The Making of India’s Resilient Opposition in the 1970s

Abstract

This article seeks to focus on the changing nature of India’s parliamentary opposition in the 1970s. The article argues that, unlike the previous decades, the Opposition in India was resilient, even if not organised in the face of the authoritarian tendencies of Indira Gandhi pre- and during the Emergency. The analytical framework helps to understand the reasons for the growing opposition’s resilience. The manifestation of this resilience can be traced to the programmes and actions of the opposition parties undertaken in the 1970s inside and outside the parliament as the crisis of democratic governance deepened, as explained in this article. This article attempts to make sense of parliamentary opposition in the 1970s, unlike any other existing study that either focused on the Congress, party system, or emergency per se. This article brings the spotlight on the Opposition as a category that lacks constitutional safeguards, thereby missing the ‘equality of conditions’ in a democratic framework. An emphasis is given to analytically understanding the political processes that played a significant role in the government–opposition relationship. The study has been conducted with the help of primary archival materials, newspaper reportings, memoirs, commentaries and governmental records such as parliamentary debates, along with existing academic works (though scarcely) on the making and functioning of the Opposition in India. The analytical approach in studying this particular moment in the political history of India helps us to understand the primacy, effectiveness, limitations and failures of democratic governance from the Opposition’s standpoint.