THE EMERGENCY of 1975 was the point of no return for Indian democracy. The story of the next five decades is, essentially, a story of the decline of liberal politics. India’s elite and middle classes abandoned the vision of the country’s founding fathers. The Emergency freed them up to disparage the pursuit of egalitarianism and sneer at the idea of shielding Muslims from the worst impulses of Hindu majoritarianism. But Indira Gandhi’s authoritarian interlude also jolted the oppressed masses into defiance and political autonomy. They gradually withdrew from the Congress party’s paternalistic hand and began to assert themselves in ways that shocked their former masters. For better and for worse, the nature of Indian democracy changed: the body politic, scarred and energised in equal measure, searched for new forms of life.
What began with Indira has culminated in the Hindu majoritarian regime of Narendra Modi. Years after she resigned as the British prime minister, the conservative icon Margaret Thatcher said she considered her greatest achievement to be Tony Blair, who transformed the left-wing Labour Party into a neoliberal force. With only some exaggeration, it could be said that Indira’s is Modi – the Congress’s nemesis, yet one who inherited her politics of authoritarian nationalism and forged it into a brutal instrument of Hindu supremacy. This illegitimate, if partial, political genealogy is buried in the unconscious of the Indian political class, desperately repressed both by Indira’s successors and Modi’s supporters. Among those who drew the crooked line between the two, Arun Shourie’s handiwork is distinctive.
Trained as an economist, Shourie emerged as an important public intellectual during the Emergency and turned into an implacable enemy of Indira Gandhi – and, later, of Rajiv Gandhi, her son and political successor. With the exceptional courage that would become one of his hallmarks, Shourie, risking imprisonment, accused Indira of being a fascist and relentlessly mocked her enablers in the upper and middle classes. In polemical essays, he called for the redistribution of wealth and for the masses to assume control of state institutions. As the executive editor of the Indian Express in the late 1970s, his “insurgency journalism” restored respectability to the press after its disgraceful abdication of duty during the Emergency. At the same time, his work as an activist helped open up new possibilities for civil society.
It is thus a minor irony that the inchoate, reactionary politics Indira improvised through the Emergency was hijacked and systematically constructed into an intellectual agenda for the Hindu Right by Shourie, her hated opponent. Initially inspired by leftist icons like Marx and Gramsci, he drifted towards the other end of the political spectrum after his first stint at the Express. Over the next three decades – in two dozen books, countless newspaper articles and any number of public lectures – he envisioned and detailed many of the themes that define India as we know it today: the unlikely union of capitalism and Hindutva, the spectre of leftist treachery, the rationalisation of dominant-caste superiority on the basis of “merit”, the presumed regressiveness of Islam in contrast to the putative greatness of the Hindu tradition, a paranoid fear of real and imaginary threats to the Indian state.