In Defense of Revolution: The Enduring Legacy of Indira Gandhi

by Purba Chatterjee and Sambarta Chatterjee

More than a century back, Mahatma Gandhi had articulated the aim of our freedom struggle as not simply political independence from British rule, but the flowering of new ideals that could confront the unique challenges of a modern world. This marked a new stage in humanity’s march toward freedom from poverty, hunger, and war. Our freedom struggle furnished the moral authority to stand against injustice anywhere in the world. This freedom was earned at a terrible price, and it had to be preserved and breathed new meaning into, in tune with the changing world.

Indira Gandhi was the last national leader who inherited and advanced this tradition. And yet, she is still to be fully grieved and understood by the generation that grew up after her time. In the decades after, there has been a second assassination, a concerted ideological attack against her legacy and the direction she was taking the Indian state in. The fact that she is lauded for her strong leadership during the Bangladesh war, while being vilified for declaring the Emergency, is a distortion of the historical truth that in both instances her stand was in defense of our freedom against the forces of imperialism, neocolonialism and white supremacy. The weak and seemingly paralysed Indian state that recent world events have brought to clear view, must be seen as a result of the triumph of these forces.

In recent months, the US has threatened India with a humiliating trade deal aimed at destroying our textile industry. It has repeatedly coerced India to end trade with Russia, although it recently  “allowed” us a limited window to purchase Russian oil, to stabilize global energy prices disrupted by the Iran war, a crisis of its own making. Days before the US and Israel launched this barbaric civilizational war on Iran, Modi addressed the Israeli Knesset, furthering a formal state relationship with Israel. The war began with the intentional murdering of hundreds of school children and the political and spiritual leader of Iran and the entire Shia Muslim world, The Indian government’s silence in the face of this unprovoked attack on an Asian nation we share ancient civilizational ties with is a break with history, and a reversal of India’s principled stand with the Palestinian cause in return for friendship with a genocidal state. Within the first week of the war, the US attacked an Iranian ship which was a guest of the Indian Navy, in the Indian Ocean, and killed close to a hundred crew members. 

All of this has catapulted the Indian people to demand answers: Are we a sovereign and independent nation any longer? Is the Indian state today incapable of standing up to the West, for all the talk of self-reliance and ancient civilization?

The urgency of this moment cannot be overstated. South Asia today is going through profound shifts. Forces of destabilization and counter-revolution have made significant gains and threaten the stability and sovereignty of India. Bangladesh just saw a violent colour revolution in 2024, which directly attacked the legacy of its liberation struggle, and left a society in complete chaos. Nepal and Sri Lanka have seen violent upheavals and face an uncertain future. Pakistan continues to struggle against its military which most recently toppled the democratic government of Imran Khan and still holds him captive. It is clear to everyone that these are movements orchestrated by clandestine forces of US imperialism, which has always seen and continues to see a strong and united South Asia as a threat. To confront these forces today, we must know the last time they were confronted, and defeated. Indira Gandhi was the symbol of courage then, for Asia and the world, and her legacy and her time must be honestly assessed today for us to deal with the present.

Advancing the unfinished revolution

Indira Gandhi not only inherited the broad democratic and revolutionary ideals of the Indian freedom struggle, but also the formidable task of translating them into the building and defense of a strong, sovereign, and modern Indian state. She set the nation firmly on the path of socialism. She led India to food security, nationalized 14 of the largest banks, abolished the privy purses of princes and made provisions for homestead lands for landless Dalits. She was a tireless soldier in the struggle to remove poverty and inequality from Indian society—ideas that ultimately split the Congress party, with the part that stood with her growing steadily closer to the masses. For the poor she was Indira Amma, the embodiment of their strivings and aspirations.

Indira Gandhi saw the world anticolonial struggle as an unfinished revolution, seeking completion in a new, moral world order. Amid the raging cold war and the global re-entrenchment of imperialist and neocolonial forces, she threw the weight of the Indian state towards nonalignment and the struggle for peace. She asserted that non-alignment was neither vague nor neutral—it was a defence of national independence and the right of the formerly colonized to determine their own political and economic destinies.

Her resolute stand against the forces that sought to re-enslave Afro-Asia is epitomized in her heroic leadership during the Bangladesh war in 1971. Sheikh Mujibur Rahman’s historical electoral victory in 1970 put him in a position to end the military dictatorship and form a government for the whole of Pakistan. In response, Yahya Khan’s regime arrested Sheikh Mujib and unleashed a horrific genocide on East Pakistan, forcing multitudes to flee to neighboring India, which was confronted with the heavy economic burden of housing and feeding one crore refugees. 

Indira Gandhi responded by taking a moral stand with the Bangladeshi people. She helped train the mukti-bahini and rallied world opinion for the release of Sheikh Mujib. On 3rd December 1971, Pakistan launched a military attack on India with the political and military support of America. Sadly, China too came to Pakistan’s side.

Indira Gandhi understood that this whole crisis was engineered to bring India to its knees and punish it for its anti-imperialist and nonaligned stand on the world stage. She knew that she was hated by Nixon and Kissinger because she would not let India be bought by the promise of aid or military support. In August 1971, she signed a historic Treaty of Peace, Friendship and Cooperation with the Soviet Union. When the US sent the seventh fleet to the Bay of Bengal to intimidate India in the Bangladesh war, they were blocked by naval units sent by the Soviet Union. Within 13 days, the Pakistani military surrendered, and India won the war.

The Bangladesh liberation struggle must be seen as a singular moment in history, marking the high point of a peoples’ courage and moral commitment to the struggle for freedom and self-determination. The world had not seen this before, the successful and ignominious defeat of Western forces at the hands of a formerly colonized nation. While this made Indira Gandhi a symbol of courage for all people fighting for freedom, it also made her hated among the Western ruling class. She herself was well aware that what had shaken the West about the Bangladesh war was that a dark nation had refused to be bowed down and dared to stand up to the wealth and military might of US imperialism. It demonstrated to the world that the freedom struggle was not a thing of the past, it continued to be the democratic instrument with which the people could fight to shape the future.

Counterrevolution At Home

After the humiliation of Bangladesh, the forces of US imperialism were handed yet another crushing defeat at the hands of a poor Asian people, the Vietnamese. Many nations in Africa also gained their independence in this period of revolutionary upsurge in the 70s. This resolute march of the dark peoples of Afro-Asia towards freedom, self-determination and a statehood rooted in socialist and democratic principles, was unacceptable to their former masters, and imperialist and white-supremacist reaction raised its ugly head.

In 1973, Salvador Allende, the democratically elected president of Chile, was assassinated and his socialist government overthrown by a CIA backed coup, to be replaced by the long and brutal military dictatorship of Pinochet. In 1975, the CIA orchestrated a military operation that assassinated Sheikh Mujib, the father of the Bangladesh nation, only three and a half years after it achieved its freedom. He was brutally murdered in his own home in Dhaka, along with family members and including his young son of 10 years. The day chosen for this heinous crime was 15th August, the day of India’s independence. Indira Gandhi was warned by many, including Fidel Castro, that she would be next. 

This was a time of strife in India. The Indian people were belaboured by the cumulative effect of successive droughts, the oil shock following the Arab-Israel war, and consequently rising inflation. The legitimate suffering of the Indian people was however exploited by the forces of counterrevolution—first through the Navnirman movement in Gujrat, and later by the Sampoorna Kranti Movement of Jayaprakash Narayan, which became synonymous with his name. These forces incited the youth and the middle classes to riots and violence, attacked the parliamentary democratic system through extra-constitutional methods, and demanded the resignation of Indira Gandhi.

It is important to take stock of the disparate political and sectarian groups that came together to attack Indira Gandhi and the Indian state. They included the RSS and the Jana Sangh. The Congress syndicate joined hands with the liberal and anti-Congress Swatantra party. The Communists too were split, with the CPI(M) actively opposing the Indian state. Incredibly, a large swath of Gandhians also came under JP’s sway, breaking from Vinoba Bhave, the leader who had most advanced the Gandhian ideal of nonviolent revolution through the Bhoodan and Sarvodaya movement. 

Another crucial factor was the counterrevolutionary role of the middle and propertied classes just like in the coup that took down Allende in Chile. Mohit Sen, leader of the Communist Party of India (CPI) assessed the situation as such: “Indira Gandhi's Garibi Hatao! received widespread support until it became clear that she intended to push the Garib forward even at the cost of the middle class.” He emphasized that the Total Revolution was no liberal democratic protest against authoritarian rule because there was no authoritarian rule to overthrow.

It is also important to understand the ideological mooring of JP himself, the so-called Lok Nayak. A participant of the freedom struggle, he was a founding member of the Congress Socialist Party in 1934. Aruna Asaf Ali, who was initially with the Socialist Party, assessed that it was a crude imitation of the British Labor Party—predisposed to social democracy and opposed to the Soviet Union. 

Although JP left the socialists to join Vinoba Bhave’s Sarvodaya movement in 1954, what  is little known is that he was at the same time pushing for closer national ties with the US and Israel. He had links to CIA backed projects like the Congress for Cultural freedom, a propaganda outfit for anticommunist cultural and ideological penetration. He visited Israel in 1958, met with Ben Gurion and attempted to give Gandhian sanction to the Socialist International, a social imperialist organization with close ties to Zionism. He, along with others such as George Fernandes and Ram Manohar Lohia, had also established the Friends of Israel committee in 1967, breaking with the ideas of Gandhi, Nehru, and most of the freedom struggle leadership. 

Vinoba’s most trusted disciple, Nirmala Deshpande, found herself alone among a handful that stood firm of the fundamental teachings of Gandhi and Vinoba, while 99% of Sarvodaya Gandhians joined JP’s camp, accepting the rhetoric of violence without question and abusing Vinoba Bhave, as much as Indira Gandhi. She was attacked and sidelined by the Gandhians for her courageous ideological opposition of JP, and described this betrayal as one of the most painful experiences of her life.

The Emergency—A great victory for Democracy

At a time when the Indian state was threatened by US imperialism on the world stage, the JP movement represented a threat to the Indian state from within. JP’s call for the army and police to oppose Indira Gandhi’s government could have had devastating consequences for our nation. The splits within the Congress, the Gandhian movement, and the Communist movement all reflected the clear contradiction between the essence of our freedom struggle and imperialism in a new guise during the Cold War. They reveal ideological forces that were opposed to Indira Gandhi’s call for deepening the substance of our democracy. They were opposed to her Herculean effort to take the national revolution toward socialism and shift the balance of democracy toward the working poor. They were equally opposed to the policy of Non-Alignment and closeness with the Soviet Union. 

The CPI(M), which had taken an ultraleft position following the Sino-Soviet split, entrenched its opposition to the Indian state on the basis–that it was a bourgeois state. The CPI stood on shaky ground, with only Shripad Amrit Dange and his close associates supporting Indira Gandhi in her stand against the counterrevolutionary forces that threatened the Indian state.

Indira Gandhi was still hesitant when the Allahabad High court judgement declared her election illegal on ridiculous technical grounds. Nirmala Deshpande recounted that Indira Gandhi was convinced by a message she delivered from Vinoba Bhave asking her not to resign. Mohit Sen echoed Dange’s opinion that while Indira Gandhi was hesitant in defending herself, she was “an aroused warrior when it came to defending India and the heritage bequeathed to her by Gandhi and her father.” On June 25, 1975, Indira Gandhi declared the Emergency, arrested agitators, and put curbs on the power of the judiciary and the press. She announced the twenty-point programme, which introduced sweeping land and agricultural reform, imposed an urban land ceiling, declared bonded labor illegal, and took resolute steps towards ending rural indebtedness, reducing prices and increasing production of essential commodities, among other radical measures.

These measures, and Indira Gandhi herself, had the overwhelming support of the masses, especially the poor and working classes. Unlike the West, which criticized the Emergency as an attack on democracy, the Soviet Union, Vietnam, Cuba, and other Non-Aligned countries supported Indira Gandhi’s actions. Even before the Emergency, Dange had led the CPI into mobilizing national and working class support against the JP movement, and in negotiating an honorable end to the railway strike in Bihar in 1974, instigated by George Fernandes, a follower of JP. 

Dange and Romesh Chandra—a leader of the CPI and of the World Peace Council—were instrumental in organizing the International Conference against Fascism in Patna in 1975, which tied the attack on the Indian State to US imperialism, and asserted that fascism could not be seen as separate from empire, neocolonialism and white supremacy. This historic conference, attended by lakhs of people, was held in a massive tent city named after Lalit Narayan Mishra, the railway minister of Bihar who was assassinated earlier in the year— seen by many as a CIA backed operation. The conference put forward a declaration that pledged solidarity with Indira Gandhi and with all forces for democracy and peace in India.

However, the progressive steps made under the emergency came under attack very soon. Sanjay Gandhi diluted the 20-point programme with his 5-point youth programme—focussed on family planning among other issues—which had little to no political substance. The people saw the excesses committed under his authority as an attack on their aspirations, and when Indira Gandhi lifted the emergency and declared elections in 1977, she lost. This electoral loss devastated the CPI, which apologized for supporting the Emergency. Dange however, stood firm on his assessment of the Emergency as a necessary step in the struggle against imperialism. For his ideological and moral consistency he was maligned and cast out from the very party he had helped found. 

The forces of Total Revolution did come to power, but not as total revolutionaries, as Mohit Sen put it. They had to work within the constitutional bounds of the same parliamentary democracy that they had tried to destroy. The lack of shared ideological principles and of a positive vision for the nation meant that they had very little to offer to the people. In less than three years, the Indian people brought back Indira Gandhi to power in an overwhelming majority.

It has to be emphatically stated, especially for the generation which has grown up on lies, that far from the darkest period of Indian democracy, the Emergency represented a historic victory over forces of imperialism and counterrevolution. Far from the tragic figure of the 1977 electoral loss, Indira Gandhi stands tall as a national leader who defended and preserved the sovereignty and integrity of the Indian state as the sole democratic instrument of the people, fought for and won by the blood of our freedom fighters. She won a great victory for the Indian people by holding at bay the playbook of counterrevolutionary forces that took down the national states of Bangladesh, Chile, Ghana, Congo and countless others. We still benefit from her courageous stand. And it was precisely because she was victorious, that she had to be assassinated.

Conclusion

Our times are ripe with ideological and moral confusion. It is not enough to seek easy answers to the challenges we face, they have to be assessed in the context of India’s unfinished revolution, which Indira Gandhi sought to take to its completion. The period of the Emergency shows that the criteria to judge a political movement is not whether it claims the authority of the Left or the Right, but whether it carries the authority of the people and advances their aspirations. This history shows that to deal with the questions facing the Indian state today, we must see in them the culmination of forces that attacked the Indian state under Indira Gandhi’s leadership. 

The great fraud that the anti-Emergency movement perpetrated was to attack Indira Gandhi in the name of democracy, to portray her as the ultimate autocrat. In reality, the forces she was fighting were the true anti-democratic and anti-people forces, which are still around and threaten India’s sovereign future. At the same time, we live in times of great optimism, because reactionary forces the world over are at the mercy of a collapsing West. 

To be sure, these forces still have a hold on the Indian State because they represent the vested interests of sections of the Indian elite and the middle class, of those who see their future bound up with the West, those who are invested in securing the recently contested H1B work visas in the US, and those whose chief concerns over the Iran war lie in the price of gold and the safe passage to the US through the Gulf states.

Their progress is not India’s progress. Indira Gandhi reminded us that “our freedom struggle is not tied to a doctrine but to a purpose” - of transforming society so that the poor have their voice heard in the shaping of our democracy, and of creating a new example for the world to take humanity forward and to make war obsolete. She inherited what Nehru called essentially the Indian approach to modern challenges, of an ancient civilization entering modernity without losing the Indian personality. 

It was the profound love that Gandhi and Nehru had for the Indian people, that she inherited and gave new substance to in shaping the Indian future. She reminded us of what Gandhi said, that there are no real rights that are not tied with responsibilities. The price we must pay to inherit her love and be transformed by it, is to rise to our responsibility and see ourselves in the Indian poor, and to excavate her legacy so that the people are armed with the truth in shaping the future.

​

Purba Chatterjee is a researcher and peace activist based out of Bangalore.
Sambarta Chatterjee is a researcher and peace activist based out of Hyderabad.