Indira Gandhi's India : a political system reappraised / edited by Henry C. Hart.

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David Lelyveld

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Includes bibliographical references and index.

Introduction / Henry C. Hart --
The last emergency of the Raj / Robert Eric Frykenberg --
The civil service and the emergency / Stanley J. Heginbotham --
Mrs. Gandhi's pyramid : the New Congress / Stanley A. Kochanek --
The industrialists / Howard L. Erdman --
Communism further divided / Bhabani Sen Gupta --
India's rural poor : what will mobilize them politically? / F. Tomasson Jannuzi --
The military / Stephern P. Cohen --
Indira Gandhi : determined not to be hurt / Henry C. Hart --
Explanations / Henry C. Hart.

Henry Hart and his seven colleagues, all but two of whom are political
scientists, do not seek to explain the why of the Emergency, only the how. They
assess the ways in which the political institutions of India could be and were used as
instruments by Indira Gandhi in assuming dictatorial powers. The examination of
the "dual constitution" is most interesting. This is the despotic system, embedded
in the democratic one, which enabled Mrs. Gandhi to abrogate civil liberties and
still retain the support of such groups as the army, whose primary loyalty is to the
central authority. The book also devotes considerable attention to her tactics in
centralizing control, both before the Emergency and during it.
The other major question dealt with is what the Emergency might accomplish.
Would the contraction of civil liberties and suspension of elections facilitate economic productivity and redistribution? Most authors agree with Hart's assessment
that it would not. The absence of the press and of elections deprives the bureaucracy
of information and pressure to perform. Orders from the top are no substitute,
because the bureaucracy does not reach far enough into rural society to implement
programs without the collaboration of local groups. Without a new mobilization of
the rural poor, the bureaucracy will remain dependent on landed interests opposing
redistribution. The authors find little indication of Indira Gandhi's willingness to
follow this road. A question posed but not answered is whether the powers and
societal support available to her in the Emergency would have enabled her to do so.
There is space for only brief comments on each paper. On the premise that the
constitutional foundations of the current government are the same as those under the
British Raj, historian Robert Frykenberg shows how the "dual institution" allowed
the government to suppress the I942 movement while maintaining the semblance
of law. He sees the Emergency as a test of whether the British succeeded in their
final goal, bequeathing to India a constitution which would stand as an arbiter of
political conflict after the British were gone. The subsequent course and end of the
Emergency suggest that, for better or worse, the British succeeded.
Stanley Heginbotham begins his examination of the bureaucracy with a straw
man: why did a bureaucracy purportedly devoted to modernization not resist the
abrogation of civil liberties? The classical conception of bureaucracy would not have
led us to expect them to resist. His main argument is straightforward, that the
bureaucracy's devotion to law was not challenged by this constitutionally permissible assumption of new powers. Heginbotham rests his negative assessment of
the possible contribution of the Emergency to economic change on a cultural analysis of the Indian antipathy to entrepreneurship. I agree with Henry Hart's conclusion that culture is not a finely-based analytical tool, and would look elsewhere in
the political forces to which the bureaucracy must respond for an answer.