Lessons from 1952, 1967, 1977 | The Indian Express

Lessons from 1952, 1967, 1977 | The Indian Express

Written by Rajmohan Gandhi |Published: March 17, 2019 1:01:10 am

The writer, a grandson of Mahatma Gandhi, is research professor at the Centre for South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Lessons from 1952, 1967, 1977

Indira Gandhi’s audacity, which few foresaw, split the Congress in the 1969 summer and the state of Pakistan in the 1971-72 winter. In March 1971, well before the liberation of Bangladesh, that daring had fetched Indira’s Congress 352 seats out of 545 in a mid-term poll.

Nehru did not obtain 1952’s largest tally. That feat belonged to Ravi Narayan Reddy, the Communist MP from Nalgonda (now in Telangana), who had polled over 3,00,000 votes.

When MPs were elected to our Republic’s first Lok Sabha in 1952, Delhi had no Indian Express or Times of India. The only competition to The Hindustan Times came from The Statesman, British-owned at the time.