India after Nehru, 1964 to 1991: Complete Notes

Jawaharlal Nehru died on 27 May 1964, and the twenty-seven years that followed carried India through two wars, a nuclear test, the only national Emergency in its history, the first non-Congress government at the Centre, two Prime Ministers killed in office, and finally the economic reforms of 1991. Papers set from this period ask for the sequence of Prime Ministers, the agreements and their years, the amendments, and the commissions. The account below keeps to that order.

Shastri and the war of 1965

Gulzarilal Nanda served as acting Prime Minister after Nehru's death, and Lal Bahadur Shastri was sworn in as the second Prime Minister of India in June 1964. His short term was crowded. The slogan Jai Jawan Jai Kisan belongs to him, as does the start of the Green Revolution under the agriculture minister C. Subramaniam, with high-yielding wheat varieties, the setting up of the Food Corporation of India and the Agricultural Prices Commission in 1965, and the founding of the National Dairy Development Board. Pakistan launched Operation Gibraltar in Kashmir and the war of 1965 followed. It ended with the Tashkent Agreement, signed on 10 January 1966 by Shastri and President Ayub Khan of Pakistan with the Soviet Premier Alexei Kosygin as host and mediator. Shastri died at Tashkent the next day, and Nanda again acted briefly before Indira Gandhi became Prime Minister in January 1966.

Indira Gandhi, 1966 to 1977

The general election of 1967 cost the Congress heavily in the states and coalition governments appeared in many of them; the party split in 1969. Indira Gandhi's answer was a programme of radical measures: fourteen major commercial banks were nationalised in 1969, the privy purses and privileges of the former princes were abolished by the Constitution (Twenty-sixth Amendment) Act, 1971, and the slogan Garibi Hatao carried the 1971 election. In the same year, the crisis in East Pakistan brought war in December 1971 and the creation of Bangladesh; the Shimla Agreement that settled its aftermath was signed on 2 July 1972 by Indira Gandhi and Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. On 18 May 1974 India conducted its first underground nuclear test at Pokhran in Rajasthan, code-named Smiling Buddha. Sikkim became the twenty-second state of the Union in 1975 by the Constitution (Thirty-sixth Amendment) Act.

Discontent over prices and corruption grew into the Navnirman agitation in Gujarat and the Bihar movement, which Jayaprakash Narayan led under the banner of Total Revolution. On 12 June 1975 the Allahabad High Court set aside Indira Gandhi's election to the Lok Sabha on a petition by Raj Narain. Thirteen days later, on 25 June 1975, a national Emergency was proclaimed under Article 352 on the ground of internal disturbance. It lasted until 21 March 1977. Opposition leaders were detained, the press was placed under censorship, elections were postponed, and the Constitution (Forty-second Amendment) Act, 1976, so sweeping that it is called the Mini Constitution, added the words socialist, secular and integrity to the Preamble, inserted the Fundamental Duties and Part IVA, and extended the life of the Houses to six years.

The Janata interlude and the return of Indira Gandhi

In the election of March 1977 the Congress lost power at the Centre for the first time. Morarji Desai became the first non-Congress Prime Minister of India, at the head of the Janata Party. His government restored much of what had been undone: the Constitution (Forty-fourth Amendment) Act, 1978 replaced internal disturbance with armed rebellion as a ground for a national Emergency, required the written advice of the cabinet for its proclamation, and took the right to property out of the list of fundamental rights, making it a legal right under Article 300A. The Mandal Commission, formally the Second Backward Classes Commission, was appointed in 1979 under B. P. Mandal. Charan Singh followed Desai briefly, and the election of 1980 brought Indira Gandhi back. Her second term faced the militant movement in Punjab, which led to Operation Blue Star at the Golden Temple in Amritsar in June 1984, and she was assassinated on 31 October 1984.

Rajiv Gandhi to 1991

Rajiv Gandhi, sworn in on the day of his mother's death, won the election of December 1984 with the largest majority any party has had in the Lok Sabha. His years are associated with the beginning of computerisation and telecom reform under Sam Pitroda, the Anti-Defection Law added as the Tenth Schedule by the Constitution (Fifty-second Amendment) Act, 1985, the Assam Accord of 1985 with the All Assam Students Union, the Punjab Accord of 1985 with Harchand Singh Longowal, the Mizo Accord of 1986 that ended two decades of insurgency, the National Policy on Education of 1986 with Operation Blackboard and the Navodaya Vidyalayas, and the lowering of the voting age from twenty-one to eighteen by the Constitution (Sixty-first Amendment) Act, 1989. The Bhopal gas tragedy of December 1984, the Shah Bano case and the Muslim Women (Protection of Rights on Divorce) Act, 1986, the Indian Peace Keeping Force in Sri Lanka and the Bofors allegations also belong to these years.

The election of 1989 gave V. P. Singh the prime ministership at the head of the National Front. His government implemented the Mandal Commission report in 1990, reserving twenty-seven per cent of central government posts for the Other Backward Classes, and the decision was upheld with conditions by the Supreme Court in the Indra Sawhney case of 1992. Chandra Shekhar followed in 1990. Rajiv Gandhi was assassinated at Sriperumbudur in Tamil Nadu on 21 May 1991 during the election campaign, and P. V. Narasimha Rao became Prime Minister. With Manmohan Singh as finance minister he began the liberalisation, privatisation and globalisation reforms of 1991, which closed this period and opened the next.