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.