Emergencies and Elections in India

Abstract

When I was on a visit to India in the mid-1970s, I flew one morning from Delhi to Jaipur. After we had all settled back into our seats a short, dapper, moustached man in an ordinary western suit, climbed into one of the front seats. At Jaipur he was the first off the plane, and was met at the foot of the steps by several army officers, with much saluting and clicking of heels. It happened that when I flew back the next day he was on the same plane once again; and at Delhi airport I eventually realised who he was. He was met there by several members of his well-dressed family, and was shown to his huge car by his seemingly even larger, magnificently turbaned, driver. He was, I realised, Sam Maneckshaw, the Indian Army’s only Field Marshal since Independence, the hero of its spectacular victory in the Bangladesh war, now, very evidently, living in enviable, luxurious, much honoured retirement.

The secular Western institutions that the retreating empires left behind them are still on trial… the concept [of democracy] is essentially alien, and was brought to these continents as part of their mental baggage by imperialists who supposed that power and responsibility were mutually interchangeable terms.

A. P. Thornton, Doctrines of Imperialism (1965) p. 226

This chapter was presented as the Kingsley Martin Memorial Lecture, University of Cambridge, 1980.