Hindustan Times

Dipankar Ghose

Dhrubo Jyoti

These five Indians will be remembered for their role in this era.

Rajiv Gandhi, Charan Singh, NTR: 5 key leaders

<h2 style="text-align:center;">Indira Gandhi</h2><p>The 1970s were a tumultuous decade for India, the Congress and Indira Gandhi, all inextricably linked. There was a war with Pakistan, of which was birthed a new nation; there was a judgement against the prime minister, confirming electoral malpractice; there was the imposition of draconian Emergency conditions; and there was a historic general election in 1977 that saw the Congress lose for the first time ever, at this level.</p><p>Events like these have been the end of many a politician, but not Indira. In three years, the government of socialist parties opposed to the Congress collapsed under its weight, and a fresh election was called in 1980. Gandhi stormed back to power, her political aura restored.</p>

<p>She defined the 1984 election too. Her assassination in that year was followed by gruesome anti-Sikh riots. A wave of sympathy also saw her son, Rajiv Gandhi, came out of relative political obscurity to become India’s youngest-ever prime minister, at the age of 40. (His mother had been 48 when she first assumed that office; his grandfather Jawaharlal Nehru had been 58.)</p><h2 style="text-align:center;">Rajiv Gandhi</h2><p>Until 1980, Rajiv Gandhi was the most reluctant of politicians. It was the death of his younger brother, Sanjay Gandhi, in an airplane crash that saw him enter the political arena in 1981, fighting and winning his first Lok Sabha election from Amethi. By 1984, he had been thrust well and truly into the political limelight. Hours after his mother was assassinated, he was sworn in as India’s prime minister.</p><p>His first few weeks saw horrific communal strife, as the anti-Sikh riots broke out in Delhi and elsewhere in the country. In the 1984 election, the country rallied around the Congress, and the party swept to power with over 400 seats.</p>

<p>Rajiv Gandhi would be at the helm in what would remain a tumultuous period in India’s history, one that saw the gas tragedy in Bhopal, the Nellie massacre in Assam, the Shah Bano case adjudicated, the beginnings of the conflict in Ayodhya, and the Sri Lankan civil war.</p><p>He eventually built a complex identity for himself, as the man who helped modernise India and drive the spread of telecommunications networks. But he also became known as an indifferent administrator whose control over conflagration was sometimes absent. The Bofors corruption scandal would prove to be a permanent taint on his legacy.</p><h2 style="text-align:center;">Charan Singh</h2><p>For most of the 1960s and the ’70s, Chaudhary Charan Singh was one of India’s most consequential politicians that didn’t carry the name Gandhi. A Jat from Uttar Pradesh, Singh became a formidable peasant leader, powerful in his clarity, an unbending voice of the Indian farmer. By 1977, as voices against Indira Gandhi’s government rose, Singh — who had by then already served as chief minister of Uttar Pradesh — was one of her loudest critics. He was one of the architects of the Janata Party that eventually came together to defeat the Congress in 1977. But he lost out to Morarji Desai in the race for the post of prime minister.</p>

<p>Singh would be union home minister, a crucial position in the post-Emergency era. Amid internal contradictions, though, the unstable, bickering government fell apart. And Charan Singh was then sworn in as prime minister with the ostensible support of Indira Gandhi and Sanjay Gandhi’s Congress (I) faction. Only, 23 days later, the Congress withdrew its support, and Charan Singh resigned, becoming the only Indian prime minister never to face Parliament.</p><p>Interestingly, in the subsequent 1980 election, Indira Gandhi pointed to this political instability as a weakness, and the Congress stormed to power again. Charan Singh went on to form the Lok Dal, which, over the following three decades, dominated the political landscape of the Jat heartland of Uttar Pradesh, led by his son Ajit Singh, and now his grandson Jayant Chaudhary.</p><h2 style="text-align:center;">Jagjivan Ram</h2><p>He was easily the tallest Dalit leader in India after the death of BR Ambedkar in 1956. A staunch follower of Mahatma Gandhi and a senior Congressman, Jagjivan Ram first became a minister in 1946, and continued under Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi, serving as defence minister during the 1971 war.</p>

<p>In 1977, he severed ties with the Congress and joined the Janata Party, which swept the Hindi heartland in that year’s general election. Ram became the first Dalit deputy prime minister of India, but spent most of his two years at the helm trying to keep the peace between various factions. When the Janata factionalism imploded in 1979, Jagjivan Ram was chosen to lead the old formation. But by then, the electorate had grown tired of the incessant squabbling and Ram was seen as the face of that dysfunction. The Janata Party slumped to just 31 seats in the Lok Sabha in 1980, and though Ram remained a parliamentarian until his death in 1986 — among the longest tenures in the Lower House — he didn’t recover politically.</p><h2 style="text-align:center;">NT Rama Rao</h2><p>It is a uniquely south Indian phenomenon, that of matinee movie stars becoming uber-successful politicians. And among such icons, the Telugu cine legend NT Rama Rao is one of the greatest. Between 1949 and 1982, Rao gained cult status among millions of Telugu-speakers with his portrayal of larger-than-life roles. He played Krishna 17 times, including in the mega-hit Mayabazar (1957).</p>

<p>He was especially popular among women, a key demographic that was to prove crucial to his political career once he launched the Telugu Desam Party (TDP) in 1982. In assembly elections the following year, Rao’s party trounced the Congress and won an absolute majority, with him using a motorised rath for his campaign — a first. When the then governor removed him and appointed his former finance minister as CM, Rao corralled his legislators at a hotel in neighbouring Karnataka, again a first, and a sign of the resort tactics that would become so common in Indian politics.</p><p>When the Congress swept the country in the 1984 general election, Rao held his own. With 30 Lok Sabha seats, the TDP became the largest opposition party in Parliament – the first time a regional party held this position.</p>