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Jayaprakash Narayan and Indira Gandhi, 1966-74: Before the rivalry
The all-encompassing duel between the clarion call of Total Revolution given by the Gandhian
Jayaprakash Narayan (JP) and prime minister Indira Gandhi’s heavy-handed response to it by the
imposition of Emergency in India in 1974-75 has dominated politics and political scholarship
since. Their domestic clash has established many analytical prisms for contemporary public
sphere in India namely personality politics versus people’s power, single party versus coalition
grouping, electoral democracy versus authoritarian dictatorship and student/youth movements
versus generational status quo. Simultaneously, it has also burnished their differences in a way
that has served to bury their affinities and agreements and not only on obscure matters. This
definite dichotomy is sought to be softened by this article, based on their correspondence, and
complimented by other primary material, to sketch their consensus in an earlier period. It shows
that before their break, on national issues like Nagaland, Kashmir and Bangladesh, the socialist
JP and the statist Indira Gandhi exhibited complementary stands. This national nearness
complicates their later adversarial politics on domestic issues, adds a dimension to our
appreciation of the mid-1960s and mid-1970s and contributes to contemporary understandings of
their respective place in narratives of the state against society in India.
History
School
- Social Sciences and Humanities
Department
- International Relations, Politics and History
Published in
Studies in HistoryVolume
37Issue
2Pages
213 - 234Publisher
SAGE PublicationsVersion
- VoR (Version of Record)
Rights holder
© The authorsPublisher statement
This is an Open Access Article. It is published by Sage under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International Licence (CC BY-NC). Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/Acceptance date
2021-06-24Publication date
2022-01-14Copyright date
2022ISSN
0257-6430eISSN
0973-080XPublisher version
Language
- en