Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- 1 Introduction
- 2 How Anti-Colonial Labour Movements Create Anti-Authoritarian Autonomous Zones
- 3 Indira Gandhi’s Political Economy of Development
- 4 Social Movements of the 1970s
- 5 Emergency at Midnight
- 6 The Coffee House Movement
- 7 ‘Coffee House’ Workers’ Anti-Colonial Labour Movement
- 8 Conclusion
- Appendix I Photographs
- Appendix II Political Parties during the Emergency
- Appendix III Methodological Appendix
- Bibliography
- Index
3 - Indira Gandhi’s Political Economy of Development
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 May 2020
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- 1 Introduction
- 2 How Anti-Colonial Labour Movements Create Anti-Authoritarian Autonomous Zones
- 3 Indira Gandhi’s Political Economy of Development
- 4 Social Movements of the 1970s
- 5 Emergency at Midnight
- 6 The Coffee House Movement
- 7 ‘Coffee House’ Workers’ Anti-Colonial Labour Movement
- 8 Conclusion
- Appendix I Photographs
- Appendix II Political Parties during the Emergency
- Appendix III Methodological Appendix
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
If the city of Delhi is globally interesting, it is not because it is an example of a city on its way to maturity. It is interesting because it is already mature, and its maturity looks nothing like what we were led to expect, in times past, that mature global cities looked like. This city, with its broken public space, with its densely packed poor living close to some of the most sweeping, most sparsely populated areas of any big city anywhere in the world, with its aspiring classes desperately trying to lift themselves out of the pathetic condition of the city into a more dependable and self-sufficient world of private electricity supplies and private security—this is not some backward stage of world history. It is the world's future.
—Rana Dasgupta, Capital (2014)In the decades after independence, the new ruling class makes claims that for the good of the nation, the radical aims of national liberation are secondary to the newly independent state's economic success in the world arena (Fanon 2002 [1961]: 138–9). To put it another way, one register at which the postcolonial class struggle is articulated is through competing ideologies of economic development (Althusser 1971: 147). Once elected, Indira Gandhi pursued a new ideology of economic development compared to previous prime ministers. Her strategies for economic development, as I will show, created adverse social outcomes that disproportionately disadvantaged India's urban poor, peasants, Dalits, Muslims and students. The social dislocations that resulted from her economic policies revitalised, for the first time since India's independence, social movement activity aimed at fully decolonising Indian society by enacting the radical social change promised by national independence—particularly, equality and improvement in living conditions for Dalits, peasants, students and workers—but as of the early 1970s not yet delivered.
Gandhi's official narrative of the causes of the Emergency is that ‘a climate of violence and hatred’ (Gandhi 1984: 178) ‘had come in the way of economic development’ in India (Gandhi 1984: 179). And, therefore, as she declared in 1975, ‘a time for unity and discipline’ (Gandhi 1984: 179) was necessary in order to quell ‘false allegations’ (Gandhi 1984: 177), along with ‘bandhs, gheraos, agitations, disruption and incitement’ which aimed ‘to wholly paralyse the government’ (Gandhi 1984: 178).
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Brewing ResistanceIndian Coffee House and the Emergency in Postcolonial India, pp. 51 - 79Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2020