Autumn of the Matriarch

Title: Autumn of the Matriarch – Indira Gandhi’s Final Term in Office
Author: Diego Maiorano
Publisher: HarperCollins India, 2015 (First)
ISBN: 9789351774709
Pages: 261

Just as Margaret Thatcher is called the ‘Iron Lady of UK’, Indira Gandhi more than deserve the epithet ‘the Iron Lady of India’. In fact, the five major policy changes she had initiated – termination of privy purses, bank nationalization, Bangladesh war, the Emergency and Operation Blue Star – ended up with far more consequences for India than what Thatcher had made in her tenure for her nation. Most books and articles on Indira Gandhi concentrate on the Emergency and how she stifled free speech and put democracy on ventilator for eighteen gruelling months. This book concentrates on the final five years in her office which she won by sweeping the polls in 1980 which, in a sense, was an indication that the populace had forgiven her for the excesses of the Emergency. The research for the book is part of a PhD scholarship of the University of Torino, Italy, granted to the author. Diego Maiorano is a research fellow at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies, University of London. He has written several articles on Indian politics and society. He was associated with very prestigious academic institutions where his main topic of interest was contemporary Indian history and politics.

It feels like Maiorano have no exposure to India other than academic or personal interactions with the prominent personalities who had a role to play during the period under discussion. This brings in a refreshingly neutral feel to the narrative while exhibiting a few glimpses here and there of the ‘white man’s disdain’ of India and its society. A primer on Indian politics after 1947 is condensed into a brief section which covers Indira Gandhi’s ascent to power. This was different from that of her father and first prime minister of India, Jawaharlal Nehru. A combination of genuine popularity with the party’s remarkable ability to extract votes in exchange of patronage distribution ensured the Congress’ dominance over India’s political system in the first two decades after independence. However, after Indira became prime minister, corruption was institutionalized in the early-1970s. Industrialists factored in the cost of ‘donations’ to Congress party as any other cost involved in an investment. Indira was riddled with a sense of insecurity right from her childhood, which made her look at her rivals – whether in politics or party – with unease and hostility. She destroyed her own powerful party leaders who could eventually turn into enemies. State chief ministers were handpicked and nominated by her. With the suspension of internal party elections in 1972, she controlled the key positions in the party apparatus. Loyalty to the Gandhi family was an essential pre-requisite to guarantee a plum position in the party as well as the state.

The early-1970s was a restive period both in terms and national and global politics. The oil shock had set in motion a huge inflation. In Nehru era, higher education had received a disproportionate amount of resources as compared to primary and secondary education. This led to high enrolment of students in colleges. Employment for these became a problem and large scale student protests erupted everywhere. The quality of Indian democracy had steadily deteriorated since Indira came to power and the Emergency was only just another nail in the process. Indira destroyed her own party as an instrument for information gathering at the local level and was not aware of the resentment brewing in the countryside in 1977. She lost the election and was even jailed for misuse of power. However, the internal dissensions in the Janata party was unmanageable. Everyone wished to have a slice of power and had no compunction to backstab anyone who obstructed their way. Within two years, the Janata experiment failed and the party exploded into several fragments. Hence in the 1980 election, Indira and her party was the only alternative to chaos. She offered stability in the face of the disastrous economic and social situation brought on by the mismanagement of her adversaries. The electors bought her argument and she swept the polls. Her modus operandi remained the same as before. Most of her colleagues in the Cabinet were long on loyalty and short on original thinking and administrative ability.

Then comes the first half of the 1980s which is the area of focus of this book. The pyramidal system of corruption that had come into being in the early-1970s scaled newer heights. Many chief ministers were removed because their incompetence and corruption had become too much even by the prevailing permissive standards. The party high command continuously intervened in provincial affairs and direct involvement of central ministers in the administration of a state became quite common. They were haughty towards local leaders as exemplified in Andhra where Rajiv Gandhi’s chiding of state chief minister T. Anjaiah provoked N T Rama Rao to float a regional party to restore ‘Telugu pride’. Law and order situation severely deteriorated in the early-1980s. Punjab and Assam erupted into violence. The irony was that the rebel sponsored by Congress as a counterweight to Akali Dal in Punjab, Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale, turned a Frankenstein that ultimately led to the assassination of Indira herself. High-handed tactics employed in removing Farooq Abdullah in Kashmir might have had a role in fomenting militancy. The personalist conception of the Congress party became clear when following Sanjay Gandhi’s death, his brother Rajiv was inducted into politics. From that moment on, dynastic succession became the universally accepted rule, not only in Congress, but in most other parties too. A whiff of fresh air was also felt on the economic side. Indira took a radical departure from the past as she gave up efforts to bring about social changes through land reforms, progressive direct taxation, measures to restrict conspicuous consumption and control over monopoly. Seeds of liberalization were thus sown in this term.

Maiorano presents a closer picture of the socio-economic transformation Indira Gandhi was attempting to bring about. She tried desperately to woo the middle class. The party proclaimed her as a strong leader the country invariably needed. It also tried to substantiate the modernisation dream of the middle class and to stimulate its sense of national pride. Then she promoted the interests of the upper castes (p.121). The book alleges that the RSS actively supported Indira in her final years. Its workers campaigned for Congress and refused to support BJP (p.134). The author claims that her political message on the country’s unity was in many ways identical to that of the Hindu right-wing. The support of big businesses and kickbacks on foreign contracts ensured a huge availability of funds for the prime minister’s party (p.136). The author observes that the Punjab problem was completely avoidable and easily manageable if Indira had negotiated with those parties who did not share her own political objectives. To break Akali unity, Zail Singh and Sanjay Gandhi financed and promoted a hard-line preacher Bhindranwale who in fact campaigned for Congress in three constituencies in the 1980 elections. He was arrested for the murder of Lala Jagat Narayan but ignominiously released soon after, because the Delhi Gurdwara management committee threatened to withdraw support of the Congress in Delhi.

The book focusses on the somewhat irrevocable damage Indira Gandhi had inflicted on democratic institutions of India. The judiciary strenuously fought for its independence and eventually resisted to a large extent the attacks of the executive. Indira superseded the seniority of three judges and appointed A N Ray as the Chief Justice of India in 1973. All the three judges promptly resigned in protest. However, the parliament and the president surrendered without fighting. The author remarks humorously that the bureaucracy split into three groups – ‘the wives’ (those officers who are attached to only one party), ‘the nuns’ (officers who remain unattached to any party) and ‘the prostitutes’ (who attach themselves to whichever party is in power and switch when there is a change of government), the share of the last being quite high (p.167). Indira left behind three destructive legacies – she institutionalized corruption as a key feature of India’s polity; entry of criminals into politics which was started and legitimized by Sanjay Gandhi (p.211); and state institutions became a vehicle for pursuing personal and partisan ends coupled with the institutionalization of dynastic politics. The book concludes that Indira left behind a divided nation, though not in the physical sense of disintegration. India’s social fabric was badly cracked in the mid-1980s.

The author’s unfamiliarity to India is almost tangible in the narrative as he relies solely on newspaper reports and personal interviews. This is accentuated by lack of comparison to modern Indian politics which he seems not to have followed in detail. At some points, the coverage is totally dependent on interviews with some of the prominent figures held a quarter century after the incident. It feels like the opinions they expressed are taken at face value. Indira’s attempts to subjugate India’s institutions for personal domination is a self-professed recurring theme in the book. Maiorano focusses only on politics and leaves out the economic aspects of her rule. This is a great drawback as her U-turn from the socialist path is not sufficiently elaborated. It is true that the author has provided some coverage on this topic and remarks that the government’s focus shifted from the rural poor to the urban middle class in the 1980s. Indira’s encounter with the judiciary is also only glimpsed at. This may be because the most dramatic period of the tussle happened before the Emergency. The lack of coverage on the personal aspects of the prime minister such as her itinerary in the final weeks and the repercussions in the country after Operation Blue Star are glaring. Written from a typical European perspective, the author trivializes the aftereffects of illegal immigration from Bangladesh into India’s northeast, specifically Assam. For the Assamese middle class, he says, what was at stake was control over the state institutions which in turn were the key to the allocation of most middle class jobs (p.114). The grave Assamese concerns over the takeover of their state by illegal Bangladeshi Muslims goes above the author’s head probably because he was not aware of the deeply religious nature of India’s partition and how the district of Sylhet was taken away from Assam to merge with Pakistan because the Muslims had by then become a numerical majority in the district as a result of unchecked immigration.

The book is recommended.

Rating: 3 Star

The Conscience Network

Title: The Conscience Network – A Chronicle of Resistance to a Dictatorship
Author: Sugata Srinivasaraju
Publisher: Vintage, 2025 (First)
ISBN: 9780670096787
Pages: 554

If you are in the habit of judging a book by its cover, this one would look like another run-of-the-mill product on Emergency for which there is no dearth. It describes the organisation and the methods through which Indians in the US – staying there for study or employment – resisted the Emergency declared by Prime Minister Indira Gandhi in India in Jun 1975 to Mar 1977. The organisation followed a path independent of Cold War leanings and was guided by nonviolent Gandhian action. It recounts a nearly forgotten story of resistance to the Emergency, its manner of construction, its philosophy and pursuance which is fascinating and a compelling read. This story is put together by a string of individuals in the USA. The role of Gandhians and Socialists and the networks they ingeniously made possible in the US to fight the Emergency have been underplayed and unrecorded and this book claims to endeavour a correction on this aspect. Sugata Srinivasaraju is an independent journalist, author and columnist who has written for nearly three decades at the intersection of politics, culture and contemporary history. In the past, he has edited newspapers and run television channels and digital news platforms. He has four other books to his credit.

The business of the 1970s Emergency is still an unfinished business in India because the Congress party, which declared the Emergency and suspended democracy in this country for 21 months, have still not owned up the culpability nor regretted it. In other words, Congress still has not accepted the mistake of Emergency. In Jan 1978, Indira Gandhi herself took the entire responsibility for all the mistakes and excesses committed, but she caveated it by saying she did what she did to save the nation. In Mar 2021, Rahul Gandhi admitted that the Emergency was a mistake, but again qualified it by saying that the Congress at no point had attempted to capture India’s institutional framework. This was a plain lie because the Emergency saw the worst corruption and capture of India’s institutions. Raju observes that it was the dynastic succession of the Congress party that prevents it from fully owning up and regretting the Emergency which should have elicited an unqualified apology in any other civilized context. In fact, the political dynasty itself was a product of the Emergency. This book does not cover the excesses committed during that dreadful period in India where tens of thousands of innocent people were imprisoned for no reason and without trial. The repressive measures adopted by the Indira regime against overseas Indians who were part of the resistance movement such as revocation of their scholarships or impounding of passports are described in good detail. The book also indicates that Nehru had also exploited this provision in the Constitution for his political expediency. Nehru imposed the Emergency in 1962 during the China invasion and did not lift it for many months even after the ceasefire. It was also misused to repress citizens for innocuous and unconnected acts after labelling them as anti-nationals (p.150).

Even though the book is fairly huge at 554 pages, it is eminently readable and a pleasant experience. The resistance movement in the US was powered by a few individuals – S R Hiremath, his wife Mavis Sigwalt, Ravi Chopra, Anand Kumar, P K Mehta and Shrikumar Poddar. The first two chapters describe their backgrounds and how they ended up in America. It also discusses the political situation in India and the US in the 1970s. Jayaprakash Narayan (hereafter JP) started a movement called Citizens for Democracy (CFD) to fight the rot in economic and social spheres in India under Indira Gandhi. The expatriates created another organisation to mirror it and named it Indians for Democracy (IFD) which consolidated support and spearheaded the resistance program in the US. Despite the contradictions in the ideologies of the IFD constituents, the organisation firmly decided to adopt the Gandhian model and were not caught up in petty streams of power games back home. Amidst all the currents and undercurrents of ideology circulating around IFD, it remained steadfast to Gandhian ideals and methods. It could build support among pacifists, Quakers and the enlightened civil society of America only because Gandhi and his non-violent methods had cast a total spell in those circles. Noted Quaker leaders like Horace Alexander who had enjoyed a warm friendship with Gandhi and Nehru, intervened on behalf of the protestors and sent fact-finding teams to India. Indira allowed herself to be interviewed by them but nothing much came out of these meetings. The western press saw JP as another Gandhi-like figure and his was another freedom movement to rid India from corruption and dictatorship. There was a Cold War angle too, as JP was fighting Indira, who was a bosom friend of Moscow.

Emergency was a heinous assault on our democracy and there is absolutely no doubt that it should have been avoided. Still, the role of the Opposition in fomenting violent protests which were encouraged to be verging on open rebellion is traditionally not examined seriously. This book also follows this paradigm. Probably if Indira Gandhi had restricted the arrests to some leaders and refrained from muzzling the media, she might’ve had a presentable case. This book describes some activities of the Opposition leaders which would make us think that they were exceeding the limits of democratic decency. JP’s exhortation of Sampoorna Kranti (total revolution) was an indirect call to arms, even though he later wriggled out of such interpretations. He has been making revolutionary utterances on a continuous basis for a year before the Emergency. In June 1974, he demanded closure of all schools and colleges in Bihar for a year. He encouraged a no-tax campaign to paralyse the government. In July 1974, he exhorted the police personnel in Bihar to be guided by their conscience rather than illegal orders from their superiors. In Oct 1974, he directed student volunteers to set up parallel, ‘revolutionary’ peoples’ governments. In the same month, he threatened to hold parallel elections in Bihar if the elected assembly was not dissolved. On June 25, 1975, he repeated the threats he had been using in Bihar in Delhi and the police scooped him out to jail on the same night. George Fernandes was a firebrand trade union leader who led a 20-day railway strike in May 1974. He asked the railway workers to realise their collective power. A 7-day strike by them would close down every thermal power plant in the country. 10-days’ strike would shut down every steel plant which would then take up to a year and considerable expenses to restart. Moreover, L N Mishra, who was the Union railway minister and a crony of Indira Gandhi, died in a bomb blast at the Samastipur railway platform in Bihar. The perpetrators were not found. In view of all these, the ethics of the Opposition protests should be re-examined by a neutral party now – at a distance of fifty years chronologically from those fateful incidents.

The book provides a good coverage of the activities of the Indians for Democracy (IFD) organisation in the US. Several times they marched to the Indian embassy or local consulates holding placards and raising slogans. Official propaganda meetings were intercepted and tough questions asked to the local or visiting dignitaries. They also organised a 200-mile walking procession to rouse awareness of India’s fall along a slippery slope to authoritarianism. With press censorship in full throttle in India, the only arena left for the counterargument to exist was the international stage, especially the US and the UK. However, the monotony and low-key of the protests turned even the ardent volunteers off. About seven months after they had begun, the program slowed down because they were only repeating the speeches and was far away from home. All of them had other regular and full-time academic and professional duties to attend to. The regime retaliated with brutal swiftness. Scholarships of several students who participated in the protests were revoked and several passports were impounded. Anand Kumar of Chicago had a tough time managing a year without financial support. When the Janata government came to power after the Emergency, his scholarship was restored with retrospective effect. The year 1976 was not like the previous year for the protestors in America. The Western press took a graver turn when the general elections scheduled for that year was indefinitely postponed. It was a kind of confirmation of dictatorship. Some Indian leaders escaped from India through adventurous means to reach the US. Their work on foreign soil are also catalogued in the book. Subramanian Swamy set up the Friends of India Society International (FISI) which had RSS links. IFD had an uneasy relationship with it due to its socialist bias, but they got on well in view of the common enemy who was browbeating both. Ram Jethmalani also escaped to the US and obtained political asylum there in 1976, becoming the first Indian to get asylum from the Indira regime.

We also read about some eminent individuals who either came in support of the Emergency or were not vocal enough in opposing it. Non-political scientists and other professionals were understandably reluctant to take the plunge which was sure to divert them away from their academic pursuits. However, the leaders of the IFD were also professionals or scientists, so there was no hard and fast rule on who could qualify for volunteering for democracy. Noted physicist S. Chandrashekhar, later a Nobel laureate, and A K Ramanujan, eminent linguist and litterateur (not to be confused with the famous mathematician) were in the University of Chicago at that time engaged in research, but they were not interested in supporting the protests. There is a chapter on T N Kaul, who was India’s ambassador to the US during the Emergency, and was personally so close to the prime minister as to address her ‘Indu’, stoutly defended the Emergency at every step as directed by Indira. But after a few years since stepping down, he changed tone and admitted that Indira was surrounded by self-seeking sycophants and democracy was indeed in danger at that time. Powerful Christian groups in the US wholeheartedly supported the Emergency and came out in vocal agreement with it when the US Congress constituted a committee under Donald Fraser. James K Matthews, Bishop of the Washington area of the United Methodist Church and Charles Reynolds, secretary of the Ludhiana Christian Medical College, took the trouble to testify before the Congressional committee to extol the Emergency, but the prudent committee did not take them seriously.

Raju has followed a non-partisan approach throughout the narrative with a distinct negative bias. He includes the arguments against a particular organisation or individual without bothering to look deep into it or attempting to verify it. However, he leaves no party untainted and in that sense, keeps a fair and neutral stand. His characterizations are stellar and deeply convincing. He claims that the police ran the country during the Emergency and each police station was an independent republic with its own set of arbitrary rules, applied differently to different people. His observations on the extreme left faction, who were called Naxals, are noteworthy. Organisations like the IPANA were Naxal-minded. They were not angry with Indira Gandhi alone for having proclaimed the Emergency; they were angry with everything connected to the freedom struggle and since India’s independence. The book sports excellent diction. Rarely do we come across books of this genre. It was a pleasure to read Raju’s turns of phrase and assimilate the fine nuances. The book was written based on personal interviews conducted during the early-2020s, but the passage of half a century has not dimmed the colour nor dulled the pungency of the narrative of the protests which was a labour of conscience.

The book is highly recommended.

Rating: 3 Star

The Case That Shook India

Title: The Case That Shook India – The Verdict that Led to the Emergency
Author: Prashant Bhushan
Publisher: Penguin Viking, 2017 (First published 1978)
ISBN: 9780670090051
Pages: 314

India awoke to freedom at midnight while the world was sleeping on the fifteenth of August, 1947, as extolled poetically by Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru. 28 years later, on a hot summer day in June, it tumbled and fell headlong into a dictatorship instigated by his daughter and grandson. The dark night that began on June 26, 1975 would run till March 20, 1977, when the ruling party and its authoritarian prime minister were voted out of office by an indignant populace. Indira Gandhi’s era marked the pinnacle of military glory for India in the spectacular victory over Pakistan in the 1971 war. In fact, a triumph of this scale was not witnessed within a thousand years. But that was the only saving grace of her disastrous stint as prime minister of India. Having no regard for political ideals or personal integrity, her rule pushed Indian polity to the lowest depths of corruption, nepotism, separatism and sycophancy. Her populist policies devastated Indian economy in the name of socialism and put the country at least two decades behind among the world’s financial powers. In 1991, Narasimha Rao reset all that she had initiated in the 1970s and steered India back into the path of progress. Indira’s declaration of Emergency in 1975 was caused by many factors, the most serious among them Opposition protests that were growing in vehemence and stridency each passing day over price rise, loss of employment and grinding poverty. However, the proximate cause of the nation’s tipping over to dictatorship in 1975 was a court case in the Allahabad High Court in which a judge invalidated her election to parliament in 1971 which took away her claim to continue in office. This book is a detailed narrative of the case right from its filing in 1971 and till it was quashed on appeal in the Supreme Court in 1975. This is authored by Prashant Bhushan who is the son of Shanti Bhushan who was the lawyer of Indira’s opponent who argued the case against her. The junior Bhushan relies on the notes he had prepared in court while the advocates were arguing the various aspects of the case and his own father’s legal notes. This book was first published in 1978 immediately after lifting the Emergency and reprinted in 2017. You can find reviews of several books on Emergency in this blog, but this book is totally different from others as it has solely focussed on the legal aspect. Prashant Bhushan is a public interest lawyer in the Supreme Court of India most known for cases such as 2G and coal scam during the Manmohan Singh era. He is a vocal critic of Narendra Modi and the NDA government.

To say that the case against Indira Gandhi was sensational would be an understatement. The entire nation looked eagerly upon Allahabad as every legal point or loophole was assiduously dissected by both sides. It was the only hope of an Opposition that was suffering from a lack of leadership – or, the excess of it, depending on which way you look at it. The people’s verdict was crystal clear. Indira won by bagging 60 per cent of the popular vote in Rae Bareli constituency in 1971 trumping over the combined Opposition’s candidate Raj Narain. Shanti Bhushan was the senior counsel for Raj Narain who was confused on how to go forward in the case at first. The first draft of allegations claimed that magic ink was used in printing of ballots on special paper. This erased the mark stamped by voters while the pre-printed voting mark for Indira would become legible after a few days. This claim was so outlandish and ridiculous that it was dropped by the petitioner immediately and instead they focussed on corrupt electoral practices of Indira by exploiting her position as the prime minister of the country. The case trial lasted for four years in which four judges heard the arguments, the last being Jag Mohan Lal Sinha who pronounced the judgement in 1975. Oral evidence was recorded between August 1974 and January 1975. Indira Gandhi herself appeared in High Court for two days and bungled under cross-examination. Justice Sinha held Indira guilty and set aside her election as void and disqualified her from holding office for six years. However, he stayed the execution for twenty days for filing appeal in the Supreme Court. Justice V R Krishna Iyer of the Supreme Court formally stayed the High Court order but restrained Indira from voting in parliamentary proceedings. She declared an internal Emergency in retaliation and suspended the Constitution. She convened the parliament after jailing many opposition members and passed an amendment of all provisions of electoral laws on which she was disqualified with retrospective effect from 1971. This would have forced the Supreme Court to have no alternative than to validate her election. Not content with this, she introduced and passed the 39th Constitution amendment in just three days which forbade challenging the election of the prime minister in a court of law. So, by the time the Supreme Court convened to consider her appeal, she had changed all laws and even the Constitution itself to force the court’s hand. Bhushan explains the arguments and logic heard in both the courts.

Even though Indira Gandhi undoubtedly misused her power to quash the legal proceedings against her, the Allahabad High Court’s order also seems to be not furthering the course of justice. By setting aside a candidate’s thumping electoral victory over a minor technical issue, the High Court, in my opinion, acted irresponsibly and committed an equal misuse of power. Yashpal Kapoor, who was an officer-on-special duty in the Prime Minister’s Secretariat, was the electoral agent of Indira Gandhi. He resigned from his government post on Jan 13, 1971 whose resignation was accepted on Jan 25 with retrospective effect from Jan 14. He was not paid after Jan 13, nor did he attend office thereafter. However, the court refused to accept the retrospective part of the order and decided that Kapoor was still in official service till Jan 25. This made all political work done by Kapoor between Jan 14 and 25 a corrupt practice. The electoral laws applied from the date a person ‘held himself out’ as a prospective candidate. One would have expected this to come into force after the elections were officially notified on Jan 27. Justice Sinha made a strange observation here too. Court decided that the election became in prospect right from Dec 27, 1970 when the previous Lok Sabha was dissolved! Two days after the dissolution, on Dec 29, Indira Gandhi had replied to a question in a press conference that she doesn’t intend to change her constituency. Court presumed this to be her holding out as a candidate even though she was nominated by the party only four weeks later. Both these decisions made her electoral work a malpractice and corruption under law. Why did the court act in this obscure way to invalidate a clear selection made by the people? Reading between the lines, a motive is faintly visible to discerning readers. What follows is my own assessment and it is only an informed guess. This hostility might be a strike back by the judiciary for superseding three senior judges in favour of Justice Ajit Nath Ray for promotion as the Chief Justice of India in 1973. Justice K S Hegde was one of the overlooked judges. He had made an interim judgement in favour Raj Narain on a minor issue related to the same case that had gone to Supreme Court for consideration in March 1972. Ray’s appointment evoked strong resentment in the legal community and it is probable that some of the decisions against Indira Gandhi was coloured by this sentiment. In a total departure from precedent, Justice Bhagwati held in another election case involving a politician named A N Chawla that any expenditure by anybody in favour of a candidate as coming under his expenses. This clarification was made in Oct 1974 while Raj Narain’s case was pending in the High Court. Justice Sinha took cognizance of this judgment and added some more expenditure to Indira Gandhi’s account even though she still barely managed to be within the limits. All these point to the sad conclusion that the court too had exceeded its limits on legal propriety in this case.

The book provides a stark reminder of how large was Indira’s ego that brooked no obstacles and wanted total obeisance from all arms of the state, including judiciary. The 39th constitutional amendment was passed only for validating her election and forbidding anybody from questioning it in future. That both houses of parliament and half of the state legislatures ratified this piece of legislation in just three days shows the obsequiousness of her party whose leaders danced to her tune. The latter half of the book is dedicated to the appeal proceedings and the petition challenging the constitutional validity of the 39th amendment in the Supreme Court. Those who are not familiar with the scene of action in court would find it curious and a bit amusing to note the clarifying questions asked by presiding judges to the pleading counsels which sometimes appear to be naïve and childish. One judge asks, “if a company spends money on a candidate, is it an offence under penal code”? “Yes”, replies the petitioner’s advocate. The judge then asks to the astonishment of readers as to “how can the company be jailed or hanged”? The counsel then informs him that the person responsible for the acts of the company can be punished (p.231).

The book includes a foreword by M. Hidayatullah, former Chief Justice of India and former Vice President of the nation, who was a legal luminary. The only thing that is added to the previous edition is a preface to the 2017 edition which is penned by Prashant Bhushan. As can be expected, he assails the Modi government on long-standing issues and suggests unrealistic and unworkable proposals to reform even the fundamentals of elections in such a way that no party would ever gain an absolute majority in the parliament which would push the nation into confusion and policy paralysis. Of course, the judiciary and the lawyers would have a dream time deciding even minor issues as all disputes would have to be eventually settled in courts. His suggestion to adopt the proportional representation system of Switzerland is laughable, considering the size and nature of the two societies. This is all the more comic when one remembers that women were allowed to vote in Switzerland only in 1971. Many discussions inside court which are presented in the book involves the landmark Kesavananda Bharati judgement of 1973 in which the Supreme Court constrained the Parliament's power to amend the Constitution only to those provisions which are not part of the basic structure of the Constitution. At first glance, this may seem normal and even a healthy check on the House’s unbridled power. But the sting in the tail is that it is only the judiciary which can pronounce whether an amendment violates the basic structure or not. This plain usurpation of democratic powers by a few unelected judges who are accountable to none still continues. Parliament needs two-thirds majority to amend the Constitution, but a division bench requires only a simple majority to pronounce it ultra vires. Of course, Bhushan supports judiciary’s enhanced powers, but the danger is clearly visible. Two decades later, judges took upon themselves the power to appoint those who would succeed them. The collegium system is so opaque that it is not even amenable to judicial review. Still, the Supreme Court thinks that it does not violate the basic structure! The book is quite readable even though many legal points are minutely described. An epilogue on what had happened to the new laws and amendments introduced by Indira Gandhi after the Janata Party came to power could also have been included.

The book is recommended.

Rating: 3 Star