A diligent chronicler of history, with an insider’s view of over fifty years of politics and governance, President Pranab Mukherjee in his new book has compiled a decade that is identified with the country’s first Prime Minister, Indira Gandhi.
Scheduled for a December 11 release, The Dramatic Decade: The Indira Gandhi Years by Mr. Mukherjee tells the story of the 1970s – considered a turning point in the political and economic evolution of India, dotted as it was with the India-Pakistan war, internal Emergency, economic reforms and political upheavals.
“He is the best person to tell the story of India’s most important decade. Whether it was the Emergency, policy, politics, nationalisation of banks, he was there. The Dramatic Decade is the first of a three-part volume; the second one will be on the years between 1981–88 and the third volume will be from 1988 to 2012,” Kapish Mehra, Managing Director of publishing house Rupa, told The Hindu .
The book is based on jottings from Mr. Mukherjee’s journal and he draws from the experiences of his role as a politician and later as a decision-maker during a decade that set in motion political and economic changes.
Mr. Mukherjee, who earned the sobriquet of ‘troubleshooter’ during his long years with the Congress, began his role as a politician in 1969 as a Rajya Sabha member and earned himself the position of deputy minister in the Indira Gandhi government in 1973–74.
Referring to the watershed moments in Ms. Gandhi’s political career, he makes a reference in the book to her mid-term resignation.
“Which democracy in the world would permit a change of a popularly and freely elected government through means other than a popular election? Can parties beaten at the hustings replace a popularly elected government by sheer agitation? Was it not prudent for those who were determined to change the government to wait till the elections which were but round the corner? Does the rule of law mean that the remedies available to the common man are to be denied to someone holding an elected office? [....]How could anybody replace her when the overwhelming majority of Congress MPs — with a two-thirds majority in the Lok Sabha — resolved that Indira Gandhi should continue as the party’s leader in Parliament and thereby as the Prime Minister of India?” he writes in the book.
