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Shekhar Gupta is Editor-in-Chief of ThePrint and one of India’s most distinguished journalists. A recipient of the Padma Bhushan and multiple journalism awards, he has reported on key events in India and from around the world since the 1980s. At ThePrint, he does a daily online show, Cut the Clutter, in which he dissects, analyses, and contextualises complex daily news developments and current affairs. He also writes his weekly column National Interest.
Ms Sheela Bhatt posted a long tweet, asserting that the government will be in office for at least twenty years. The question ordinary Indians, whose plight this insightful, empathetic column brings out so well, will ask is, Why does no one talk about Achhe Din any longer. Not even on the election campaign trail.
I remember asking my father in Baroda in the summer of 1973, climate change lay far in the future, but Mrs Gandhi’s tiff with the Nixon – Kissinger administration was well understood, Does USA have the technology to engineer droughts in India.
The Editor and I share the same year of birth, 1957. There is also some telepathy. The comparison the column makes struck me a few days ago. How swiftly the national mood darkened for Prime Minister India Gandhi,. 1971 when she liberated Bangladesh, Durga, Empress. 2. We were in Poona when those two droughts struck in 1972 and 1973, Maharashtra hit especially hard. That became the genesis of the Employment Guarantee Scheme, the model for MGNREGA. 3. Then the first oil shock of 1973 which quadrupled oil prices. Almost all western democracies saw their leaders change, although it was Watergate that scalped Richard Nixon. 4. Sister had stayed back for a year in the hostel of MS University Baroda, so she gave us a first hand account of the Nav Nirman agitation. The railway strike organised by George Fernandes in early 1974 which would have paralysed the economy. Crushed with exceptional brutality. The finale came with Justice Sinha of the Allahabad High Court disqualifying Mrs Gandhi. The Emergency, which was an idyllic time for me personally in Calcutta because that is when my wife and I fell in love. So one will hope for a happy ending to what is now happening as well, the political capital is there to retrieve the situation.