India After Gandhi: The History of the World’s Largest Democracy
by Ramachandra Guha
Macmillan ₤25 688 pages
FT bookshop price: ₤20

During India’s 19-month Emergency in the mid-1970s - its sole period of autocratic rule - newspapers laboured under suffocating restrictions. Even freedom-loving passages written by Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister, were prohibited - even though Nehru was the father of Indira Gandhi, the prime-ministerial architect of the country’s brief suspension of democracy.

A few outraged souls still managed to outwit the censors. Focusing on agriculture, one economist wrote: ”There are at present 580 million sheep in this country [India’s population at the time].” A wittier but less brave dissenter placed an anonymous advert in The Times of India, which announced ”the death of D.E.M. O’Cracy, mourned by his wife T. Ruth, his son, L.I. Bertie, and daughters Faith, Hope, and Justice.”

Happily for today’s 1.1 billion Indians, that brief spell of authoritarianism seems almost as distant as the era of British colonialism that drew to a close nearly 60 years ago. That India possesses a robust and authentic democracy and will almost certainly continue to do so, is no longer seriously doubted - even by foreigners. It was not expected to turn out like this.

One of the many strengths of Ramachandra Guha’s India After Gandhi is the wealth and breadth of its sources. In addition to official archives and private collections, the Indian historian Guha draws frequently upon the perceptions of writers and foreign journalists. Some of them might wish he had refrained.

Writing of the 1969 election, Neville Maxwell of The Times concluded that ”the great experiment of developing India within a democratic framework has failed”. Maxwell described the 1969 election as India’s ”fourth - and surely last - general election”. India has held 10 since; by definition each successive election is the largest democratic exercise in human history.

Nor were great novelists immune from pessimistic views on the country: ”There seems to be no solutions to its problems in any way that any of us [in the west] regard as acceptable,” wrote Aldous Huxley in 1961. ”When Nehru goes, the government will become a military dictatorship.” As Guha wryly notes later in the book, India’s generals have not only never attempted a coup (or even spread rumours of such), but have also avoided electoral ambitions after they retire - in contrast, for example, to the United States.

Accounting for the tenacity both of Indian democracy and of India itself is a different matter. Given the supposed unlikelihood of its survival and the lack of entrenched democratic comparisons elsewhere in the developing world, Guha concludes that ”as a modern nation, India is simply sui generis.” Guha rightly gives a large share of the credit to the extraordinary influence of Nehru, whose 17-year tenure accounts for almost half of the book.

Braving - among other elements - the scepticism of India’s former colonisers, the hostility of large sections of upper-caste Hindu society, the Islamaphobic fears of the millions of victims of Partition and a potentially threatening communist insurgency, Nehru managed to enshrine one person one vote into a constitution that proclaimed equality of caste, religion, gender and language.

Much of the description of India’s first general election in 1951 could be transplanted to today. Activists daubed campaign slogans on to the flanks of cows. Unlettered villagers turned out in greater numbers than their social betters. And the streets of India’s cities were festooned with the symbols of myriad parties.

Exhorting Indians to vote not only for his own party but simply to vote, Nehru ”travelled more than he slept and talked more than he travelled”. It is estimated that Nehru addressed 20 million people directly and another 20 million caught a glimpse of him at some point in the 25,000 miles that he journeyed by boat, train, plane and car. More than 2 million steel ballot boxes and 389,916 phials of indelible ink were manufactured to ensure things went smoothly.

Sceptics, such as Chester Bowles, the American ambassador, remained ”appalled at the prospect of a poll of 200 million eligible voters, most of whom were illiterate”. By the end of it, however, he had changed his mind. The knowledge that octogenarian peasants had tramped miles so they could exercise their choice could not fail to move: ”In Asia, as in America, I know no grander vision than this: government by the consent of the governed.”

It surely ranks as one of the most momentous feats in modern history. And yet, as Guha points out, the implanting and flourishing of Indian democracy remains astonishingly understudied: ”There are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of books on the French and American revolutions: biographies of their leaders famous and obscure... By contrast, the works by historians on any aspect of Indian democracy can be counted on the fingers of one hand.”

To be fair, much of India’s history is too recent to qualify as such. And as Guha concedes in the last section of the book, which deals with the early 1990s until today, the ”recent din of events” makes dispassionate assessment much more difficult. It is the weakest portion of an otherwise magisterial work.

This is too short a review to do justice to what is a sweeping and compendious book by one of India’s foremost writers. Airport browsers might be deterred by its length. But considering the breadth of subject matter and the deft touch of its author, they should linger over this one. It is, after all, a ”modern history of one-sixth of humankind”.

Edward Luce is author of ”In Spite of the Gods: The Strange Rise of Modern India” (Little, Brown).