THE problems for democracies, observed an editorial in the inaugural issue of the national newsmagazine India Today (December 1975), “is to decide where freedom begins and responsibility ends....What a handful would consider suppression, millions of Indians do seem to consider emancipation.” That quotable quote is not about India today. It was, in fact, India Today magazine’s view half a century ago.
Launched in the midst of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s Emergency Rule, as I have recently recorded in my book, India’s Power Elite: Class, Caste and a Cultural Revolution, the first issue of the newsmagazine sang paeans to Indira’s democratic authoritarianism, very similar to what it now does in praising Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s.
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