Being underestimated​ was Indira Gandhi’s chief political asset. Her earliest talent was for invisibility. To the men who surrounded her father, India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, she was a gloomy, awkward girl. To the socialist leader Ram Manohar Lohia, who tried and failed to dislodge her Congress Party from power in the 1960s, she was a gungi gudiya, a dumb doll. But Gandhi learned to turn such condescension to her advantage. The Congress elders who helped her become India’s third prime minister in 1966 imagined that they were installing a pliable cipher. Within a few years she had defenestrated the lot of them. A decade on, she mounted a coup.

India’s second prime minister, Lal Bahadur Shastri, died suddenly in Tashkent after signing a peace agreement with Pakistan. Gandhi, the 48-year-old minister of information and broadcasting, stepped into the breach. The oligarchy of provincial Congress bosses known as the Syndicate chose her mostly because of their distaste for Morarji Desai, the party’s austere number two: a urine-drinking, prohibition-touting Gujarati moralist. A Nehru at the helm at least promised continuity. In a country where hierarchy remained the national faith, where the Hindu majority as well as the Muslim and Christian minorities set store by the caste system, where deference counted for more than solidarity, there was virtue in being a nepo baby.

Indira was born, as her father liked to remind her, in the same month as the Russian Revolution. Her arrival was inconvenient. Nehru, the son of a barrister of some prominence in the United Provinces (Uttar Pradesh), was involved in the independence movement. His wife, Kamala, was also an activist, but suffered from TB and frequently had to retreat to sanatoriums in Europe for treatment. Indira’s early years were spent awaiting police raids. ‘The whole house was always in such a state of tension that nobody had a normal life,’ she later said. ‘It seemed my parents were always in jail.’

Her intellectual formation came in fits and starts: she went to bohemian schools in Poona and Santiniketan, where pupils dabbled in amateur verse and watercolours. She did receive an epistolary education from her father, who, from prison and with an eye on posterity, composed a series of didactic letters from the late 1920s on. He never sent at least 196 of them, which were later brought out by Penguin under the title Glimpses of World History: Being Further Letters to His Daughter, Written in Prison, and Containing a Rambling Account of History for Young People, a compendium of everything from philhellenism to the Soviet Union.

His instruction didn’t help her pass the Oxford entrance exam. In 1936 she failed the Latin paper and was dispatched to Badminton School in Bristol to prepare for a second attempt. According to her biographer Katherine Frank, her ‘name was entirely absent from the school magazine’. But she was noticed by Iris Murdoch, a precocious prefect and editor of the magazine, who remembered her as ‘very unhappy, very lonely, intensely worried about her father and her country and thoroughly uncertain about the future’. In her memoirs, Gandhi claims to have told her schoolmates, ‘I don’t like being away from India at this time, but I must get to know the British in order to fight them.’ This sounds suspiciously self-mythologising but it is in keeping with her character. Her world was always divided between friend and foe.

The stint at Badminton helped her, as intended, to get a place at Oxford, but her university career was short-lived. In the autumn of 1939, she too got tuberculosis (her mother had died of the disease in 1936) and was sent to a sanatorium in Switzerland. A few years later, recovered and back in India, she married the journalist and activist Feroze Gandhi – a Parsi from Allahabad and no relation of the Mahatma. Nehru disapproved of the union, perhaps resenting the attentions Gandhi had paid to his own wife; rumours of an affair circulated, though most biographers dismiss them. In the end he gave his assent, arguing that parents should not interfere in their children’s romantic life.

Within months of the wedding, Indira had become involved in the Quit India movement. A short spell in Naini Jail was followed by a long apprenticeship under her father, who was made interim prime minister in 1946, a year before independence. Feroze, who also spent time in Naini Jail, became managing director of the National Herald and acquired a reputation as a womaniser. He was said to have had affairs with three MPs (one of them Indira’s friend Subhadra Joshi), a Nepalese radio presenter and an upper-caste Malayali divorcée. More damaging to Indira was Feroze’s career in parliament, where he specialised in baiting his father-in-law’s government. His one enduring achievement before he died in 1960 was the passage of the Parliamentary Proceedings (Protection of Publication) Act of 1956, which permitted the press to reproduce parliamentary debates and protected journalists from prosecution. Two decades later his wife’s authoritarian government would repeal the legislation without a qualm.

Indira’s private life takes up only a few pages in this study of her premiership. Srinath Raghavan notes Feroze’s relationships, but not Indira’s liaison with M.O. Mathai, Nehru’s private secretary and, it turned out, a CIA informant. The story was deftly neutralised at the time, with Mathai being forced to resign, and became public only in 1978 when he published Reminiscences of the Nehru Age. In the expurgated sections of his memoir Mathai described Indira: ‘She has Cleopatra’s nose, Pauline Bonaparte’s eyes and the breasts of Venus,’ he wrote, adding that ‘in the sex act Indira had all the artfulness of French women and Kerala Nair women combined.’ He even claimed she became pregnant with his child.

After independence, Gandhi moved into Teen Murti House, the prime minister’s residence, as her father’s châtelaine and gatekeeper. For almost seventeen years she presided over the domestic side of postcolonial India’s first dynasty, privy to every cable, confidence and crisis of the new republic. Ministers soon learned that the most efficient route to Nehru’s ear was through his daughter. By 1955 she had joined the Congress Working Committee, vetting candidates for elections. Four years later, she became party president – the third Nehru, after her grandfather and father, to hold the post. Her first order of business was to dismiss, unscrupulously if not unconstitutionally, the government of Kerala – the second democratically elected communist administration in the world (the first was San Marino’s in 1945). ‘I intend to fight them and throw them out,’ she told the Hindu. It was an early display of the ruthlessness that would later find wider expression.

Shastri, Nehru’s successor, miscalculated when he gave her the information and broadcasting portfolio; he hoped to keep her occupied with ribbon-cutting. Within months, she was touring riot-hit Madras, assuring Tamils that the government had no plans to foist Hindi on the south, and brazenly telling the press: ‘Do you think this government can survive if I resign today? I am telling you it won’t. Yes, I have jumped over the prime minister’s head and I would do it again whenever the need arises.’ Shastri reminded her of cabinet discipline. ‘I don’t see myself as a mere minister,’ she replied, ‘but as one of the leaders of the country.’ When she took over in 1966, she didn’t tolerate ministerial independence. In five years, she split the Congress Party, waged a war and refashioned the state in her own image. In another five, she had paralysed the judiciary, crushed the press and suspended democracy.

At first things looked bleak. India was reeling from famine: a 17 per cent collapse in agricultural output meant the country was fifteen million tonnes short of grain. Oxfam arrived; ration shops opened, distributing food at subsidised prices; and Lyndon Johnson dispatched food aid on humiliating terms: India was to abandon co-operative farming, embrace family planning and – worse still for the elite in Delhi who prided themselves on non-alignment – moderate its criticisms of the Vietnam War. This ‘short tether’, as it was known in Washington, left Indians, as Gandhi’s critics put it, living ‘from ship to mouth’. There was little she could do. In return, she was promised $5 billion for the Fourth Five-Year Plan – more than twice the sum that India had received for the previous one.

This was the backdrop to what became known as the Green Revolution. Gandhi became convinced that India’s salvation lay in technology. High-yielding seeds imported from Mexico and the Philippines, chemical fertiliser and tube well irrigation would, she believed, achieve for the country what her father’s attempts at land redistribution and tax-and-spend had failed to do. Between 1965 and 1972 wheat production doubled, but the gains were confined to the fertile triangle of the Punjab, Haryana and western Uttar Pradesh. As regional inequality deepened, so did the gulf between classes. Smallholders unable to afford tractors or fertiliser were pushed out of their plots, swelling the ranks of landless labourers working for a new breed of ‘bullock capitalists’ with five to fifteen acres and a little capital – they were the chief beneficiaries of the Green Revolution. Class resentments flared, as these newly prosperous ‘backward castes’ sought to challenge upper-caste dominance as well as to assert their dominion over the Dalit peasantry.

In 1967, a peasants’ association in the Bengali village of Naxalbari rose up against landlords who had exploited legal loopholes to dispossess them. When the police arrived, they were met with bows and arrows; the landlords fled. For a few days the Mao-inspired insurgents governed themselves, dispensing popular justice, until the police returned and killed eleven villagers, including nine women and a child. The uprising spread, and before long the Naxalite slogan ‘China’s chairman is our chairman’ was being daubed on walls across Bengal. The same year, the Communist Party of India (Marxist) came to power for the first time at state level as part of a coalition in Calcutta, and took action to rein in landlords and moneylenders. Gandhi responded by parachuting in a red-baiting governor, Shanti Swaroop Dhavan, who dissolved the government. Elsewhere, too, landlords brutally reasserted their power. In Kilvenmani, a village in Tamil Nadu, 42 Dalit peasants were torched by their upper-caste landlords, all of whom were acquitted by the Madras High Court on grounds of insufficient evidence.

In Asian Drama (1968), an investigation into the economies of South Asia, the Swedish political economist Gunnar Myrdal memorably described India as a ‘soft state’, one that was unable to enforce laws, regulations or public policies effectively. But he didn’t mean it was a weak state. The Indian authorities, he observed, were capable of violence, particularly against the lower orders, but lacked the commitment, let alone the capacity, to bring about structural change. The toleration of poverty was a political choice. The ruling party, beholden to the gentry and opposed to redistribution, had long exempted the countryside from taxation – this in a country where four-fifths of the population lived outside the cities. Congress legislators were almost all landlords, and the party relied on them to mobilise the rural vote. It no doubt helped that in such a stratified society, hierarchical fealty replaced class solidarity, with the masses voting for their local Congress patrons, who exempted themselves from taxation and ensured that police and magistrates looked the other way when landlord violence occurred. The result was a state that was capable of repression but not of reform or redistribution.

Gandhi’s challenge was to free herself from the grip of the Congress-voting gentry without losing electoral support. For a while, the answer lay in progressive populism. She hitched her fortunes to the ascendant left-wing group within Congress, the Congress Forum for Socialist Action, with its programme of nationalisation, a living wage, land ceilings and price floors. When she fell out with the Syndicate in 1969 she formed a new Congress faction and reinvented herself as a tribune of the poor, in the manner of Perón and Bhutto. In 1971 she seemed to be riding high. She triumphed at the hustings under the slogan garibi hatao (‘get rid of poverty’), a riposte to her opponents’ war cry, Indira hatao. Then came military victory.

Amilitary​ historian by training, Raghavan is on firm ground in tracing the narrative of the thirteen-day India-Pakistan conflict, which led to the formation of Bangladesh. When Yahya Khan’s army enforced a crackdown throughout East Pakistan, driving ten million Bengali refugees and a cholera epidemic across India’s border, Gandhi authorised covert support for the Mukti Bahini, the guerrilla Bangladesh liberation army. By the time that Washington, courting Beijing through Islamabad, grasped what was happening – Indira’s being a ‘bitch’, Nixon told Kissinger, who replied: ‘The Indians are bastards anyway’ – it was too late. Delhi swiftly pressed its advantage, as the US Seventh Fleet steamed towards the Bay of Bengal to forestall Indian annexation. Within a fortnight Dhaka fell; 93,000 Pakistani soldiers became POWs. Bangladesh became independent on 16 December 1971. In the Indian state elections the following spring, the Congress swept all before it. For the moment, Gandhi appeared unassailable.

Raghavan is at his best in showing how socialist populism went awry and the Emergency – the authoritarian interlude between 1975 and 1977 – came about. The trouble began, he argues, with the bank nationalisations of 1969, which enabled a government too timid to tax the rich to siphon private savings into its own coffers. Compulsory bond purchases and interest-free deposits turned the banks into cash dispensers for Gandhi’s pork-barrel machine, enabling her to compete with the Congress grandees who had decamped to the opposition. But there was a side effect: a monetary jolt that sent inflation soaring to 20 per cent by 1973, even before the OPEC oil crisis that year quadrupled oil prices. The countryside seethed; the railwaymen went on strike. Deficit spending on salaries and subsidies led to stagflation.

In 1974, with the IMF hovering and Gandhi’s chief economic adviser (and future prime minister), Manmohan Singh, calling for moderation, she reversed course. Nationalisation was shelved, wages frozen, deposits and dividends capped. Labour unrest was crushed. Increasing indirect taxation meant that the bulk of the economic burden was borne by the poor. This was austerity in socialist dress, though Raghavan stops short of saying so. Student uprisings in Gujarat and Bihar led to the foundation of the JP Movement, led by the saintly, self-denying Jayaprakash Narayan – a conservative Mahatma of sorts – whose campaign against corruption pushed the socialists into an uneasy alliance with the Hindu right. When an electoral petition threatened to unseat her, Gandhi became aware of a pincer movement: the judiciary on one flank, JP crusaders on the other. In June 1975 she struck first, declaring a state of emergency, suspending elections, banning the opposition, and locking up more than a hundred thousand dissidents.

The Youth Congress, overseen by her son Sanjay, with his sideburns and swagger, and staffed by well-connected Delhi princelings, became her instrument of reform. In the name of ‘beautification’ and ‘family planning’, during the Emergency Gandhi mère et fils bulldozed thousands of slums and sent eleven million Indians to sterilisation camps. That was one way of getting rid of garibi. In Delhi, Jagmohan Malhotra, an admirer of Haussmann, uprooted 700,000 people, mostly Muslim and lower-caste, banishing one in six inhabitants of the city to the east bank of the Yamuna. The Emergency was a euphemism: the world’s largest democracy could never think of itself as a dictatorship.

India wasn’t alone in its descent into authoritarianism. As Raghavan notes, the oil crisis and America’s retreat from the Bretton Woods system upended exchange rates and sent inflation spiralling everywhere. The El Niño event of 1972-73 caused further disruption. Across the world, democracy was in retreat. Like Gandhi, Park Chung Hee and Ferdinand Marcos were both elected but became despots, staging coups and ruling by decree from 1972. Burma adopted presidential rule in 1974, Bangladesh followed in 1975, Sri Lanka in 1978; Pakistan’s 1973 constitution stipulated a highly presidential prime ministership.

Even so, Raghavan is too deterministic in arguing that ‘the lurch towards a coup d’état was inexorable,’ though it is telling that Gandhi had always taken a dim view of democracy. ‘Democracy is not an end,’ she once wrote to Yehudi Menuhin. ‘It is merely a system by which one proceeds towards the goal. Hence democracy cannot be more important than the progress, unity or survival of the country’ – by which she also meant her own survival. The party president, D.K. Barooah, put it more pithily: ‘Indira is India and India is Indira.’

Raghavan notes that the opposition, too, had lost faith in constitutional means. L.K. Advani, the leader of Jana Sangh, a Hindu nationalist party that had thrown in its lot with the JP Movement, held that ‘dethroning an elected government by extra-constitutional means has acquired legitimacy.’ But there was no symmetry: one side was marching on the streets, the other was pulling the trigger. Narayan’s demonstrations were permitted by a democratic system. His motley coalition of socialists and Hindu nationalists was scarcely poised to mount a coup. At most, it sought to generate enough disorder to force a snap election. Gandhi’s response was of an altogether different order. Until then, state violence had been reserved for the peripheries – the tribal belts and the north-east. The Emergency brought the frontier home. Paramilitary policing, mass detention and rule by ordinance were now experienced by the bourgeoisie.

Capital, meanwhile, applauded. The steelmaker, hotelier and airline mogul J.R.D. Tata praised Gandhi’s ‘refreshingly pragmatic’ approach: the trains ran on time, strikes ceased, markets rose. Two thousand union leaders were imprisoned and wages were frozen. Days lost to strikes fell from 34 million to three million; days lost to lockouts, a crucial tool for controlling labour, rose from seven to ten million. As even the New York Times observed, the Emergency regime was ‘profoundly schizoid. The left has been given control of the rhetoric. The right has been granted most of the tangible benefits.’

In January 1977, Gandhi abruptly ended the dictatorship. ‘We may never know for sure’ what prompted her to call an election, Raghavan writes, but it may be clearer than he thinks: she went to the polls because she thought she could win. As it was, the opposition came together, uniting to form the Janata Party – the People’s Party. Raghavan describes the election result as ‘an utterly crushing verdict’ for the Congress, though that is to overstate things. Janata took 298 seats to Congress’s 154, but the ruling party’s vote share fell only from 44 to 35 per cent. Turnout, at 60 per cent, was lower than in 1967 – hardly the citizens’ uprising against dictatorship of later nationalist legend.

With that election, India ceased to be a one-party democracy and the Congress monopoly cracked for good. Yet the Janata was never really a party so much as a coalition of convenience, combining socialists and royalists, Hindu nationalists and secularists. Predictably, it floundered in office, undone by infighting and presiding in 1979-80 over India’s steepest economic contraction of the 20th century. Three years after her fall, Gandhi was re-elected.

Gandhi’s final term was marked by insurgencies in Assam, Kashmir and Punjab, which together amounted to a civil war. In Assam, anti-migrant nationalism, rooted in late colonial resentment of Bengali ascendancy, erupted after the Bangladesh war. It led to the boycott of the 1983 election by Assamese nationalists, who objected to nearly five million Bengali Muslims being given the right to vote, and the Nellie massacre, in which thousands of Bengali Muslims were slaughtered, mostly by peasants, as Delhi looked away. In Kashmir, Delhi’s dismissal in 1984 of the chief minister, Farooq Abdullah, confirmed what the former governor – and Indira’s cousin – B.K. Nehru had warned: Kashmiris were now convinced India would never allow them even limited autonomy. By the decade’s end, a secessionist intifada had taken root.

Punjab was bloodier still. The Sikh nationalist Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale turned the Golden Temple in Amritsar into a fortress; the Indian army duly flattened it. Four months later, Gandhi was assassinated in revenge, and her son Rajiv, the dutiful prince of dynastic democracy, took power. Within hours, he had given tacit licence to the mobs that, led by Congress leaders, butchered three thousand Sikhs in Delhi. Despite Gandhi’s obsession with national unity, at the time of her death India was more unstable, more violent and more divided than at any moment since Partition.

Historians​ have approached the Emergency from different angles. Bipan Chandra recast Gandhi as a ‘sensitive’ and fundamentally well-meaning figure driven to excess by Hindu nationalists. Gyan Prakash, by contrast, made her the villain of the piece, a leader who snuffed out the liberal flame kindled by her father. In our book about the Emergency, India’s First Dictatorship, Christophe Jaffrelot and I argued that Gandhi’s direct rule represented a form of continuity. Nehru wasn’t a saintly democrat: he hobbled labour through lawfare, purged his rivals, jailed his opponents, arbitrarily dismissed governments and crushed dissent in the north-east with shoot-to-kill orders. It is unclear why Raghavan says so little about the Nehru years, since they constitute an essential backstory to his account.

Raghavan is an army officer turned historian. His first book, War and Peace in Modern India (2010), was a panegyric to Nehru’s leadership in wars with Pakistan and China. He defended Nehru’s ‘forward policy’ as a ‘cautious’ model of restraint rather than the provocation it plainly was. In his subsequent books, the idea of national righteousness has remained uppermost. This faith was tested by the election in 2014 of Narendra Modi, who could be seen as Indira Gandhi’s most obvious heir. Modi fuses her authoritarianism with open Hindu nationalism. The shift in Raghavan’s posture is discernible. The military adventurism and persecution of minorities during the Modi years have brought about a reassessment. Before 2018, he published three more books on war and foreign policy; now, after seven years of silence, comes this study, in which he is most at ease chronicling constitutional clauses, cabinet reshuffles and the endless choreography of who met whom in which bungalow. Analysis, let alone argument, is rare.

Modi was in his mid-twenties during the Emergency, still living in Gujarat. He opposed Gandhi’s regime and frequently travelled in disguise to avoid arrest, once dressing as a monk and on another occasion as a Sikh. He was involved in the printing of opposition pamphlets and in organising demonstrations. Yet his own rule has witnessed the return of a political style unmistakeably similar to Gandhi’s: a cult of personality; a hostility towards institutions in general and universities in particular; a meddling with the judiciary and a muzzling of the press; paranoia; an intimacy with big business; access to the vast, unaccounted flows of money sluicing through the electoral system. That last was Gandhi’s innovation. Corruption, of course, was Narayan’s obsession when he led the JP Movement, as it was the main concern of Anna Hazare, who in 2011 fronted the India against Corruption movement. For all the admirers who queue at the Indira Gandhi Memorial museum to pay homage to the blood-stained sari she wore on the day of her assassination, the taint of corruption still clings. I was reminded of it, of all places, in a North London ocakbaşı, where I found out that İndiregandi is Turkish slang for ‘embezzlement’.