Author: Vinod Mehta
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 9350299399
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 169
Get Book Here
Book Description
How did a nation of over 600 million people bow down to the whims and fancies of a Prime Minister's pampered son? In this carefully researched book, Vinod Mehta makes the first complete appraisal of the Sanjay Gandhi phenomenon and its impact on the national scene. It begins at Anand Bhavan, the Nehru mansion in Allahabad, and Feroze Gandhi's relationship with the Nehrus - particularly Kamala and Indira. This gives the background to an understanding of Sanjay's volatile personality as it developed through his early years and his obsession with cars that led to the establishment of the Maruti factory. Writing in a style that is both compelling and honest, Vinod Mehta sifts the facts from the rumours and gets to the core of Sanjay's dramatic emergence after the declaration of the Emergency. His capturing of the Youth Congress and the excesses of the sterilization campaign (which he thought would ensure his place in history) are brought out in telling detail, as is the use of the media to build the cult of Sanjay. With a new introduction, The Sanjay Story allows readers to look with the benefit of hindsight on the rise and fall of one of independent India's most controversial figures. What emerges from the text is not only an understanding of Sanjay and his times, but an understanding of India's current political scenario. Vinod Mehta confirms the truth of history writing - that to engage intelligently with the present, you must come to terms with the past, even a past as inglorious and bewildering as the Emergency.
Author: Maneka Gandhi
Publisher: Bombay : Vakils, Feffer & Simons
ISBN:
Category : Politicians
Languages : en
Pages : 276
Get Book Here
Book Description
Author: Jairam Ramesh
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 9386797275
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 491
Get Book Here
Book Description
This is the first definitive biography of arguably India’s most influential and powerful civil servant: P.N. Haksar, Indira Gandhi’s alter ego during her period of glory. Educated in the sciences and trained in law, Haksar was a diplomat by profession and a communist-turned-democratic socialist by conviction. He had known Indira Gandhi from their student days in London in the late-1930s, even though family links predated this friendship. They kept in touch, and in May 1967, she plucked him out of his diplomatic career and appointed him secretary in the prime minister’s Secretariat. This is when he emerged as her ideological beacon and moral compass, playing a pivotal role in her much-heralded achievements including the nationalization of banks, abolition of privy purses and princely privileges, the Indo-Soviet Treaty, the creation of Bangladesh, rapprochement with Sheikh Abdullah, the Simla and New Delhi Agreements with Pakistan, the emergence of the country as an agricultural, space and nuclear power and, later, the integration of Sikkim with India. This power and influence notwithstanding, Haksar chose to walk away from Indira Gandhi in January 1973. She, however, persuaded him to soon return, first as her special envoy and later as deputy chairman of the Planning Commission where he left his distinctive imprint. Exiting government once and for all in May 1977, he then continued to be associated with a number of academic institutions and became the patron for various national causes like protecting India’s secular traditions, propagating of a scientific temper, strengthening the public sector and deepening technological self-reliance. Successive prime ministers sought his counsel and in May 1987, he initiated the reconstruction of India’s relations with China. He remained an unrepentant Marxist and one of India’s most respected elder statesman and leading public figures till his death in November 1998. Drawing on Haksar’s extensive archives of official papers, memos, notes and letters, Jairam Ramesh presents a compelling chronicle of the life and times of a truly remarkable personality who decisively shaped the nation’s political and economic history in the 1960s and 1970s that continues to have relevance for today’s India as well. Written in Ramesh’s inimitable style, this work of formidable scholarship brings to life a man who is fast becoming a victim of collective amnesia.
Author: Sanjay Lal
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1498586538
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 135
Get Book Here
Book Description
With an intense focus on both the depth and practicality of Mahatma Gandhi’s political and religious thought this book reveals the valuable insights Gandhi offers to anyone concerned about the prospects of liberalism in the contemporary world. Gandhi’s Religious Thought and Liberal Democracy makes the case that for Gandhi, in stark contrast to commonly accepted liberal orthodoxy, religion is indispensable to the public life, and indeed the official activity, of any genuinely liberal society. Gandhi scholars, political theorists, and activist members of a lay audience alike will all find much to digest, comment upon, and be motivated by in this work.
Author: Ramachandra Guha
Publisher: Pan Macmillan
ISBN: 1509883282
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 871
Get Book Here
Book Description
Ramachandra Guha’s India after Gandhi is a magisterial account of the pains, struggles, humiliations and glories of the world’s largest and least likely democracy. A riveting chronicle of the often brutal conflicts that have rocked a giant nation, and of the extraordinary individuals and institutions who held it together, it established itself as a classic when it was first published in 2007. In the last decade, India has witnessed, among other things, two general elections; the fall of the Congress and the rise of Narendra Modi; a major anti-corruption movement; more violence against women, Dalits, and religious minorities; a wave of prosperity for some but the persistence of poverty for others; comparative peace in Nagaland but greater discontent in Kashmir than ever before. This tenth anniversary edition, updated and expanded, brings the narrative up to the present. Published to coincide with seventy years of the country’s independence, this definitive history of modern India is the work of one of the world’s finest scholars at the height of his powers.
Author: Gyan Prakash
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691186723
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 452
Get Book Here
Book Description
The gripping story of an explosive turning point in the history of modern India On the night of June 25, 1975, Indira Gandhi declared a state of emergency in India, suspending constitutional rights and rounding up her political opponents in midnight raids across the country. In the twenty-one harrowing months that followed, her regime unleashed a brutal campaign of coercion and intimidation, arresting and torturing people by the tens of thousands, razing slums, and imposing compulsory sterilization on the poor. Emergency Chronicles provides the first comprehensive account of this understudied episode in India’s modern history. Gyan Prakash strips away the comfortable myth that the Emergency was an isolated event brought on solely by Gandhi’s desire to cling to power, arguing that it was as much the product of Indian democracy’s troubled relationship with popular politics. Drawing on archival records, private papers and letters, published sources, film and literary materials, and interviews with victims and perpetrators, Prakash traces the Emergency’s origins to the moment of India’s independence in 1947, revealing how the unfulfilled promise of democratic transformation upset the fine balance between state power and civil rights. He vividly depicts the unfolding of a political crisis that culminated in widespread popular unrest, which Gandhi sought to crush by paradoxically using the law to suspend lawful rights. Her failure to preserve the existing political order had lasting and unforeseen repercussions, opening the door for caste politics and Hindu nationalism. Placing the Emergency within the broader global history of democracy, this gripping book offers invaluable lessons for us today as the world once again confronts the dangers of rising authoritarianism and populist nationalism.
Author: Bertil Falk
Publisher: Roli Books Private Limited
ISBN: 9351941876
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 460
Get Book Here
Book Description
Feroze Gandhi is often remembered as Indira Gandhi’s husband and Jawaharlal Nehru’s son-in-law. But who was Feroze Gandhi? A Congress worker, a young freedom fighter, a parliamentarian, or just another Gandhi? Diving into the history of the Nehru–Gandhi family, the Swedish journalist Bertil Falk brings together his 40-year-old research in this biography of Feroze Gandhi. Including first-hand interviews of people close to Feroze and personal experiences of the author with some rare photographs, this volume brings to light his significant, yet unrecognized, role as a parliamentarian, in cases such as the Mundhra case, Life Insurance and Freedom of Press Bill. It also busts some myths about Feroze’s controversial birth, his personal life, his importance as a politician, and his relationship with the Nehrus. With interesting details about Feroze as a young boy in Allahabad, to his years as a freedom fighter, journalist, Congressman and a politician, this volume examines the chronology of events that shaped the life of Feroze.
Author: Coomi Kapoor
Publisher: Penguin UK
ISBN: 9352141199
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 364
Get Book Here
Book Description
A searing indictment of the suspension of democracy In June 1975, a state of Emergency was declared, where civil liberties were suspended and the press muzzled. In the dark days that followed, Coomi Kapoor, then a young journalist, personally experienced the full fury of the establishment. Meanwhile, Indira Gandhi, her son Sanjay and his coterie unleashed a reign of terror that saw forced sterilizations, brutal evictions in the thousands, and wanton imprisonment of many, including Opposition leaders. This gripping eyewitness account vividly recreates the drama, the horror, as well as the heroism of a few during those nineteen months when democracy was derailed.
Author: Sudhir Gajanan Pradhan
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Plants
Languages : en
Pages : 838
Get Book Here
Book Description
Author: K. S. Komireddi
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 178738005X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 303
Get Book Here
Book Description
After decades of imperfect secularism, presided over by an often corrupt Congress establishment, Nehru's diverse republic has yielded to Hindu nationalism. India is collapsing under the weight of its own contradictions. Since 2014, the ruling BJP has unleashed forces that are irreversibly transforming the country. Indian democracy, honed over decades, is now the chief enabler of Hindu extremism. Bigotry has been ennobled as a healthy form of self-assertion, and anti-Muslim vitriol has deluged the mainstream, with religious minorities living in terror of a vengeful majority. Congress now mimics Modi; other parties pray for a miracle. In this blistering critique of India from Indira Gandhi to the present, Komireddi lays bare the cowardly concessions to the Hindu right, convenient distortions of India's past and demeaning bribes to minorities that led to Modi's decisive electoral victory. If secularists fail to reclaim the republic from Hindu nationalists, Komireddi argues, India will become Pakistan by another name.
