On January 23, 1977, nineteen months into her State of Emergency, Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi announced the dissolution of parliament and the holding of fresh elections. With infinite magnanimity, she also decreed the release of all political prisoners, by that stage numbering tens of thousands (100,000 by the reckoning of Amnesty International).
Two months later, all was gone. Gandhi’s shot at dictatorship, with all its execrable facets (the mass arrests and torture, the crushing of civil liberties, the press censorship, the ghastly toll exacted by mass compulsory sterilisation and the forced ‘relocation’ of millions of slum-dwellers in the name of city ‘beautification’) had been reduced to Ozymandias-style rubble by perhaps the greatest of all India’s election campaigns: the national uprising of March 1977. In the Lok Sabha, the Congress party was confined to a dismal 154 seats, its weakest showing ever. Its imperial leader was routed in her own constituency, Rae Bareli, by a margin of 55,202 votes. In neighbouring Amethi, the heir presumptive, the egregious Sanjay, was seen off even more emphatically. For the ruling party, much of northern India – the heartland of Congress Raj – was rendered a political desert where:
Round the decay/Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare/The lone and level sands stretch far away.
Why did Indira Gandhi, in the full flush of tyranny, make the fatal error of calling elections in 1977? Among the various explanations that have been mooted, three possess particular plausibility. The first emphasises Gandhi’s discomfort at the international criticism that her upending of democracy had attracted. The second highlights the role played by her sycophantic entourage, in particular, the political advisors who, on the basis of a ‘survey’, assured her that electoral victory would incontestably be hers. And the third harkens back to the wisdom of the ancient Greeks, specifically the toxic results of the combination of excessive confidence with arrogance and pride. In other words, hubris.
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