The Postwar Era's First Democratic Authoritarian

Antara Haldar

NEW DELHI – The 78th anniversary of India’s independence this month offers an opportunity to recall one of the most insidious moments in the country’s post-independence history: Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s 1975 decision to declare an emergency and suspend civil liberties. A new book by political scientist Srinath Raghavan, Indira Gandhi and the Years That Transformed India, not only revisits that fateful move, but also traces its lasting impact half a century later.

Raghavan’s unsentimental autopsy of India in the 1970s – one of the country’s most turbulent decades – is a timely study of how political power can be used to bend the scaffolding of democracy. He sets out to offer “an antidote to every generation’s illusion that its own problems are uniquely oppressive,” but the book’s themes resonate in ways that even the author may not have fully anticipated.

Gandhi, the daughter of India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, is often depicted as either a cynical all-knowing strategist or a hapless dynast. But Raghavan astutely dismantles both these caricatures. 

His Gandhi is a consummate improviser, operating within the “limits” set by bureaucratic inertia, economic shocks, a fraying Congress party, and the geopolitical uncertainty of the Cold War. It was a world not entirely unlike the one that the Global South finds itself seemingly locked into today.

Gandhi responded to these pressures with audacity – sometimes brilliantly, sometimes recklessly, but always with an unerring instinct for consolidating personal power. 

This framing matters. Raghavan rejects the lazy determinism that suggests leaders have “no choice.” Instead, he makes visible the political agency – and moral responsibility – that always determines political legacies. It is a lesson that today’s leaders would do well to heed. It also sets up the central tension of the book: transformation at the expense of democratic guardrails.

No episode better illustrates this trade-off than the notorious Emergency of 1975-77. After a court invalidated her election to India’s parliament, Gandhi declared a state of emergency, suspended civil liberties, censored the press, and sanctioned mass detentions. 

Raghavan’s treatment of this episode is forensic rather than preachy. But the facts speak for themselves. This was India’s first great democratic rupture, an object lesson in how the tools of a constitution can be turned against its spirit.

The Emergency also serves, eerily, as a mirror for today’s “strongmen,” who rely on the same kinds of legal justifications, national-security rhetoric, and vilification of opponents. Raghavan is no propagandist for a particular party, but the book’s reception demonstrates that even the most meticulous scholarship does not exist in a vacuum. It has become yet another part of India’s culture war, now a familiar fixture in the world’s democracies.

Since Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi came to power in 2014, the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party has consistently sought to discredit the Congress party (which has ruled India for a cumulative 54 years) and the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty. In this context, a richly detailed account of Gandhi’s authoritarian turn, however balanced, can become a gift to the powers that be.

This is not to fault Raghavan, but rather to acknowledge a truth that is too often ducked in polite circles: once history leaves the archive, it becomes raw material for the present. Selective quotation, stripped of nuance, is a bipartisan sport, and the Emergency can be deployed to score political points just as readily as it can be studied to understand the fragility of democracy.

Still, India’s “iron lady” is an enduringly fascinating figure. Everything from her birth as the much-beloved daughter of a famous father (and mother of a future prime minister, Rajiv Gandhi) to her 15 consequential years in power, her cultivation of a distinctive sense of style, and her assassination (by her Sikh bodyguards in 1984) makes for compelling biographical material.

To his credit, Raghavan resists the temptation to frame his subject purely as a cautionary tale. Thus, he duly recognizes what Gandhi would call her big achievements, from the swift victory in the 1971 war with Pakistan that gave birth to Bangladesh to the 1974 nuclear test that established India’s strategic independence to her nationalization of India’s banking and oil industries.

These were not symbolic gestures. They altered India’s economic and geopolitical reality. Raghavan demonstrates that they were inseparable from Gandhi’s centralization of authority in New Delhi and in the prime minister’s office. But the very decisiveness that enabled rapid change also hollowed out Congress’s capacity for internal debate. The result was a more streamlined organization in the short term, yet a more brittle one in the long term.

In reconstructing the 1970s, Raghavan gives us a case study in the universal dilemma of political leadership under systemic stress. When legitimacy falters and institutions wobble, even democratic leaders will be tempted by authoritarian shortcuts. Doing what is most expedient is more likely to produce visible results, at least initially.

But violating norms and undermining institutions nurtures a political culture primed for more of the same. From Latin America to Eastern Europe and beyond, the playbook is a familiar one: build legitimacy through crisis management, frame dissent as sabotage (or “treason”), and centralize decision-making to “get things done.” The state of exception that begins in response to an “emergency” all too often becomes the new normal.

Raghavan’s methodology is itself an implicit provocation. He writes with both archival rigor and political literacy, showing how structural constraints and personal choices collide in real time. But this dual lens is what makes the book dangerous. By revealing the workings of power, it is simultaneously a warning – and an instruction manual.

Indira Gandhi and the Years That Transformed India is more than a political biography. It is a study in the mechanics of power, the fragility of institutions, and the uncomfortable reality that democratic transformation and erosion are liable to share the same road. Gandhi’s story, told in 2025 (and refreshingly free of any “woke” romanticization of a formidable female leader), is a poignant reminder of the tenuous nature of democracy. In this era of ascendent political incorrectness, it is perversely ironic that the postwar era’s first strongman was a woman.

Antara Haldar, Associate Professor of Empirical Legal Studies at the University of Cambridge, is a visiting faculty member at Harvard University and the principal investigator on a European Research Council grant on law and cognition.

Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2025.
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