Ramachandra Guha: Indira Gandhi vs Narendra Modi – whose regime has been worse?

In early June, the senior Congress leader, Jairam Ramesh, began using the hashtag, Emergency@11, in his daily posts charging the Narendra Modi government with various errors, mistakes and crimes. This was in anticipation of what Ramesh knew would come later in the month: namely, the prime minister’s invocation of the 50th anniversary of the Emergency imposed by Indira Gandhi and her Congress Party.

Through that hashtag, Ramesh was suggesting that while Indira’s Emergency lasted less than two years, Modi’s period of authoritarian rule had extended for more than a decade.

I myself came of age during Indira Gandhi’s prime ministership, and am growing old during Narendra Modi’s prime ministership. In this column, I shall venture to compare their political legacies, drawing both on personal experience and on academic research. (I shall leave the assessment of their economic and foreign policy legacies to scholars who understand those subjects better than I do.)

To the historian, there are five striking similarities between these two prime ministers separated in time and by ideological affiliation. To begin with, Modi, like Indira, has used his political authority to construct a mammoth personality cult, representing himself as the sole embodiment of the party, the government, the state, the nation itself. This cult is sustained...

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