Nehru led India until his death in 1964. His achievements included largely democratic government institutions and an economic model called Nehruvian Socialism, which relied on high tariffs and other measures to protect national industries and promote economic self-sufficiency. He also made India a strong backer of decolonization movements in Asia and Africa. Nehru's succession by the veteran but uncharismatic Congress leader Lal Bahadur Shastri, and the emergence of Nehru's difficult daughter, Indira Gandhi, as head of the Congress Party and, eventually, the nation's prime minister, made many Western observers question the viability of Indian democracy. "There was a line of thinking, widely prevalent in the West, which held that only the personality and example of Jawaharlal Nehru had kept India united and democratic," Guha writes. He is obsessed with tracking down advocates of this line in publications like The Atlantic Monthly, the New York Times and the Times of London, and in the writings of various social scientists, almost vindictively digging out the most obscure comment and refuting its "doomsday" proclamations with evidence that Indian democracy had survived.

Yet such stern judgments are absent whenever Guha writes about how Nehru failed democracy, such as when he imprisoned the prime minister of Kashmir, Sheikh Mohammed Abdullah, who was also Nehru's personal friend, in 1953, after Sheikh Abdullah talked about the possibility of Kashmiri independence. Had Sheikh Abdullah not been arrested by Nehru, had Nehru and his Congress not promoted dubious puppet regimes in Kashmir and eroded its autonomy, we might not have lived to see the emergence of a regional conflict that nearly brought India and Pakistan to the brink of a nuclear war in 2002, a conflict that continues to brutalize millions of people in Kashmir and has given the region, controlled by half a million Indian soldiers, the distinction of being the most militarized area of the globe.

Strangely enough, in his telling of the reconstruction of Kashmir after its rebellion against Indian rule in 1989, Guha chooses not to cite Kashmiri accounts, not even the archives of the much-respected English-language newspaper the Kashmir Times--something that Indian scholar Sumantra Bose, who teaches at the London School of Economics, does very well in his two astute and non-nationalistic books, The Challenge in Kashmir (1997) and Kashmir: Roots of Conflict, Paths to Peace (2003). Indian writer Pankaj Mishra's essays on Kashmir, reproduced in his latest book, Temptations of the West (2006), are another important example of critical thinking and moral courage on the subject. Guha's narrative skills are also subdued when he describes the pro-independence protests in Kashmir that first occurred throughout 1990, when millions marched with memorandums to the UN offices and prayers to Sufi shrines. Instead, he offers a few newspaper headlines and discusses the separatist rebellion sparked by the denial of fair electoral democracy in terms of jihad. Similarly, while writing about the infamous massacre of thirty-five Sikhs in Kashmir on the eve of President Clinton's visit in March 2000, Guha again prefers the standard Delhi view and loses a chance to raise some important questions. The Indian government claimed to have arrested a "Pakistani militant" involved in the massacre. Why has there been no news of a trial, conviction or sentence? In a country where few calamities don't prompt a judicial inquiry, why was there no inquiry into the massacre of the Sikhs?

Yet Guha is passionate about the successes and failures of parliamentary democracy when he describes the spell of authoritarianism that Indira Gandhi engineered in 1975. Political opponents of Indira, led by veteran Gandhian leader Jayaprakash Narayan, had mobilized the disenchanted population and cornered her government with demonstrations and sit-ins. Indira was further annoyed by an adverse judgment in a technically weak case against her own membership of the Parliament, which if upheld in the Supreme Court could have forced her to resign. She responded by declaring a state of emergency and ruling by decree. Her policies included press censorship, the jailing of political opponents, forced vasectomies under the guise of family planning and the demolition of slums and poor neighborhoods in the name of progress and development. Most of the Indian intellectual and media elite are passionate about that time, maybe because it was the only time the might of the state threatened their comfortable existence. To sum up his account of the era, Guha quotes an anonymous obituary in the Times of India, announcing "the death of D.E.M. O'Cracy, mourned by his wife T. Ruth, his son, L.I. Bertie, and his daughters Faith, Hope, and Justice."

Democracy's Indian daughters have continued to mourn him, or at least worry about his health, throughout the three decades since Indira's Emergency. When it is not the season of colorful electoral bunting, outlandish posters and stump speeches from candidates ranging from imprisoned mafia dons to New Age gurus to eunuchs, the battle for social and political rights rages on almost every day in small and big protests, often unnoticed. A few hundred yards from the Parliament in New Delhi, on the sidewalk near the medieval observatory Jantar Mantar, one sees groups of petitioners and protesters hoping to be heard by indifferent politicians or the fickle media. The Indian government recently celebrated the United Nations' adoption of Gandhi's birthday as the International Day of Non-Violence, but India's new Gandhis mostly go unheard, their voices often drowned out by the roaring engines of luxury cars speeding past and the sirens of police cruisers.

On a hot afternoon in April 2006, India's beautiful people were busy attending India Fashion Week at a five-star hotel in south Delhi, while across town at Jantar Mantar, activists of the Narmada Bachao Andolan (Struggle to Save the Narmada) were staging a Gandhian sit-in and hunger strike against a major dam project on the Narmada River in central and western India. Since the mid-1980s, led by the much-respected activist Medha Patkar, the residents of the Narmada Valley have peacefully fought for the government to halt construction on dams along the course of the Narmada, whose swelling waters have submerged hundreds of villages and displaced thousands of people.

Nehru once called the dams "the temples of modern India." In 1954, as Guha reminds us, when Nehru inaugurated Bhakra Nangal, one of the first major dams in India, "he flicked on the switch of the powerhouse" as "Dakotas of the Indian air force dipped their wings overhead. Next he opened the sluice gates of the dam. Seeing the water coming toward them, the villagers downstream set off hundreds of home-made firecrackers." Nehru's temples of modern India, like those of ancient Hindu goddesses, now require human sacrifice. On the eighth day of the hunger strike at Jantar Mantar, hundreds of policemen attacked Patkar and the protesters, their batons drawing blood.

Among those also drawn to Jantar Mantar are the former untouchables who call themselves the Dalit, or Broken People. Dalits fashioned themselves into a potent force in Indian politics by forming their own political parties, tactically joining coalition governments. But the Broken People continue to be pounded upon--people like Bant Singh, a folk singer from Punjab who was maimed more than a year and a half ago for campaigning against the upper-caste men who raped his teenage daughter; or a journalist friend who was humiliated by the family of his Brahman girlfriend, despite his education and professional accomplishments, because he is a Dalit. Throughout his mammoth book Guha rightly laments the utter lack of biographies of various "provincial" political leaders, such as Kashmir's Sheikh Abdullah, Dalit leader Kanshi Ram and Sikh leader Master Tara Singh, who have affected the course of independent India. India might understand itself better if biographies of people like Bant Singh were available as well.

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