The Collapse of the Indian National Congress

Abstract

T HOUGH THE RESULTS of the Indian election of March 1977 were undeniably momentous, their deeper significance is by no means obvious. Perhaps the most appealing view is that the Indian people decisively rejected authoritarian government and opted for the restoration of a liberatarian political order. Arbitrary actions, nepotism, a family planning program that often degenerated into compulsory sterilisation-these have been seen to lie behind the rejection of Indira Gandhi's Congress Government. This explanation is too simple. The election cannot be understood in an historical vacuum; rather, it represented the culmination of developments over at least a dozen years which accelerated during the twenty months of Emergency rule and the period of the election campaign itself. The period between the proclamation of Emergency in June I 975 and the election sharpened and broadened an opposition to Congress rule which had long been evident in both organized form and imperfectly articulated political opinion. There was certainly a dramatic swing in popular opinion in the period immediately before the election but it is doubtful that this swing reflected the pent-up antipathy of most Indians towards authoritarianism of the Emergency regime. Rather, the Emergency excesses presented a revitalised and unified opposition with an issue that was skillfully exploited. Indians did not opt for libertarianism in quite the way that some observers have argued. If the election had been solely about authoritarianism of the Emergency period, one would expect to find an anti-Congress vote more or less evenly distributed across the country, assuming that the Emergency affected the country evenly. But in South India (Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Kerala and Tamil Nadu) the Congress (in concert