Indira Gandhi's Emergency spawned a new genre of writing in India, that of instant analysis and potted political history, a poor clone of the sort penned by Bob Woodward and others of his ilk. The rush of books that flooded pavement stalls after the Emergency titillated readers thirsting for details of the black deeds, especially those of Sanjay Gandhi and his cronies. But few books offered a full analysis of the Emergency years.

IN THE NAME OF DEMOCRACY: JP MOVEMENT AND THE EMERGENCY By Bipan Chandra Penguin India Price: Rs 350 Pages: 384

As for the events leading to the Emergency, including the "save democracy" movement led by Jayaprakash Narayan, they were the stuff legends were made of. It is another matter that many who led the agitation, including a certain Laloo Prasad Yadav, inspire anything but admiration.

In a sense, a proper analysis, cold and clinical, was impossible during the heady period of political turmoil that marked the 1970s, with protest and discontent colouring both journalistic and academic attempts to analyse contemporary events. By putting a gap of three decades between the events and the publication of his book In the Name of Democracy: JP Movement and the Emergency, historian Bipan Chandra has distanced himself from the emotional claptrap that marked the bulk of writings on the Emergency era. Instead, he has attempted to paint a big picture minus the tedious minutiae of what transpired behind the green, shuttered doors in Delhi, trying to structure it within the matrix of a study on possible fascist and authoritarian politics.

What has hampered Chandra's study is the near absence of documents. Mrs Gandhi's papers and those pertaining to the Emergency are yet to be made public. The JP movement was not a structured, organised agitation guided by backroom boys preparing position papers or political strategists who put pen to paper prior to practising their strategy.

PUTSCH AND POWER: JP's call for total revolution rattled Gandhi

Where Chandra has scored is in retracing JP's movement which shaped a million-or more-minds at its peak. The Navnirman Movement that flamed the imagination of students across a country wracked by galloping prices, mounting corruption and cynical power politics, however, merits a better study than Chandra's reliance on Ghanshyam Shah's supercilious analysis, if one may use that word for want of a better one. For, the Navnirman Movement challenged the status quo that had come to mark Indian politics and the increasing cynicism that underscored Mrs Gandhi's policies in the post-Bangladesh war phase.

It is a fact, as asserted by Chandra, that the JP movement lacked organisational discipline and ideological cohesiveness; no less important is the fact that while seeking to destabilise Mrs Gandhi's regime, it did not offer a tenable or convincing alternative. There is no gainsaying that the venerable socialist was woolly headed while theorising concepts like "total revolution". Which socialist wasn't?

The real and imaginary crimes of the Emergency shall remain forever indistinguishable. An astute politician, Mrs Gandhi could never have thought of the Emergency as a permanent political measure. She knew that sooner or later she would have to go back to the people for a mandate. JP's clarion call for an all-out putsch rattled her. Nascent democracies had fallen to populist and agitational politics; hers, too, could go the same way. It was this fear, as well as her arrogance that she alone could rule India, which forced the unfolding of the unedifying spectacle of the then tenant of Rashtrapati Bhavan meekly signing the Emergency papers and India's political process being brought to a sudden halt. The midnight knock followed.

Yes, it could have turned out differently. Mrs Gandhi might not have called for elections in 1977; Sanjay could have emerged as India's very own Baby Doc. Authoritarianism could have supplanted democracy. But that did not happen.

In positing the possible politics of fascism and authoritarianism while discussing JP's movement to save democracy and Mrs Gandhi's movement to save India from the former, Chandra perhaps should have had greater faith in India's ingrained aversion to anything that militates against freedom. As for saffron flags and khaki knickers, little purpose is served by taking recourse to sophistry that seeks to illegitimise the participation of the RSS or the BJP in India's political process. If there was any ideological component or organisational skill that made JP's movement worth imposing the Emergency and suspending civil liberties, it was imparted by those for whom it is still fashionable-especially among India's woolly headed and intelligentsia-to malign in order to prove one's academic credentials. Bipan Chandra need not have trod that path; his study of two watershed events that have shaped modern Indian politics would have been no less the stronger for it.