In February 1967, India was due to hold a general election. Days before the country went to the polls, The Times ran a series of articles under the title "India's Disintegrating Democracy". Indians, wrote the newspaper's New Delhi correspondent, would soon vote in "the fourth - and surely last - general election". For "famine is threatening, the administration is strained and universally believed to be corrupt, the government and the governing party have lost public confidence and belief in themselves as well." The reporter could discern the "already fraying fabric of the nation itself", the states were "already beginning to act like sub-nations". Rule by men in uniform beckoned - in any case, "the great experiment of developing India within a democratic framework has failed."

What is striking about this judgment is not how wrong it appears in hindsight, but how representative it was at the time. In the 1960s, a flurry of books and articles predicted that India would become a military dictatorship, or descend into civil war, or be subject to mass famine - or perhaps all of the above. The American journalist Selig Harrison wrote a book called India: the Most Dangerous Decades, which warned that there were "seemingly irresistible compulsions of totalitarian experiments of one sort or another in the nature of the Indian nation". The Crisis of India was the title of a book by a South African visitor, Ronald Segal - this found the country on "the economic precipice", with "the ground... crumbling beneath her". India reminded the writer at times of Weimar Germany, at other times of Guomindang China.