There is a telling passage in Gary Bass’s book, The Blood Telegram. In as early as 1969, frustrated by the interlocutory spirit and cumbersome rules of democracy, Indira Gandhi mused that “Sometimes I wish …we had a real revolution–like France or Russia–at the time of independence.” Her meaning is clear -- India’s governance paradigm needed to shift and settle, once and for all, the ambiguities of democratic rule. Six years later she declared Emergency rule.