religious purposes. Moreover, the limited consumption of beef makes it extremely affordable for poor Muslims.

This particular agitation however was intended to mobilize Hindu sentiments behind the Jana Sangh. The government's response, however, was forceful. After a large demonstration marched on Parliament in November 1966-and sparked a confrontation that left eight people dead-Prime Minister Gandhi dismissed the Home Minister, arrested several activists, and threatened the RSS with administrative action. In doing so, Mrs. Gandhi demonstrated her steadfastness in the face of communalist assertion, and reinforced her government' s commitment to secularism. It also ended the VHP agitation.

The controversy over cow protection, however, highlighted the deep divisions that continued to exist within the Congress party between the left-of center secularists and the more conservative traditionalists. This polarization was exacerbated, moreover, by the economic policies of the 1950's. Nehru's efforts to reform the agricultural sector-particularly his proposed caps on land ownership, and the failed co­operativization program-had alienated large segments of the economic elite. Despite the limited nature of these reforms, they were nonetheless perceived as a revolution from above, and an attack on private enterprise.

These policies helped to coalesce right-wing opposition to the broader program of state-led development. lronically, though, the entrenchment of the one-party system had at the same time undermined the impetus for reform. The empbasis on socio-economic justice, which ad characterized the early reformist period, had given way to the temptations of office, and the Party was increasingly seen among the population as dedicated to the pursuit of patronage and the spoils of office. By 1967, the Congress party was no longer perceived as an agent of social change, but had, instead, become the 'underwriter of a inequitable status quo.

The national elections held in 1967 were subsequently a disaster for the Congress leadership. Although retaining power at the center, the Congress party lost a large number of seats in the national parliament, the Lok Sabha, and also lost control of several state governments. This reversal reflected the Congress party' s loss of popular support, and a growing disdain for the corruption of its leaders. The elections were als characterized by the defection of rich farmers and the landed elite to varlous right-wing and regional parties.

The electoral loss of 1967 also affected the internal balance of power within the party. The polarization along a left-right axis bad been in the making for some time, particularly on such issues as economic policy and reform of the agricultural sector. However, it became more pronounced as the progressives moved to support Indira in opposition to the conservative elements of the party.

The right wing had been advocating a greater reliance on private enterprise, and a corresponding de-emphasis on state planning. Consequently, it had supported efforts to reach out to the rich farmers and landowners. The left, on the other band, had sought to re-affirm the emphasis on socio­-economic reform and socialism, which were an essential part of the Nehruvian consensus.

The struggle between these two factions was evident at an All-India Congress meeting in July of that year, when Indira put forward a set of policies that fully associated herself with the left wing of the party. Although opposed by conservatives, many of the party bosses-weakened as they were by the 1967 elecrtons-went along with Gandhi' s initiative.

The struggle over the direction of the party continued over the next two years, and came to a head after the death of President Zakir Husein in May of 1969. The strugg1e to nominate his successor was significant since it would tip the balance of power to one faction or the other. The President of India, although a largely ceremonial position. has the power to invite one individual or another to form a govenunent. This, it was believed, would shift the balance of power toward one wing of the Congress at the expense of the other.

The conservative elements, backed by the Syndicate, blocked Gandhi' s candidate for the post, and subsequently nominated one of their own. In the following election, the conservative candidate was defeated by a coalition of Indira's supporters, leftist parties, the DMK(a caste based party), and the Muslim league. A candidate who was supportive of Indira (running as an independent) subsequently won the vote. Within this same time period, Indira stripped Morarji Desai, a conservative Congress party minister, of the finance ministry portfolio, and took control of it herself. She then nationalized the banks, eliminated preferential policies for the former princes, and watched as her popularity soared. These actions led to a formal split in the party in November of 1969 and the formation of rival organizations, the Congress (Rerequisitionists) led by Indira, and the Congress (O/Organization) which represented the conservative opposition.

Thus Indira's politics and rhetoric during the 1971 elections were defined by an increasingly leftist populism. Since the split with the conservative faction, Indira had come to rule India with a coalition of minority and leftist parties.89 Her main opposition was a coalition alliance composed of the Congress (0), the Jana Sangh, and other right wing parties. The latter groups mobilized around tbe motto: "Indira Hatao!" (Remove Indira!), to which Indira's supporters responded with the campaign theme: "Garibi Hatao" (abolish poverty). By emphasizing the issue of poverty, Indira was able to refocus the 1971 campaign upon the core themes of Congress legitimacy, social­ economic reform, seeularism and socialism. A key issue in the campaign was the abolition of the payments to the former Princes (so-called 'privy purses'), which Indira had tried to eliminate before. Similarly, Indira spoke throughout the campaign of the need to defeat those who opposed her efforts to bring about social change. She also targeted the Jana Sangh for its support of communalism-which was depicted as divisive-and promised the middle classes a strong, stable government.

The Congress (R)'s victory in the 1971 elections was massive. The party had won a clear majority, capturing 352 of 518 seats in the Lok Sabha, and Indira emerged as a dominant force with both a mandate and a political base. Moreover, the forces of conservatism were decisively defeated, and the Nehruvian consensus re-validated.

Indira's standing was further bolstered by the war with Pakistan in 1971-2. Perhaps the most significant conflict between the two countries, the crisis led to the military defeat of Pakistan and the creation of Bangladesh. Mrs. Gandhi' s determined leadership and ultimate success played weIl for her personally, and helped created the image of Indira as a Durga (Female Deity). More importantly, it translated into tangible electoral benefits, as her party won control of all the regional governments in state assembly elections held the following year. The opposition was unable to portray themselves as either more populist or more patriotic than Gandhi, and, as a result, had no campaign platform. There were several defining features of Indira's tenure during the early 1970's that are worth noting. The first, and most indicative, was a deep sense of discontent among the population. Despite the electoral gains of 1971, and the war with Pakistan, Indira's leadership rapidly fell into crisis. Much oft his derived from the poor economic performance ofthe state. Despite early economic gains in the 1950's and 60's-and the passage of various anti-poverty programs-industrial development remained stagnant, unemployment was high, and poverty remained pervasive. The economic situation was the product of a variety of factors, including the war with Pakistan, the intlux of refugees trom Bangledesh, two years of drought and other factors.19

In rural areas, land was still concentrated in the hands of a few, and the inability (or unwillingness) ofthe Congress party to implement genuine reform left the social structure of rural India largely unchanged. Guerilla movements had already emerged in Bengal to take the social revolution into their own hands. In the late 1960's and early 1970's, an armed peasant movement in Bengal emerged. Organized by a militant faction of the Comrnunist party (the Naxalites), the peasants took land reform into their own hands and seized property, burned records of ownership, and kiIled the landlords.

The expectations among urban laborers (and middle classes) similarly went unfulfilled. These trends were exacerbated by the 1973 economic crisis-sparked by the oil shock of the 1973 Middle East war-which led to higher food prices, inflation and recession. The resulting discontent was manifest in a series of strikes across the country that culminated in a bitter railway strike in 1974.

A second, trend was the centralization of state power and party control. Indira's defeat ofthe former party bosses, and the electoral gains of Congress (R), significantly shifted the balance of power within the government. Under the new regime, the centralleadership appointed the Chief Ministers of the various states who served only so long as they bad the center's support. 'Ibis provided Mrs. Gandhi a great deal of control over the regional govemments, and reflected a degree of bureaucratic centralization that bad not existed during Nehru's tenure. Similarly, within the party, Mrs. Gandhi sought to undermine the state branches which bad previously been the institutional base of the party bosses. Internal party elections were eliminated,and positions within the party structure at alllevels-state, local and national-were filled by appointment from above rather than by election from below.20

The result was a clear weakening of the party as an institution; since the regional organizations were no longer run by local elites, its traditional capacity for dealing with community issues-and mediating inter-group conflict-was significantly diminished. These two trends, moreover, were very much intertwined; diminishing the influence of local networks was crucial in centralizing power within the state.

A third, and related, point was the emergence of a new style of populist politics. The traditional party structure bad long relied upon the local party machinery to interact with regional elites and deliver the popular vote. This reflected both the ability of local party bosses to direct voter preferences-and mobilize their populations-as weIl as to mediate between national demands and community interests. This electoral strategy worked weIl in maintaining Congress hegemony throughout the Nehru period, even if it served as a stumbling block to the social reforms promoted by the center. Indira's new populist politics, however, was premised upon bypassing the traditional party structure, and reaching out to the population directly. Through mass communication, modem advertising and national campaigns, the Congress (R) actively nurtured a cult of lndira.

Associated with this style of politics was the Congress Party's corresponding loss of ideological commitment. Although the debate in 1971 was a serious one-and reflected a major challenge to the Nehruvian consensus-the policies that bad won the election remained unimplemented, and, perhaps, were never intended to be. What this illustrated was an instrumentalist approach to ideology that demonstrated the lack of seriousness with which party platforms were now taken. As elections came to be fought through the mass media, serious programmatic debates were largely replaced with campaign themes, and elections were transformed into populist referendums that hinged on misleadingly rhetorical questions, like whether (people] wished to see poverty removed.
Moreover, this type of mass politics was intimately associated with the decline of the traditional party structure, and neither trend-the diminution of the party, nor the lack of substance of ideology could have occurred had the very nature of politics in India not change during this period.

This new, populist politics [of Indira's era] tumed political ideology-a serious disputation about the social design during the Nehru era-into a mere electoral discourse, use of vacuous slogans not meant to be translated into government policies. [The] shift of the Congress to populist politics quickly set up a new structure of political communication in which Indira Gandhi could appeal directly to the electorate over the heads of the party organizations. The relation between the party and its leader was turned around: instead of the organization carrying her to power, she carried them.

The volatility inherent in this type of mass politics became evident in 1974 with the emergence of the JP movement. This popular revolt was sparked by discontent over an increase in the price of food in both Gujarat and Bihar. This led to widespread civil unrest, rioting and anarchy, which, in turn, sparked a violent backlash by the government. Although initially led by students, opposition parties quickly joined these young activists and sought to broaden the revolt. In the Spring of 1974, Jayaprakash (JP) Narayan, a former socialist leader, came out of retirement to lead the agitation in Bihar, and sought to transform it into a nation-wide movement against government corruption. Touring Northem India, Narayan ca1led for the removal of Congress, and particularly Indira, who was identified as the "fountainhead" of corruption. Many opposition parties on both the right and the left ra1lied behind the so-ca1led JP Movement, and spread it to other areas of the country. Despite the amorphous ideology of the movement, the opposition was united in removing Mrs. Gandhi, and found that socio-economic concerns were an effective means for mobilizing popular sentiments behind their anti-Congress attack.

The involvement within the JP movement of the Jana Sangh, the RSS, and the Congress was extremely significant. On the one hand, the participation of these communalist groups was important because their activist networks were national in scope, and they were able to provide an organizational structure to the movement. The RSS and Jana Sangh, in particular, were essential in organizing street protests and popular agitations. RSS activists subsequently became a major force in the movement.

On the other band, these communalist groups saw the IP Movement as an opportunity to portray themselves as within the mainstream of lndian politics. Narayan's respectability, his ties to Gandhian idealism and his former association with the Socialist party provided an aura of legitimacy which extended to these organizations. Similarly, while the Jana Sangh had fared poorly in national elections-largely due to its continued reliance upon upper class and upper caste notables-the JP movement provided an opportunity for them to work with grass roots voters on matters of popular concern.

The influence of the Hindu right upon the JP movement can also be seen in its program of social reform. The socialist planning and industrialization of the Nehru era, and its corresponding program of modernization, was subject to attack and stigmatized as the source of both the corruption and the socio-economic ills of society. Moreover, the JP Movement depicted India as in astate of 'total crisis,' which was as much cultural as economic or political. The subsequent call for 'total revolution'--i.e. a revolution in every sphere of social life and organization- -sat well with the RSS and VHP which had long argued the need for a cultural transformation of society. The dominance of the Hindu right, along with Narayan's calls for the 'purification ofthe democratic process,' however, struck many, including Indira Gandhi, as fundamentally illiberal. The Movement's extra-legal tactics also brought into question its commitment to democracy.

The violent response by the government to the strikes, demonstrations and gheraos (protests) continued to fuel the tension between the state and its opposition. When, in the Summer of 1975, a decision in the Allahabad High Court declared Indira Gandhi's 1971 election to the Lok Sabba to be fraudulent, the opposition called for the Prime Minister's resignation, and announced a nation-wide civil disobedience movement intent on removing her from power. Two weeks later, on June 26, 1975, Indira declared astate ofemergency, arrested the opposition leadership, and effectively ended the JP Movement.

The 1975 emergency was declared, and justified, on the basis of preserving the nation. In the course of several speeches and radio broadcasts, Mrs. Gandhi argued that the stability, security, unity, the fabric and the very survival ofthe nation were in danger due to national and international threats.

She argued that opposition parties were working to undermine democracy in India, and that the emergency-a contingency allowed for under the Indian constitution-was necessary to preserve the established order. Indira took particular aim at the RSS and the Jana Sangh for their willingness to use violence, and to work outside of the established political institutions, to overturn a democratically-elected government. She also alluded to "foreign influences" which sought to subvert the Indian government in a manner similar to President Allende of Chile, who bad been deposed just two years before. The assumption was that the United States was working to undermine Mrs. Gandhi's position owing to her close ties with the Soviet Union.21

Finally, the Prime Minister justified the imposition of emergency as a necessary pre-requisite for following through on her economic reforms, which, she argued, bad been consistently blocked by the 'forces of reaction.' While the Emergency initially brought a degree of stability, it greatly diminished Mrs. Gandhi's popular support. Moreover, it was during this period that Congress (R)'s break with the traditional ideals of the Nehruvian consensus became particularly evident.

The harassment and corruption associated with this era, along with the anti-poor policies that characterized emergency rule damaged the Congress' s credibility as a force of progressive change. Particularly egregious were the so-called family planning and 'urban beautification programs' that were overseen by Indira's son, Sanjay, during the emergency. These programs entailed coerced sterilization and forced relocation of the urban poor, and relied upon the police and state apparatus to carry out these programs.

Both the slum clearances and the compulsory sterilization, moreover, disproportionately affected Muslim and lower caste communities, groups who were traditional constituencies ofthe Congress party. Sanjay's elose ties with private enterprise, and his illiberal tendencies, also characterized a new trend in the governing elite. Sanjay himself was the beneficiary of a government license and numerous bank loans to set up a car manufacturing facility which never quite got off tbe ground.22

Seth and Bhardwaj also argue that it was at this point that the forces of reaction worked their way back into the Congress by throwing their support behind Indira after her defeat of the Syndicate.23

When elections were finally held in March of 1977, not only did Congress lose, but both Mrs'. Gandhi and Sanjay lost their respective bids for parliament. 104 There was a debate as to why the Prime Minister called elections at this time; the conventional wisdom is that. being surrounded by sycophants and loyalists, she was misled about the popular perception of the Emergency, and thought she would actually win the election.

The opposition coalition that won the elections, however, was short-lived. It was composed of many of the same elements of the JP movement, and made the elections of 1977 a referendum on the Emergency. As such, they soundly defeated the Congress. However, the so-called Janata Front coalition quickly fragmented. They bad no unifying ideology-apart from a shared opposition to Indira Gandhi-and no agreement on state policy. This became problematic as tensions in the rural areas turned violent. Many of the rural elites, who bad long backed the right-wing parties, used this opportunity to roll back what few socio-economic reforms had been implemented in earlier years.

Moreover, caste violence in the rural areas became pronounced, as was the confiscation of land previously distributed through land reform. At the same time, communal violence and crime escalated. The Janata leadership was unable to deal with these issues since it was pre-occupied with keeping the coalition together. Moreover, the efforts to arrest and prosecute Mrs. Gandhi were badly mishandled, and inadvertently helped regenerate her support. As the Janata coalition crumbled, a number of former defectors returned to Indira's Congress [now Congress (I)]. When elections were called in January 1980, Congress swept into office, and Mrs. Gandhi was back in power.24

The Emergency and its aftermath reflected the diminution of democracy of previous years.106 Indira's rule prior to 1975 had been detined by the consolidation of authority within both the party and the state, which produced a highly centralized apparatus of governance controlled by a closed oligarchy.25

This trend undermined the federal nature of the state, and diminished the government's responsiveness to local needs and concems. It consequently strained relations between the center and the regional state governments. The centralization of state power-and the demise of the Congress party as an institution-also contributed to the govemment' s inability to mediate conflicts between different sectors of society, and forced the expression of dissent outside normal political channels.26

The centralization of authority also coincided with an increased criminality in Indian politics. There was a heightened degree of corruption in the form of kickbacks and bribes, as well as a large number of people entering politics with criminal records.Many of the younger cadres recruited into the Congress party by Sanjay Gandhi fit this description. More problematic was the emergence of a 'gangster' element which was employed by various political factions for the purpose of murder or intimidating opponents. This was seen in a variety of local and state contexts, and particularly in the police agencies which were becoming more and more corrupt, criminalized and lawless. These trends were also related to the alliance between India 's economic elites and its national leaders (particularly Sanjay Gandhi), who increasingly found that they bad a shared interest in constraining the poor. New laws were passed which banned the right to strike, and the state-working in conjunction with the landowning elite-increasingly targeted violence against the rural peasantry.

Associated with these authoritarian tendencies was Mrs. Gandhi's artieulation of a new nationalist diseourse rooted in religious eommunalism and fear of minority separatism. The turbulenee of the 1970's-particularly in regard to the radiealization of the poor and their disaffection from the party-created a erisis of legitimacy to whieh the ruling party responded by emphasizing its historieal role as the authentie representative of the nation. Dissenting voiees were stigmatized as threats to national unity, and the ruling Congress elite was portrayed as the only group eapable of proteeting the eommunity.

Of particular signifieance was the majoritarian nature of this discourse, and its link to security, ethnic conceptions of nation, and the stigmatization of minority populations. By depicting the separatist tendeneies and minority grievanees that had emerged under her role as 'anti-national,' Indira was able to marshal the Hindu majority behind her.

There were several important features of this new discourse. First, it was intended to redirect populist mobilization along new lines. The democratization of the 1950's and 60's bad mobilized the population behind a leftist program of social reform and development. However, these forces became increasingly frustrated as the opportunities for advancement remained closed, and state-Ied development failed to raise living standards on a large scale. The emergency can be seen, then, in part as an effort to restrain the populist forces which bad been unleashed by the Congress party, but now threatened its rule. Although the JP Movement was infiltrated-and some would say hijacked-by the communalist organizations, it nonetheless fed off a populist impulse associated with the disgnmtlement ofthe lower classes. Despite Congress's traditional commitment to economic equality, little bad changed in the 30 years of Congress rule.

Thus, the state could not allow the continued mobilization along class lines, and sought, instead, to shift public discourse away from socio-economic issues to those of religion and nationalism. A second defining feature of this new discourse was its religious orientation, and its clear appeal to the Hindu majority. The turn toward religion could be seen, superficially, in Mrs. Gandhi's public demonstration of her religious devotion, visiting (and inaugurating) temples around the country,and cultivating an image of devoutness. Indira was greatly influenced by Dhirendra Brahmachari, a elose associate of Mrs. Gandhi who established an influential ashram in Delhi, and had his own television show where he lectured on Yoga. Indira's turn toward religion became more pronounced in the aftermath of Sanjay's death in 1980.

She also began reaching out to activists within the Hindu nationalist community, relying upon her nephew Arun Nehru as a conduit, and increasingly surrounding herself with 'godmen.’ The communal nature of Congress (I)'s orientation was more explicitly evident, though, in the Mrs. Gandhi's rhetoric ofthe early 1980's. Initially, this was articulated in tenns of the 'nation in danger' -threatened by both internal and external enemies-but it became increasingly religious in orientation as the challenges were detined as emanating from 'anti-national minorities.' In a 1983 speech, for example, Mrs. Gandhi noted that in "certain places [Le. Kashmir and Punjab]" minoritie populations have been guaranteed rights and privileges, while the "majority community was being suppressed." 27

Similarly, in another speech to the Arya Samaj in November of the same year (1983), she explicitly stated that "our religion and traditions are under attack." 28

This theme would be reiterated the following year, when, in the aftermath of the assault on the Golden Temple in Amitsar, she claimed that ''the Hindu Dharma was under attack," and appealed to her audience for support in her efforts to save "Hindu [tradition] from the attack that was coming from the Sikhs, the Muslims and others." And Mrs. Gandhi was "engineering a Hindu religio-political revival, in the style of Zionism, a la Rabbi Meir Kahane." 29

Implicit within Gandhi's depiction of the 'nation in danger' was a link between national unity and state security. At the heart of her message was the claim that thenational security required a strong centralized state and continued Congress rule. By emphasizing the existence of amorphous security threats, the Gandhi regime played upon the fears of the population, and held the Congress out as the one force that could make them safe. Criticisms of Mrs. Gandhi and Congress Party rule were subsequently depicted as outright attacks on the nation. Similarly, dissent and the articulation of grievances were perceived as either anti-national or treasonous, and were commonly dealt with as problems of law and order and not politics.

The result was that political conflicts which derived fundamentally from a crisis in relations between the state and the regions, increasingly became articulated in religious and nationalist terms, and were depicted by state elites as fundamental threats to national unity and security.This discourse of religious nationalism was evident in the elections of the early  1980's. In the 1983 assembly elections in Jammu and Kashmir, for example, the Congress party based its electoral strategy upon an explicit appeal to communal sentiments, and played upon Hindu fears of domination by the Muslim majority. The main opposition to Congress in this state was the National Conference, a predominantly Muslim political party, which Gandhi depicted as 'anti-national" and "pro-Pakistani." 30

Similarly, in the 1983 local elections in Delhi, threats from separatists in Punjab and Kashmir were again made central campaign themes. In this depiction, it was only Congress that could defend the interests of the majority from the 'anti-national' forces that sought to weaken it.

This strategy was largely opportunistic in nature, for it was a reflection of the demise of the Congress Party's electoral base. Moreover, Indira now pereeived the reliance upon minority votes and upon the poor as a liability. The proliferation of Muslim and low-caste parties also siphoned off support from the Congress, while majority complaints over reverse diserimination were inereasingly vocal. Upper caste Hindus, in particular, perceived themselves as suffering diserimination from the types of off innative action programs that were designed to address historic inequities. The result was a 'Hindu backlash' against policics that were perceived as "pampering minorities," a criticism that had become a staple of the Jana Sangh's successor, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).

On the other band, the shift towards an explicit Hindu majoritarianism reflected a much broader ideologieal transformation that was rooted in the search for a new basis of authority. Since the Congress Party's historical commitment to a progressive agenda was no longer credible, an alternative means of populist mobilization was needed. The party subsequently sought to develop a new strategy that was premised upon reaching out to the Hindu majority, particularly the middle classes of Uttar Pradesh and the other states in the "Hindi Heartland."

RSS had always understood its role as that of the sun in a solar system, the center of a family of affiliated organizations. By encouraging the formation of distinct entities with similar ideologies, it could encourage the idea that this ideology was that of the nation as a whole, or of Hindu people as a whole. The most important such organization was the VHP, Vishva Hindu Parishad (All-Hindu Council), founded in 1964, with considerable help from trained RSS leaders. It is difficult to describe precisely the difference between RSS and VHP, in part because the two are typically so closely linked. VHP portrays itself as a cultural organization. It is less concerned with youth mobilization than RSS, although it later gave birth to a youth wing, the Bajrang Dal, a quite militant and often violent organization. In official ideology, there are few differences between the VHP and its parent organization. That is indeed deliberate, so that the ideology, stemming from a plurality of sources, should increasingly come to seem ubiquitous and natural. In style, VHP has evolved as a more openly confrontational organization, given to mass organizing and not averse to violence; it is less focused on asceticism and strict discipline. One of its tactics is to call on many diverse and even contradictory sources of inspiration, including (a highly selective use of) Gandhi, Tagore, and many others, so that it does seem to be a universal ideology. “No great Hindu figure has been left out,” write the authors of Khaki Shorts, Saffron Flags. “Rather than composing a distinct, defined lineage for itself, the attempt is to establish a complex, constantly proliferating and sprawling kinship network which stops only at the Muslim, the Christian and the ‘secular’.” From this point onward we may speak of the “Sangh Parivar,” the family of Hindu organizations (the name means “Family of Groups”) who work together, the RSS providing core values and direction for all.

But the horror that happened in Gujarat also shows us something else: the resilience of pluralistic democracy, the ability of well- informed citizens to turn against religious nationalism and to rally behind the values of pluralism and equality. In May 2004 the voters of India went to the polls in large numbers and gave the Hindu right a resounding defeat. Because exit polls, taken in cities and towns, did not predict this result, it is clear that impoverished rural people played a major role in giving India a new government.

Some of the issues that led to the rejection of the right were eco­nomic rather than religious. The BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party, the polit­ical wing of the Hindu right) had used the campaign slogan "India Shining," emphasizing economic gains through foreign investment in the cities. But the rural poor had seen few benefits from globalization, and their lives were not particularly shining. Many rural areas have no safe water supply, no reliable electricity, no public transportation, and no schools. (The literacy rate is around 60 percent for the nation as a whole; this average conceals large rural/urban and regional differences, and also differences by sex: the female literacy rate is no higher than 50 percent.) Voters living in such inadequate conditions reacted angrily to the claim that India was doing splendidly, a claim that excluded them and denigrated their struggles.

The economy, however, was not the only major electoral issue.

Prominent as well was a widespread popular rejection of religious extremism. The Congress Party, which won, had throughout the cam­paign drawn attention to religious tensions and strenuously repudiated the BJP's idea of India as a nation for Hindus first and foremost. Both party leader Sonia Gandhi and the new prime minister, economist Manmohan Singh, repeatedly insisted that India is a nation built upon 'equal respect for all religious groups and all citizens.

Coming back now to the question what subverts democracy, and what preserves it? We now can positively say that, in any democracy, the moral imagination is always in peril. Necessary and delicate, it can so easily be hijacked by fear, shame, and outraged masculinity. The real "clash of civilizations" is not "out there," between admirable West­erners and Muslim zealots. It is here, within each person, as we oscillate uneasily between self-protective aggression and the ability to live in the world with others.  

 

1. For Babur's origins and early career, S. A. M. Adshead, Central Asia in World History (London, 1993), pp. 131 ff.

2. J. F. Richards, The Mughal Empire (Cambridge, 1993), p. 6.

3. S. F. Dale, Indian Merchants and Eurasian Trade 1600-1750 (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 6-7.

4. Baburnama (Memoirs of Babur), trans. A. S. Beveridge (Delhi, 1921, 1989), pp. 531-2.

5. R. M. Eaton, The Rise of Islam and the Bengal Frontier 1204-1760 (London, 1993), p. 36.

6. Tutzelmann, Indian Summer, 2007, p. 12.

7. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1988, pp. 30-52; G.R. Elton, England Under the Tudors (Methuen & Co., London, 1955), pp. 229-51; J.B. Black, The Reign of Elizabeth, 1558-1603 (1936; second edition, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1959), pp. 251-67. Modern life expectancy statistics are from the World Health Organization's World Health Report, 2005.

8. See P. Burke, Tradition and Innovation in Renaissance Italy (pbk edn, London, 1974), p. 306.This book furthermore presents details for Flanders as the not so well known source for the Italian Renaissance.

9. See Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (Eng. trans. London, 1944), pt I.)

10. F. Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II (1966; Eng. trans. 2 vols., London, 1972-3), vol. 2, p. 913.

11. See G. Parker, The Grand Strategy of Philip II, London, 1998.

12. See G. Muto, 'The Spanish System', in R. J. Bonney (ed.), Economic Systems and State Finance (Oxford, 1995), pp.

13. W.S. Churchill cited in M.S. Venkataramani, Bengal Famine of 1943: The American Response. (Vikas Publishing House, Delhi, 1973, p. 8.)

14. Ibid, p. 4)

15. Famine Inquiry Commission, Report on Bengal (1944), pp. 1-2.

16. K.S. Fitch, A Medical History of the Bengal Famine, 1943-44 (Government of India Press, Calcutta, 1947, pp. 6-28.

17. Hamid, Disastrous Twilight, pp. 23-6; Report on the Royal Indian Navy Mutiny, AP: MS Attlee dep. 32, ff 285-9.

18. Penderel Moon, Divide and Quit 1961, pp. 62, 80.

19. See Bipan Chandra, In the Name 0f Democracy: JP Movement and the Emergency, New Delhi, 2003.

20. James Manor, "Parties and the party System," in Atul Kohli, ed., India 's Democracy: An Analysis of Changing State-Society Relations, Princeton University Press, 1988, p. 70.

21. See Oriana Fallaci, "Indira's Coup," New York Review of Books, September 18,1975.

22. See K.N. Setb and N.N. Bhardwaj, "Sanjayvad: A Study of the Phenomenon that Defeated Congress," Secular Democracy, April (1) 1977.

23. lan lack, "Sanjay's Untold Story," The Sunday Times, London, March 6, 1977.

24. Harold Gould, "The Second Coming: The 1980 Elections in India's Hindi Belt," Asian Survey, Vol XX, No. 6, June 1980.

25. See also Rajni Kothari, "A Moment of Truth," in State Against Democracy: In Search of Human Governance, New Delhi, 1988.

26. See also Pool Brass, "National Power and Local Politics in India: A Twenty-Year Perspective," in Brass, ed., Caste, Faction and Party in Indian PolWes, Vol. I: Faction and Party, New Delhi, 1984.

27. Mrs. Gandhi quoted in "Congress (I) and Minorities," Economic and Political Weekly, December 15, 1984, p. 2098.

28. Ibid., p. 2098.

29. Impact International, "India Votes for Dynasty, But Rajiv Rides a Holy Tiger," London, 11-24, January 1985.

30. See also Aaron Klieman, "Indira's India: Democracy and Crisis Government," in Political Science , Vol. 96, No. 2,Summer, 1981.

 

 

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