The focus of the project has moved away from the early decades after independence to investigate more closely the turbulent decades of 1960s and 1970s. Previously, it was envisaged that a substantial part of the project will be devoted to the emergence of railway workers as citizens in early postcolonial India, the focus is now more squarely on the crisis of the wider developmentalist/planning regime vis-à-vis labour from the mid-1960s onward.
The railway strike of 1974 offers an excellent opportunity to assess the meanings of the bewildering invocation of the ‘popular will’ to declare a dictatorship and decipher the nature of what Jaffrelot and Anil have rightly called a very complex authoritarianism. The response of Indira Gandhi to one of the most powerful episodes of resistance of the urban poor promises to reveal far more than a discourse analysis of her pro-poor programmes. The latter methodology has led scholars, perhaps erroneously, to suggest the Robespierreian spirit of the Emergency.
The research started with the hypothesis that the strike offers a window into underexamined histories of the Indian Emergency and the 1970s. In the course of my research, I have found very interesting evidence to make a set of arguments that together outline a prehistory of the Emergency. Existing scholarship on the event tends to focus on middle class mobilisations and the Gandhian leader Jayaprakash Narayan, without an analysis of the deeper subterranean forces shaping and constraining the policy framework, ideational environment, and governmental decision-making of Indira Gandhi’s regime. My findings outline the shaping of a high developmentalist regime between 1969 and 1973, and charts 1974 as a year of multiple crises, in the wake of high inflation, labour strikes and the pressures of international financial institutions. Thus, the Emergency emerges as an outcome of Indira Gandhi’s policy decisions that combined populist, centralising and developmentalist tendencies, which became increasingly untenable with a global economic crisis following the oil crash in the mid-1970s.
This project hypothesizes that the ‘long’ 1970s and not just the two years of dictatorship, marked a spectacularly violent closure of the developmentalist state beset with multiple crises. The findings provides a more detailed history of the transition from the planning regime to neoliberalism with the 1970s as a turning point, the story of the railway strike of 1974 and the imposition of the Emergency will now be anchored in the economic history of transition from the developmentalist state to neoliberalism in the 1980s.
